A Christmas Horror Story is the third in a trio of Amazon Prime Christmas horror films I've watched this year (the others being A Christmas Slay and CAESAR AND OTTO'S DEADLY XMAS). I hated the first two and hoped that this film would be the best of the three, which it is, but unfortunately it's still not a good movie. Instead this Canadian anthology film is muddled and unfocused, going for gore and action over really effective storytelling.
William Shatner plays a DJ in the linking scenes and is a delight; certainly the best thing about the otherwise lousy production. There are four stories here and the problem is that instead of telling one after the other, which is how anthologies should play out, they're all mingled together with repeated cutting back and forth between the narratives. It's confusing and messy, repeatedly taking you out of the stories just when they're getting interesting.
The material is sub par too. There's a half-hearted found footage exercise which goes nowhere and another re-run of the now popular 'Krampus' legend which feels like a cheesy '80s horror. One story is a mini-slasher while the brunt of the screen time involves a Santa battling zombie elves with a taste for human flesh. The horror is noisy and gruesome but never scary; in fact, I started getting a headache at the sheer inanity of it all.
William Shatner plays a DJ in the linking scenes and is a delight; certainly the best thing about the otherwise lousy production. There are four stories here and the problem is that instead of telling one after the other, which is how anthologies should play out, they're all mingled together with repeated cutting back and forth between the narratives. It's confusing and messy, repeatedly taking you out of the stories just when they're getting interesting.
The material is sub par too. There's a half-hearted found footage exercise which goes nowhere and another re-run of the now popular 'Krampus' legend which feels like a cheesy '80s horror. One story is a mini-slasher while the brunt of the screen time involves a Santa battling zombie elves with a taste for human flesh. The horror is noisy and gruesome but never scary; in fact, I started getting a headache at the sheer inanity of it all.