A robot­ic San­ta wreaks hav­oc in a new fes­tive offering

Christ­mas Bloody Christ­mas opens with a sequence of TV ads: a Yule­tide malt bev­er­age ​“for the entire fam­i­ly”; a slash­er (Kill.Xmas: The Lester Lord Sto­ry) in which lit­tle Lester’s POV catch­es mum­my blow­ing San­ta; ​‘San­ta Live In Con­cert’, in which a man in a famil­iar red suit shreds a gui­tar; cook­ies laced with THC; ​‘Kune Christ­mas Creamp­ies’; and last­ly, a mil­i­tary-grade com­bat robot that has been con­vert­ed into ​‘RoboSan­ta+’ to replace ​“your local degen­er­ate mall Santa”.

Screen­ing on Chan­nel 83 (also the name of the pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny behind Christ­mas Bloody Christ­mas), this hilar­i­ous­ly wrong mon­tage of late-night cable spots imme­di­ate­ly and stark­ly asso­ciates Christ­mas with booze, drugs, sex, rock and mur­der – and these asso­ci­a­tions will play out at much greater length in writer/​director Joe Begos’ fifth feature.

It is Christ­mas Eve, and Tori Tooms (Riley Dandy) arrives for the clos­ing hours of the record store that she owns. Her plan for the rest of the evening is to meet mar­ried cou­ple Lah­na (Dora Madi­son) and Jay (Jon­ah Ray) in the toy store where they work, and then to meet an online hookup for some no-strings sex. Yet her employ­ee Rob­bie Reynolds (Sam Delich), who clear­ly adores Tori, talks her out of see­ing her date, and as the two co-work­ers move their drink­ing from a bar to Tori’s home, it looks as though Rob­bie may be about to get his Christ­mas wish.

Mean­while, as Lah­na and Jay get it on in their closed toyshop, the creepy in-store ​‘anatom­i­cal’ RoboSan­ta+ (Abra­ham Ben­rubi) comes to life, mur­ders them both, and heads out look­ing for more peo­ple to mur­der – and seems to fix­ate on Tori, fol­low­ing her to the house where she lives with her sis­ter Lid­dy (Kansas Bowl­ing) and broth­er-in-law Mike (Gra­ham Skip­per). Santa’s bru­tal slay­ing of the fam­i­ly next door (Matt Mer­cer, Aer­i­al Wash­ing­ton) is inter­cut with a scene of Rob­bie going down on Tori, nail­ing the link between sex and death that has been here from the start.

Ear­li­er Tori had com­plained to Rob­bie: ​“Maybe I’ll fuck­ing set­tle down when I can find a man that can keep up with me. Do you know how it is being in a world sur­round­ed by so many boys that can’t han­dle a woman who can out-drink, out-earn and out-fuck them?” Yet now this strong, self-reliant woman may have met her match – and the RoboSanta+’s unwel­come pur­suit of her and desire to pen­e­trate her – with axe, shot­gun bul­let, or what­ev­er phal­lic tool is to hand – forms the back­bone of Begos’ film.

Tori is a great final girl, wit­ty and resource­ful and cer­tain­ly no vir­gin – but with the RoboSan­ta+ fast prov­ing prac­ti­cal­ly unstop­pable and his body count very high, we are quick­ly stripped of our con­fi­dence that she or indeed any­one else will sur­vive the night, even as the arrival of mul­ti­ple police offi­cers (Jeff Daniel Phillips, Elliott Gilbert, Jere­my Gard­ner, Adam Diet­rich) hard­ly serves to protect.

Tori col­lects her beloved music on vinyl – and there is a scene late in the film where a VHS cas­sette can be seen lying on the floor out­side its case. Which is to say that while Christ­mas Bloody Christ­mas may have a con­tem­po­rary set­ting, it is an ana­logue film in a dig­i­tal world, right down to its old-school prac­ti­cal effects and blue/​green/​red colour scheme (cour­tesy of all the Christ­mas lights).

For like Begos’ pre­vi­ous Almost Human (2013), The Mind’s Eye (2015), Bliss (2019) and VFW (2019), this has a retro sen­si­bil­i­ty that reveres every­thing about Eight­ies cin­e­ma – and if Tori pro­fess­es to Rob­bie her pref­er­ence for hor­ror sequels to orig­i­nals, then there is also some­thing overt­ly deriv­a­tive and belat­ed about the film they are both in, which wears on its sleeve the influ­ence of Lewis Jackson’s Christ­mas Evil (1980) James Cameron’s The Ter­mi­na­tor (1984), Charles E. Sel­l­i­er Jr.’s Silent Night, Dead­ly Night (1984) Jim Wynorski’s Chop­ping Mall (1986), Robert Harmon’s The Hitch­er (1986), Tom Holland’s Child’s Play (1988) and Richard Stanley’s Hard­ware (1990).

Like those ads at its begin­ning, Begos’ fea­ture is a mash-up of the fun­ny, the per­verse and the hor­rif­ic. It nev­er takes itself too seri­ous­ly, nor even tries to make too much sense (why would mil­i­tary killing machines be repur­posed as mall San­tas? how does the robot keep find­ing the hero­ine?). No mat­ter – for this is not a real­ist pic­ture, but a young inde­pen­dent woman’s night­mare (of patri­archy) before Christmas.

Christ­mas Bloody Christ­mas streams on Shud­der from 9^th Decem­ber 2022.