Krampus

Happy Holidays from the end of March!

I wanted to see Krampus when it came out early in December, but unfortunately there weren’t any prescreenings for the film. Guess they assumed critics would hate it, or not get the point, man.

Either way, I was disappointed, but not disappointed enough to spend money on going to the film. December is busy for awards movies, not comedy horror films!

But the idea of a Krampus movie was very exciting. I haven’t even seen a Christmas horror film since Rare Exports years ago, which was wonderful and you should consider adding it to your Christmas collection.

But this one has scary clowns, so you know it might be more horror than comedy.

It’s Christmas time, yay! We are going to celebrate at the Engel household with their family coming over. Tom (Adam Scott) and Sarah (Toni Collette) have to make sure their house is clean, food cooked and everything decorated for Santa. After all, their kid Max (Emjay Anthony) still believes despite being like 10 or something. Also living in the house is their older daughter Beth (Stefania LaVie Owen) and Omi (Krista Stadler), Tom’s mom. She speaks German!

Anyways, the family eventually comes over. Rednecks. Howard (David Koechner), Dorothy (Conchata Ferrell), and Linda (Allison Tolman) with some dick kids (Queenie Samuel, Lolo Owen) and a baby.

Needless to say, the other boy kids tease poor Max for believing in Santa. They find his letter to Santa and read it outloud, making fun of his wishes for things like his parents to love each other more, and so on. He gets mad and rips up his letter throwing it into the wind! And with that, the power in the whole city goes out. And the winter storm gets a little bit more wintry.

Strange things are afoot. But let’s just cut to the chase. People have ruined Christmas. Krampus is here to punish them.

Damn grandma, you are brave enough to take on the Krampus alone?

When you go into a comedy horror film, you can never really expect a whole lot. They rarely have large budgets and are never really too funny or too scary. Krampus seems to fit the bill like the other ones, with a slightly more impressive budget.

I feel bad for Adam Scott, who often is put into these sort of roles (see Piranha) and lower budget comedies (see Hot Tub Time Machine 2). He is a funny guy who keeps getting stuck in bad to mediocre films.

Krampus at times is a little scary. Toys come to life in a very The Nightmare Before Christmas way. The Krampus itself felt downplayed with most of the work being done by creepy helper demon things. But knowing that even the kids weren’t safe was a nice surprise that a lot of films seem to avoid.

As for the comedy, well, there really wasn’t any. The comedy came from strange things happening, like CGI gingerbread men attacking them. No other real jokes outside of the weird factor, which is the most disappointing aspect of the film.

It did an okay job at the scary parts, but failed when it came to making me chuckle.