Secret Santa

I'm not sure what's in the water as of late, but it seems like everyone and their mother have been churning out Christmas themed slasher movies in the past 5 years. Most of them are pretty charmless, but Secret Santa has its heart in the right place and writer/director Mike McMurran at least attempts to bring a little extra character development and a sense of humor to go along with the gore.

Secret Santa borrows a few pages from the likes of Black Christmas and To All A Goodnight with its house filled with nubile young college girls who are about to have more than student loan and boyfriend drama to contend with as a murderer with a ski mask begins to terrorize and kill them one by one during a secret santa party.

Like most movies around this budget, the cinematography is competent but flat at times without a whole lot of style and some of the sound mixing leaves a bit to be desired, but the actors are above average for a film of this type. Special mention goes to Annette Wozniak as Nicole who gets the most interesting character to sink her teeth into. She's struggling with a cheating boyfriend (Brent Baird who looks like Finn Wittrock's long lost brother) and with her sex cam business she's set up to help pay off her student loans. There's even a fairly progressive scene where she tells her boyfriend about her sex cam work and he's pretty supportive of her. Wozniak carries most of the film herself through her insurmountable amount of charm and she's easily the high point of the film.

Besides the characters of Dewayne and Carissa (he's mostly shrill and painfully unfunny and she's too bitter and angry to ever warm up to), the rest of them are an agreeable group to spend 75 minutes with. I'm not sure if I enjoyed spending as much time with them as McMurran does, because it does take about 50 minutes to get to any major action (besides an opening kill scene). Once the film gets going, the tone begins to shift slightly into something more resembling a dark comedy. Some of it works and some of it doesn't, but you can't fault McMurran for trying something different. At least the results are usually entertaining.

There's a great gag where a hairdryer the killer is using to electrocute a victim in the bathtub with falls out of the wall socket when he tries to throw it into the water, so he has to beat his victim to death with it instead. Even funnier, the length of the killer's "why I did it" monologue is poked fun at during the climax of the film.

Some of the gore effects might have been more effective if the camera didn't linger on them as much, but that's a small complaint in the grand scheme of things, especially when most of the movie is so much fun. Secret Santa is definitely a gift worth unwrapping.

This was titled Christmassacre on Prime, and it should not be confused with the 2018 Adam Marcus-directed comedy/horror Secret Santa on the same platform. Regardless this one is an amateur slasher comedy. And considering that this film's budget was apparently expired foodstamps, some of the dialogue is actually pretty funny and the quasi-professional actors deliver relatively decent performances. Unfortunately the story is trite, the practical effects look silly and the budgetary constraints detract from virtually every scene. There's a sense that the people involved in the production have real talent, but there wasn't the time or money available to develop their ideas into something entertaining or even fully coherent.

Also titled Secret Santa. Early 90s Straight to video college buddy let's make a horror movie fan film schlock. Direction and editing make it interesting, but the comedy is juvenile and tries hard to hijack the film. Instead of using 16mm scratch effects, the better choice would have been VHS tracking lines. The acting is clumsy and immature and no actor separates themselves with any charisma, which is probably right so that you root for the next clumsy kill. One plus is the use of practical effects, the hairdryer scene being the highlight. Random note: eggnog, like blood is supposed to be thicker than water. Music vacillates between nintendocore and synth used in Eli Roth Thanksgiving trailer. As we reach the final 20 mins of the film one wonders if this was filmed as a stream of consciousness with the sole purpose to make some gore effects. No knock on that. I've done that. Best served earlier in a movie marathon, 1/4 in the bag, with a few friends. Or better yet on some horror film fest circuit. Maybe then the humor would sputter a bit better. Survived with a couple drams of Old Soul. Warning: The closing credits may cause seizures or flashbacks.

Shot on video with a godawful grainy 'grindhouse' filter effect (Quentin Tarantino has a lot to answer for), comedy slasher Secret Santa delivers some fairly decent gore effects, the majority of which occur in the final twenty minutes, meaning that there's the best part of an hour of 'character development' to get through first - not great when most of the characters in question are so tedious, the script lamentably dumb, and the acting unbearable.

The worst offender is, without a doubt, Geoff Almond as hopped-up loser Dwayne, who is as irritating as he is bald, but there are plenty of other obnoxious types guaranteed to rankle, including smarmy professor Ramsey (Tony Nash) who is diddling his student Olivia (Nicole Kawalez), promiscuous blonde Carissa (Keegan Chambers), and two-timing Bryan (Brent Baird), who cheated on his girlfriend Nicole (Annette Wozniak), the only likeable character in the whole film (even if she is a web cam model).

Nicole is, not surprisingly, the film's 'final girl', all of her friends bumped off before the end of the film by a masked killer who has been sending them Secret Santa gifts that reveal how they will be killed: a meat cleaver, an electric knife, gardening shears (for a spot of graphic penis pruning!), and a hairdryer (which leads to the funniest moment in the film, when the cable proves too short for the killer to throw it into the victim's bath). The bloody and well executed gore (head smashed in, decapitations, chainsawed legs) in the final act, and the occasional spot of gratuitous female nudity (although, rather strangely, no boobage), make it just about worth persevering until the end.

4.5/10, rounded down to 4 for the aged/distressed look, which is completely unconvincing and totally unnecessary.

At a glance, this is another super low budget holiday slasher flick, and while those are becoming a dime a dozen, I still think this one stands out for several reasons. For starters, it is void of slasher Santas (despite the box art) while still being festively linked to the holiday season. Second, the filmmakers clearly knew their budget limitations and decided to give it more of an 80s B horror/comedy grindhouse throwback kind of vibe, which absolutely works. Likewise, they had to improvise on the gore and I'm sensing some PA ended up hitting the grocery store for assorted shredded meats and maybe some Spam. Again, it works. Last, it doesn't take itself too seriously and that actually is really important with a low budget film. The acting is amateur but a lot of the characters are intentionally over the top which ends up making it a pretty fun movie. Overall, if you don't mind low budget and campy, definitely give this one a shot.