Christmas Evil Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I first discovered 1980's Christmas Evil (a.k.a. You Better Watch Out and Terror In Toyland) when I found it in one of those 10 packs of public domain horror movies that Brentwood/BCI Eclipse was putting out a few years ago. Based on the title I had assumed this to be a Christmas slasher flick along the lines of Silent Night, Deadly Night, but there's a bit more going on here. Try to imagine Taxi Driver as a Christmas movie and Travis Bickle as a man obsessed with the idea of making Santa Claus real. Christmas Evil isn't in the same class as Scorsese's flick, but both are stories about loners with dark obsessions, and Christmas Evil makes for some fun if seriously twisted holiday viewing.

Harry Stadling had his belief in St. Nick brought to a tragic end at a young age. To paraphrase the classic song, he saw mommy getting busy with Santa Claus (actually, it was his Dad in costume), and he hasn't been quite right since. Harry grows up to become a man with more issues than National Geographic, and he is driven by the idea of making Santa Claus real in his own way. He spies on the neighborhood children with binoculars, keeping track of which ones are naughty and which ones are nice, (the kid with the Deborah Harry issue of Penthouse is a particular troublemaker) and he works at the Jolly Dream toy factory. His recent promotion to management doesn't allow him to work on the assembly line, and he misses working directly with the toys. His relationships with his co-workers are strained because to them it's just a job and they don't take the business of toy making seriously.

Feeling just a little bit cynical about the Christmas season by now? Sick to death of sweet seasonal flicks like It's a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story and, um, Bad Santa? Ready for a few choice chestnuts full of yuletide terror? Well unfortunately there are very few Christmas-based horror flicks that are actually, y'know, good movies. Most of 'em are low-rent horror knock-offs that are barely worthy of the celluloid they're stored upon, but hey, it's an amusing little sub-genre nonetheless. So let's get ready for a little late-night stocking stuffing and tons of creepy coal.

Silent Night, Deadly Night -- The first one is the flick that caused all that nasty controversy back in 1984, yet when you look at it today ... the thing's almost embarrassingly bad. But once you've seen a few of the sequels -- Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987), Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (1989), Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990) and Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker (1992) -- the original doesn't seem quite so rotten anymore. (Actually, it is.)

Christmas Evil -- Also known as You Better Watch Out and Terror in Toyland, this 1980 cheese-fest benefits from an odd sense of humor (and the presence of longtime character actor Jeffrey DeMunn) but struggles to fill its overlong running time. It's basically another "looney in a Santa costume" schpiel desperately hoping to ape the success of Halloween, if not its attention to quality.

Silent Night, Bloody Night -- Just like the original Black Christmas was a forefather of Halloween and Friday the 13th, so too is this semi-starchy 1974 thriller a forefather of ... the original Black Christmas, kinda. It's about a guy who inherits an old mansion (one that used to be a lunatic asylum, natch) during the holiday season and must contend with, yep, a local psycho. Patrick O'Neal, Mary Woronov and John Carradine add a little color to the affair.

It's that time of year. We are gearing up for Cinematicalmas; the boob tube is a melange of claymation, desperate advertising pleas and Christmas trees; and the big screen shows us a little baby Jesus and a festival of lights. However, lurking behind the wholesome faces and sparkling eyes is the more deliciously insidious side of the holidays. For every angel that gets a pair of wings, there's always a John Waters to bring things back to earth with a little raunch, filth and other debauchery.

Two years ago, John Waters gave us his own jingling brand of Christmas with A John Waters Christmas. There's a little bit of quirky classics with Alvin and The Chipmunks' "Sleigh Ride", or Tiny Tim singing about Rudolph. But there are also the likes of "Fat Daddy" and "Santa Claus is a Black Man." Is there anything better than curling up with some hot cocoa during the holidays and listening to some hellsome tunes?

This year, you might have missed an added Waters Christmas goodie to help round off the season. He's on a bonus audio commentary for the recent Christmas Evil DVD release with the film's director, Lewis Jackson. If you're not familiar with the film, it gives a new perspective to the Santa myth, and what that can do to the mythtaken. We all know how the season will start to feel more like the Twelve Pains of Christmas, and when Bob Rivers just can't cut it, at least the Pope of Trash is here to help.

*Editor's Note: The previous weird formatting of the word "Christmas" noted by some of our readers was the result of some wonky code from cutting-and-pasting into our software from a word processing program, not from any freakish sense of political correctness. We apologize, however, for any misperception this may have caused. The code has been cleaned out, and Christmas has been restored to normalcy. - kdv