Mercy Christmas

I was expecting a horrible movie but DJ Hale made this movie. He was hilarious and his part is unforgettable. Great acting, good story. Pleasantly surprised by this sleeper.

Low budget affair lacking laughs in the comedy department and lacking scares in the horror department. The hot blonde and the chunky bald guy who was to be the main course were decent enough, but everyone else seemed like community theater types. Seems like it was shot mostly at the director's house over the weekend. Even at 80+ minutes, this movie was stretched beyond its limits. It might have made a better 30-minute short in an anthology movie.

If you've ever wondered what would happen if "Office Space" was crossed with "Wrong Turn," here's the movie for you.

If The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were a Hallmark holiday movie, it would be Mercy Christmas, which celebrates the importance of Christmas traditions - in the company of a wonderfully deranged family of suburban cannibals!

Lonely downtrodden office worker Michael Briskett (Steven Hubbell) is given a ton of work to do before Christmas by his overbearing boss Andy Robillard (Cole Gleason). When Mr. Robillard's sexy assistant Cindy (Casey O'Keefe) invites Michael to her family home for Christmas, he accepts, providing he can take his work with him. Michael is welcomed in with open arms by Cindy's family, but passes out after knocking back an eggnog, waking up to find himself tied up in the basement, just one of several unfortunates destined to become dinner for Cindy and her kin.

I knew nothing about Mercy Christmas going in, having picked it at random from numerous low-budget Christmas horrors on Amazon Prime; I was very happy, then, to find that the film was not only very entertaining, but easily one of the most original and fun festive horrors I have ever seen. Forget the over-rated Black Christmas - this film is about as black as it gets, a deliciously demented tale with a really warped sense of humour and a mean-streak a mile wide. It takes a while to get going, and the low budget is evident, but stick with it 'cos it gets progressively more crazy and bloody as it goes along, culminating in a gory final act that is as funny as it is jaw-droppingly violent.

8.5/10, rounded up to 9 for IMDb.

Michael Briskett is your typical corporate office geek. The CEO picks on him, he throws Christmas parties where nobody comes, and he's the only one in the company who receives dull work with a deadline on Christmas Eve. When he spends a wonderful evening with Cindy, the prettiest girl at the office, and she then also invites him to spend Christmas with her and her family, it seems too good to be true. And it is...

Ah, Christmas traditions! Some people drink eggnog and eat stuffed turkey, others sing Carols. The tradition of yours truly is to watch at least one holiday-themed horror movie around the Christmas period; - the bloodier the better.

"Mercy Christmas" isn't a very good movie. In fact, it's a highly unoriginal and predictable movie, and if I wasn't in such a festive mood, I probably would have flunked it big time! Buy hey, it's the season to be jolly, and thus I can even tolerate another umpteenth horror story about a cannibalistic family that looks perfectly normal from the outside, victims strung up with colorful Christmas lights, and shrieking grannies. The middle-section seemingly takes forever, with irrelevant padding footage and dull conversations, but the final 15-20 minutes luckily are gory and sadistic.