A Christmas Horror Story (2015)

(On Cable TV, January 2019) There’s a surprisingly strong subgenre of Christmas horror movies, and A Christmas Horror Story seems like it wants to be four of them at once. An anthology of four short stories loosely linked by none other than William Shatner as a radio DJ (and a few more throwaway links), it’s a Canadian tax-dollar-financed low-budget feature aimed at domestic cable channels in an effort to meet CanCon requirements. While most movies of that type are terrible, A Christmas Horror Story is a little bit better than most: the direction and production values aren’t bad, and the stories generally hold up. Still, not all segments are created equal, and the film’s standout sequence is a Santa-versus-zombie-elves story (and then on to Santa gunning for Krampus himself) with deliciously filthy dialogue and a surprisingly nasty stinger. A Christmas Horror Story is the kind of thing you watch as an antidote for Christmas cheer, and it’s almost exactly what it portrays itself to be (even though your cable channel may mistakenly tag it as comedy). The soundtrack features some pretty good spookified version of holiday tunes, and the end credit promises us that “no elves were harmed during the making of this film”. (Whew.) It’s bound to be watchable in the January-to-October timeframe.