skorkk

If the one and only thing you need to see in a slasher movie to find it enjoyable is plenty of graphic kills then you'll have a good time watching Silent Night. Someone gets bumped off literally every five-ten minutes, and yes the kills are brutal and gory.

However, if you like to see even the tiniest amount of excitement, scares, tension, character development or decent humour then look elsewhere.

The killer Santa here only murders people that he deems are "naughty". Now this is a simple idea, but one that could have worked quite well with some proper character and plot development that left us guessing who was naughty and who was nice. Instead what we get is a shower of one dimensional arseholes who are made out to be so extremely unlikeable that they simply become a set of caricatures. As a result of this we know who's going to get offed the second they appear on screen and we also don't care.

Another flaw is that the tone of this movie is all over the place. It desperately tries to be dark and eerie and occasionally it succeeds, but then the few attempts at humour are so OTT that it seems like the movie is making fun of itself. The director should have just abandoned any attempts at injecting bits of comedy into the plot because there were too many moments throughout where you're wondering what's actually supposed to be funny and what's just unintentionally hilarious! The main saving grace of the movie that stops it from being a complete stinker is the acting from Jaime King. She really does give a terrific performance and I sincerely hope that she gets to reach a wider audience in the future.

So in the end all you have here is a set extremely unrelateable and unlikeable characters in the most predictable storyline you could imagine. You'll basically just sit there waiting for the next person to die and won't care about anything else going on in the movie. The fact that the kills are slightly varied and inventive is what stops this from being a complete borefest.