Joe Begos’s Christmas Bloody Christmas

Cody checks out a new holiday horror film from director Joe Begos.

When it was announced that Joe Begos, the director of Almost Human, The Mind’s Eye, Bliss, and VFW, would be making a holiday slasher for the Shudder streaming service, I was hyped to check it out... and while his movie Christmas Bloody Christmas did eventually show me exactly the sort of killer robot Santa Claus mayhem I was hoping to see, I found the first 40 minutes or so of this 87 minute movie to be an endurance challenge. That’s because I couldn’t stand the characters. 

Particularly annoying was our heroine Tori Tooms, played by Riley Dandy and introduced while closing her vinyl and VHS store for the night on Christmas Eve. There’s nothing wrong with Dandy’s performance, she handles the material well and I’m sure plays the character just like Begos wanted her to. The problem is, Tori was incredibly irritating to me, a person I wouldn’t want to spend more than 30 seconds in the general vicinity of in real life, and here I was having to sit and watch her spew nonsense for 40 minutes straight. Tori is the kind of person who has an opinion on everything and believes her opinion to be absolute fact, and I guess Begos made her a stand-in character for him so he could get some of his music and movie opinions out into the world. I can’t say whether or not I would agree with her musical choices in most cases, but I definitely did not agree with her movie opinions. Her penchant for vulgarity also got old real quick, her dialogue was peppered with so many F-bombs it’s almost enough to make a Rob Zombie character tell her to chill.

Tori spends her evening drinking and bloviating with her employee Robbie Reynolds (Sam Delich), who is also quite abrasive, while the viewer waits and waits for the movie to get good. It does after a while, thanks to the robotic Santa in the toy store run by Tori’s pals Lahna (Dora Madison) and Jay (Jonah Ray Rodrigues). As a faux commercial at the head of the film informs us, RoboSanta+ uses cutting edge robot technology that was originally designed by the Department of Defense for use on battlefields. Now these battlebots have been redesigned into a replacement for human mall Santas. RoboSanta+ (played by Abraham Benrubi) has full range of motion and a vocabulary of over 90,000 words. And something’s wrong with them, because they’re being recalled. There’s something very wrong with the Santa in Lahna and Jay’s store: it starts moving on its own and goes on a homicidal rampage.

The second half of Christmas Bloody Christmas is packed with action and brought classics like Silent Night, Deadly Night; The Terminator, and Hardware to mind. That was really fun to watch, even if characters did continue to be irritating from time to time.

The action and bloodshed weren’t the only things I appreciated about this movie, as I also found it great to look at. Begos shot it on 16mm film and filled it with colorful neon lighting. So it’s eye candy even when terrible things are happening and characters are being annoying.

If you like holiday horror movies, go ahead and check out Christmas Bloody Christmas. Chances are you’ve already seen much worse than even the worst parts of this one, and it delivers some solid entertainment by the end.