Santa Gets Savage in Two New Films

Violent Night is the perfect encapsulation of the American Christmas these days. It’s grotesquely violent, unable to hold war profiteers responsible for anything, completely devoid of class consciousness, deeply sentimental for an abstraction that can’t really be expressed in words, a slave to memories that never really existed, certain that outward-directed brutality can fix what ails a family and utterly mercenary in making certain that audiences will experience all possible emotions. It’s also kind of awesome. 

Writers Pat Casey and Josh “Worm” Miller (best known for the Sonic the Hedgehog films and Dorm Daze, but with a lifetime “get out of jail free” card for the no-budget masterpiece Hey, Stop Stabbing Me — a film I had on my top 10 list in 2003) understand all too well that it’s not possible to find a coherent story about what Christmas even means anymore, instead finding kernels from Die Hard, Home Alone, Peter Pan and Bad Santa, and using them to engage in some fascinating dialectical exercises about belief, power dynamics and whether rich people deserve to live, working through a lot of the conflicted issues that everyone, regardless of religious background, endures during the holiday season. 

“Christmas magic; I don’t quite understand it” is a refrain that keeps coming back up. The Lightstone family, a dynasty of fairly odious war profiteers presided over by matriarch Gertrude (the legendary Beverly D’Angelo, having a blast), finds their family Christmas gathering invaded by would-be robbers (led by John Leguizamo) who take them hostage. The only person who can save them is the actual Santa Claus, an ambivalent drunk worn down by a millennium-plus of human greed and avarice. Played by Stranger Things’ David Harbour in an actually quite effective performance, this Santa is a vulnerable anti-interventionist (an important plot point until it isn’t) who must embrace his long-suppressed Viking-adjacent backstory and put the pain to a bunch of people on the naughty list. 

It is in no way an exaggeration to say that Harbour gets more to do here than in his entire thankless subplot in the most recent season of Stranger Things, and he’s having a lot of fun, even when he’s bringing to life a surprisingly nuanced performance for someone with a larger body count than Halloween Kills. Also, everyone who found something awakened in them by Thor in Avengers: Endgame will find more fetish ammunition herein.

This film delivers some serious mayhem, all of it just digitally treated enough for even the nastiest of kills to register more like Looney Tunes. (A climactic chimney set piece is somehow grotesque, imaginative, triumphant and utterly disgusting in the way you can’t help but whoop for.) Proudly R-rated and more than happy to play out as five or six different movies each happening at the same time, Violent Night has a manic desire to encapsulate every aspect of modern life in holiday mode that can be exhausting, but it's also impressive. It plays like gangbusters with an audience, every smashed skull or ice-skate slash yielding a breezy carnage catharsis, and it seems perfect holiday counter-programming to most everything else currently in theaters. Also, one of the robbers, codenamed Krampus (Brendan Fletcher, from Air Bud and Ginger Snaps 2 and 3), brings very specific Evil Ed from Fright Night energy.

But if your taste in R-rated holiday mayhem isn’t interested in a child’s sense of wonder or letting grotesque financial crimes slide, you’ve also got Joe Begos’ Christmas Bloody Christmas coming to Shudder on Dec. 9. Aiming for a streamlined, Terminator/John Carpenter/Albert Pyun/Rob Zombie’s Halloween II approach to holiday horror, the film has an opening card that lets us know that the military-industrial complex made a bunch of robot Santa Clauses for use in malls that wouldn’t be prone to alcoholism or inappropriate behavior with the youths, to the thunderous endorsement of parents. The only problem is they used the same programming architecture as their sentry soldier/killbots for global conflict.

So anyway, after some extended shooting the shit and low-key flirtatious banter, Tori (Riley Dandy) and her friends (including a great performance from Jonah Ray) find themselves on the business end of one of the aforementioned robot Santas (played at first by Larry Kubiak himself, Abraham Benrubi, and later by AN ACTUAL ROBOT!). As Begos excels at, this is a grim and colorful (shot on 16 mm film and with the most visually interesting color palette of anything this year that isn’t Strange World) catalog of all sorts of violence. If the dialogue isn’t quite as sharp as 2019’s VFW, the relentless nature of the Kringle Killbot makes for a singular experience. This film is brutal and mean and is not concerned with Christmas magic in the slightest. It also has an animatronic Santabot that is like nothing else horror or sci-fi has given us in years — shout-out to Josh and Sierra Russell for doing practical effects on a whole other level. Begos made the best unofficial Scanner Cop movie of all time with 2015’s The Mind’s Eye, and in a just world he’d get to make a movie every year. 

To put it another way, tonally, Violent Night is the Mars Attacks! to Christmas Bloody Christmas’ You’re Next. Either way, you’ve got some sparagmos to delight your misanthropic tendencies and conflicted feelings about whatever the hell it is that happens to us, collectively, this time of year. Both will find their place in the holiday traditions that most need them.