Review – Krampus

Krampus should have been the worst kind of awesome.  A Christmas horror movie with a ridiculous plot and some funny cast members should have been a campy good time.  Instead, Krampus suffers from the soft, PG-13 rating and tries to hard to be taken seriously.

Max (Emjay Anthony) is a child who just wants to have a good, family friendly Christmas.  However, his parents (Adam Scott and Toni Collette) are having issues and his trailer trash in-laws don’t help anything.  During a fight at dinner, Max loses the Christmas spirt, which ends up summoning the Christmas demon Krampus, which reigns hell on his entire family and neighborhood.

With such a ridiculous plot, you would expect a ridiculous movie and some of it is, like Krampus’ creepy weird helpers of possessed gingerbread men, teddy bears, and a jack in the box that eats people.  However, the studio’s decision to make this movie PG-13 ruins any sort of fun they could have had.  Firstly, it isn’t scary, like at all.  Not even a single jump scare in this one.  But the biggest issue is the lack of blood.  This should have been a violent, disgusting film with decapitations, limb removal, and outrageous death scenes.  Instead, we don’t really see anyone die.  They just kind of disappear.  The only blood we see in the movie is when Max’s Uncle Howard (Dave Koechner) gets bitten by one of the possessed creatures and his leg is bleeding.  So disappointing.

The movie also wanted to be taken seriously as a Christmas movie about the family bond and talking about what Christmas truly means.  Having the movie revolve around a Christmas demon is not the route I would have gone to tell this message.  Did this movie really need a message?  Couldn’t it have just hammed it up and talk about family disfunction and have everyone die?  If you go into a Christmas horror movie, you don’t want an emotional plot with character development.  You want insanity and a story that gets you from one death to the other.  The dialog and characters didn’t fit the bill either.  Give me one note characters with cheesy dialog so that when they die in the ridiculous fashion that they should have, it would be funny.  Don’t give me this family with issues and them trying to solve their issues.  Who cares about sympathy?

Krampus should have been a campy Christmas classic.  The story was ridiculous enough, all it needed was some outrageous death scenes and buckets and buckets of blood.  Instead, we get a soft, bloodless, scareless horror film that tries to hard to be something it isn’t.

MY RATING – 2/4

Did you see Krampas?  If so, what did you think?  Comment below, hit me up on Twitter @kevflix or on Facebook @Kevflix