Simon Carter (Frank Jakeman) likes to dress as Santa and kill people around Christmas for some unknown reason. He escapes from Moorview Hospital at the same time three young ladies holiday in a remote lodge in Scotland (the part of Scotland where no one has a Scottish accent and the locals have rotting teeth). It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this one out. On the way up we only get to know Emma (Jessica Ann Brownlie) who is greatly being set up as "The Final Girl."The ending has an unforeseeable twist which they could have done without. The acting and soundtrack was bad. Doctor Jones was creepy and why does our killer cut a single strap off a woman and then kill her? Deadly weapons include a candy cane and a blue wax crayon.I imagine this was a spoof on 80's Christmas slasher films, but it wasn't done that well.Guide: F-word. Brief sex, nudity (Natalie Bailey-Trist plus background calendar)
... View MoreI saw Christmas SLAY as part of a three-film Christmas horror package that Amazon Prime were offering me. I have to say that this film is particularly appalling, a no-budget and amateurish slice of festive slasher madness, and I hope that things can only get better from this point onwards. The story was shot in Kent by a largely inexperienced cast and crew, and boy does that inexperience show.The loose plotting is your usual nonsense about a psychopath who likes dressing up as Santa Claus and going around butchering innocent families. The stuff about him escaping from the asylum is so clichéd and boring that I wonder why they didn't just concentrate on following the main characters at their Highland retreat instead although it's obvious that this film is padded throughout given that there's very little in the way of content.The viewer is forced to follow the inanity of having a bunch of girls (and later, a few dweeby guys) hanging around in a remote lodge, stripping down to their nightwear and chatting for ages and ages. The actresses seem to have been picked for their looks rather than talent because some of them are incredibly wooden, although at least Dani Thompson looks like a proper scream queen. Eventually the psycho Santa shows up and there's some really cheesy gore bits, although they forgot to dub in wound noises so the deaths are oddly silent. It's all very rubbish and laughable and not a film that even the most dedicated of horror fans would want to bother sitting through.
... View MoreFollowing her boyfriends' attempted infidelity, a woman joining her friends at a holiday getaway at a remote mountain lodge find themselves being stalked by an escaped deranged serial killer dressed as Santa Claus and forces them to band together to escape from the killer.Frankly, this one wasn't all that great of a Santa-slasher. One of the main problems with this one stems from the film's exceptionally low-budget look and feel which runs rampant throughout here and doesn't give this a chance at times. The cheap, cramped locations and just home-made look really give this one the overwhelming sense of a low-budget affair which is much grander than the type of story is supposed to tell which just makes the whole thing look worse than it really should. The technical aspects here, from the camera work to the editing and the sets, really screams low-budget quality and is done to the point of being detrimental more than it really is. That facet carries over into the special effects for the kills, which is a shame as there's quite a large body-count and simply throwing red-colored liquid along the walls and only showing the aftereffect of what he did with the body rather than seeing it play out on-screen. Cutting to black whenever it's supposedly going for a kill only to come back seeing what he actually did really screams a cheap, low-budget affair and hinders this one considerably. Likewise, the film also manages to feature that same utterly dreadful pacing that plagues so many British horror films of the recent millennium as this one drags on forever without any kind of enthusiasm in what's happening featuring characters so laid-back that they rarely seem interested in anything going on around them which tends to drop the energy level to a barely- breathing crawl here which ends up hurting the film overall as much as these other issues. The last flaw here is the decidedly weak and completely pathetic killer which doesn't really strike any ounce of fear looking simply like a homeless man wearing a cheap Santa jacket, offers up no real reasoning for the obsession with Santa or the holiday and comes off like a total joke in how easily he's dealt with in the end that this one really suffers for such a lousy job with the main villain. While these here hold it back, there's a few solid moments present when it counts. Even though it's most hurt by the effects used to create them, the fact that this has a decent- sized body count offed in a wide variety of manners is a nice point for it as this one does manage some rather intriguing ideas here with such a lot of deaths to feature. That manages to include the fact that there are a couple of highly- enjoyable stalking scenes here to generate that amount of kills, from the opening home invasion which results in the murder of the family before his eventual arrest, the escape from the sanitarium that includes some decent antics against the staff to get out and the scenes of him lurking in the surrounding woods makes for some decent enough stalking scenes. Things pick up nicely in the finale when he targets them in the lodge which has some better-than-expected confrontations and has solid enough action to keep it interesting in the big showdown using the atmospheric mountain lodge setting to fine effect throughout here in letting the action develop nicely. These issues here really help this one, although the flaws here really outweigh these.Rated R: Graphic Language, Violence, Brief Nudity and drug use.
... View MoreMovies can't get much worse than this. Well, except maybe "Scrapbook". I only signed on here today to counter the good review that was posted on IMDb. That review was obviously written by someone related to the makers of "Christmas Slay". I don't know which thrift store this Santa got his red suit from, but my money's on Goodwill. Lots of those around here. Maybe they have them in Europe, too.I must say, though, that this drawing on the box of a demented Santa looks good. Impressive, even. It had me fooled. If only the producers went through the trouble to make their Santa half as believable, this film would've been worth it. All in all, bad direction, bad sets, bad acting, bad script, bad everything. Save your money and, instead, watch your two dogs playing in the front yard. That's infinitely more entertaining than this nonsense.
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