Sunday, December 4, 2016

DVD Movie Review #194 Krampus


Hello again and welcome to the second of my Krampus Christmas Romp! This time I am covering the new release that started my interest in this project: KRAMPUS! I know we all want those campy B-Movie favorites like the one that kicked it all off but this one is special, in the way that My wife actually has an interest in seeing this one and not the others so….gotta get that viewing time in where I can. (I have an untouched FFXV laying around I need to get to it sometime after all).
So we start out with a lovely view of how the world really looks during the holidays which is enough to crush your spirit even if for just a little bit. Amongst the Black Friday we come upon a lovely family that becomes the star of our little Christmas pageant. Once home we get to see how loving they are as they are visited by more relatives to spend a miserable Christmas in each other’s company. Hence se visit our young hero that is destined to work on trying to change things and officially sets this series into motion as our family are shown how terrible it is to be terrible during the holiday season.

This film is an interesting mix of B-movie horror and campy comedy horror. You can tell this in the almost cartoonish way the family is portrayed and of course in some of the monsters they fight in order to stay alive. I really did like this film for a lot of these qualities. It comes across pretty well for what it is trying to do and is probably one of the top tier of this type of film. I think the creativity of the monsters here and the way things were directed even left a few moments of suspense in this holiday teaser. The special effects were definitely nothing to sneeze at. I could tell that they did work on these effects very well in the film and it can be seen throughout. The acting was…good enough for what this is. It wasn’t campy, it wasn’t spectacular but it was enough to get us through this without noticing anything being wrong. Finally let me get to where this movie shines the most, the music. They are very good at incorporating different themes into this film and the music helps them work it out with twisted versions of known carols or just the placement of old favorites. In the end this film sets the stage quite well for the coming horrors.

That being said this movie is what it is, which is a B-Movie/Scary Movie hybrid and though one of the best it still is a detractor.  I really love scary movies and I really love B-Movies, both are really good at what they do be it a B-Movie like Thankskilling which has me laughing in my seat or a Scary movie like the Last Shift which leaves you crawling under the covers to hide both genres are really good. Unfortunately many try to do a hybrid mixing campy and slightly funny moments in what they would consider a serious horror film, this is sometimes done on purpose and sometimes by accident (see this on the upcoming “A Christmas Horror Story” review). There is a problem with this attempt to bring levity in and it is that the film can become confusing or even the worst case scenario…boring. This film does an good job of this and is probably one of my favorites of this type but at the same time it suffers from this attempt as I have never seen a film of this type that I would consider…great (sorry Shaun of the Dead Fans). The next is the way they portray the family. Really they did a good job of having them develop throughout but they make them so distasteful and so hateful that it really doesn’t help by the end and though in the B-Movie type I may want to root for the protagonists to die (though lets face it in a B-Movie the real protagonist is the monster) I don’t want to feel that way for a scary film.

In summary this is overall a solid film that only suffers from its attempts at trying to skirt that line between horror and comedy. Still….I would consider this movie a good watch for the holidays and a one I will revisit again in the future.


Ragint 7/10   

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