All the Creatures Were Stirring

Every holiday season, I like to offset my cookie cutter Hallmark/Lifetime movies with a couple Holiday Horror B movies. Balances it out or something. I've seen some real clunkers and some real gems but Christmas horror movies are especially difficult to get right. This movie however was decent for what it was. Being an anthology film, some segments were of course better than others and the film's limited budget shows but if you enjoy bad movies you'll have a decent enough time here. I found myself wishing that they went a step further to make it pure camp but I wasn't disappointed overall. Anyway grab a beer and have a watch. It definitely isn't the worst of the holiday horrors that's for sure. *No real gore and no nudity.

All the Creatures Were Stirring: Written and directed by David Ian McKendry and Rebekah McKendry

This was not the movie we started the night out with. The movie I was originally trying to watch was something called Christmas Presence, a bizarre English slasher film with some of the most morally repugnant obnoxious characters you ever laid eyes on. You know perfect slasher movie fodder. For some reason or other, I couldn't bring myself to spend more than 7 minutes with them. It was too much for my psyche to bear. I turned it off and turned this movie on instead. An anthology movie with a Christmas theme to most of the stories. It had one of those posters that catches your eye right off the bat. What's this?! A tiny monster exiting a Christmas ornament like some kind of egg. Well alright then I'm on board.

Lies! All lies! No such thing exists in the entirety of the movie. It's like being in a video store back in the 90s searching through the horror movie section being bamboozled by the cover art. I sadly fell for it. I ventured into the community theater on Christmas Eve for what stories it may tell. None of the stories really had any impact. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be scared or laughing. I did laugh at it. So I'm going to assume that this is meant to be a comedy. It's funny in the way things play out in an oddly stilted way. I laughed at the stuff in the community theater a bunch. You go from the serious bloodshed portion to the same thing being reenacted by two actors on a blank stage in the most over the top way possible.

This was a very cheap looking movie. I don't mean just low budget. I mean cheap. This is a difference. This is a cheap looking movie. I guess they spent all their money on the poster. You could have spared some for some good camerawork. We could have used some of this money for some decent makeup effects. None of the stories were all that good. The first one was a mixture of the Belko Experiment and Saw. This type of story has been handled by better filmmakers. We didn't need a fan film version of this with a Christmas flavor. The second story about the demon keepers was too long. It had some okay elements and the demon creature had a great design. The one doing a low budget version of A Christmas Carol made me roll my eyes. The one with the aliens visiting on Christmas and doing a Christmas dinner with this guy and his girlfriend. It's sort of weird. All the stories are very weird but not engaging.

This is a very weak anthology movie. There is no story good enough to overcome the shabby structure. The poster is the best part of the movie. The rest of it was very meh. I can not recommend it. There are better Christmas related horror movies out there. I give it a D.

Both as an anthology and as a Christmas horror movie, "All the Creatures Were Stirring" is far from perfect. In fact, it's a lackluster and wildly uneven movie altogether. On the other hand, though, I respect and even admire low-budget horror productions that dare to be different and original, and that's the least you can say about this omnibus. All the individual short segments, and the wraparound story, are unconventional and unique, and that's at least worth half of the optimistic score of 5/10 I gave!

On Christmas Eve, two people with nowhere else to go and absolutely nothing better to do, spend their first Tinder date together at a raunchy theater where three "actors" enact a series of holiday-themed stories with a bare minimum of decors and means. The stories turn into short films, and they are remarkable to say the least. There's a tale about an office Secret Santa party turning into a massacre, one about a traditional Yule demon, a modern version of Ebeneezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve, reindeers bent on bloody vengeance, and a totally bonkers fable about holiday-loving aliens. The wraparound story about the first date then eventually turns into the last story.

A few of the separate stories are ingenious and compelling ("Dash Away All", " In a Twinkling") and others are more derivative ("Arose such a Clatter"), but ALL of them have in common that they are creative, but sadly also too underdeveloped and abruptly ending with many questions left unanswered. There's some gore, but not enough. There's occasionally tension and atmosphere, but not enough. There are flashes of sardonic black humor, but ... well, you know the rest of that sentence.

In the end, I can't really recommend "All the Creatures Were Stirring" wholeheartedly, but surprisingly enough I enjoyed it. And so did my mate with whom I watched it. Who knows, maybe it's because I was rejoiced by the spirit of Christmas, or maybe it's because the other two holiday-themed horror movies we watched were total rubbish. Either way, in case you love Christmas horror but you have already seen all the obvious classics ("Black Christmas", "Silent Night Deadly Night", "Krampus",...) this one may be worth a peek.

Most anthologies I have watched have some that are good and some not so good. This movie was like that. I enjoyed some of them and while the others I didn't enjoy but also didn't hate.

The actors i did a very good job. I thought the theater actors distracted from the stories, just have the couple talk between the short films.

They did this film for fun ,it shows its not gonna win any prizes but it has a twillight zone vibe that makes you go through the whole thing .In the end its an ok weird horror comedy .