As if there weren't enough crappy killer Santa movies, here is yet another one. Actually, this is the movie pretty much responsible for the short-lived killer Santa craze of the early-80s, so I can praise it for bringing about SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT, which in turn brought us SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 5: THE TOYMAKER... the only reason I couldn't bring myself to give this a 1/2, instead being extremely generous and bestowing a lowly 1 smiley face rating on it's undeserving head. Then again, I think the "All Through The House" segment of 1972's TALES FROM THE CRYPT film adaptation could be the recipient of the "inspired future killer Santa movies" accolade, though it too sucked, so either way I'm not in the mood to give a fuck who started the whole thing. My major problem with CHRISTMAS EVIL and the animosity I show for it early on in this review? EVERYTHING! I hate the acting, I hate the characters themselves, I hate the story, I hate the direction, I hate the soundtrack, I hate it all. The most insignificant and "it's really no surprise" surprise of the year for me is that the director/writer of this tripe (which is unfair, because this movie gives tripe a bad name), Lewis Jackson, has yet to work again in the 20 years since this movie was made. In short, I can't stand this movie and I have made it my goal to destroy every copy of it I ever find. More explicitly, well, read on...

The steaming load of reindeer vomit starts back in 1947, where pain-in-the-ass youngsters Billy and Harry chill on their staircase with their, perched in wait for Santa to arrive. Oddly absent from the festivities is dad, who misses the whole ordeal when a fat guy in a red suit with a fake beard hanging an inch off of his chin throws a couple packages under the Tannenbaum. When the siblings return to their beds, Harry insists it was the real Santa Claus, while the far more realistic Billy says it's all horse shit and joins Little Nemo in a Slumberland game of Russian Roulette... or at least I'd LIKE to think that's what happens to him when he sleeps. Unconvinced that Santa's a fraud, Harry saunters downstairs to take a closer look, and gets an eye full of... what we're not exactly sure of, because the director leaves us hanging, except for a few brief flashes of what appears to be a scene of Santa filling mommy's "stocking"... with his tongue. Yes kids, Santa's a "player", why else would his trademark line be "Ho Ho Ho"? Anyway, the incident snaps every sense of normalcy in little Harry's gray matter, sending him up into the attic where he pulls out an X-Mas snow globe and busts it on the floor, gashing his palm with one of the glass shards. Whether this is because he realized Santa IS a fake, or because he witnessed his parents engaging in disturbing sexual acts is never explained, but when we FF>> to "the Present" (which, as always in these situations is now our past), Harry's grown up to be a pretty fucked up (and astonishingly pathetic) middle aged man.

Living alone in a little shit hole of an apartment, Harry has a disturbing amount of Santa and Christmas related cards and decorations plastering his walls. Going about his daily routine of being a loser and a total tosser, Harry shows us that he probably hasn't accomplished much in the 30 years or so since last we left him, cleaving his hand in his parents' attic. Harry shows us a little of just how much this childhood trauma fucked his brain up, as he whips out two large books to write names and events in: one for the good kids in the neighborhood and one for the bad kids... I wonder where his voyeurism of children from the roof of his apartment building would sit in his book, especially when he peeks in on the bad seed of the "hood", the foul-mouthed Garcia boy, "reading" dad's porno mags. That's not all that's wrong with the Garcia kid though, as to quote Harry he's got "bad hygiene". While not stalking children, our hapless retard pays the bills by putting in hours at the Jolly Dream Toy Factory. Where else did you expect a weirdo with a Christmas problem to work at? Harry's not happy with the products that Jolly Dreams craps out either, and why should he be? Jolly Dream manufactures some of the most action-less action figures I've seen this side of the shelves at my local dollar store. I mean, their big seller is a solid, monocolored (now available in red OR blue), chunk of plastic shaped somewhat like a tin soldier with a removable piece of yellow plastic that's probably meant to be a rifle, but winds up looking like a lightning bolt... as a lover of toys my entire life, from Weeble-Wobbles of childhood to Nintendo GameCubes of adult childhood, I have to say those are the most pathetic attempts at playthings I've ever seen.

As if shoddy merchandise wasn't bad enough, Harry's also pissed about his co-workers' crappy attitudes toward the quality of their work and toward the holidays as a whole. Blinded by his anger that others aren't as hard-on about Christmas as he is, Harry actually manages to cut his hand on one of Jolly Dream's cheap little toys. The destruction of the toy is no surprise, but the fact that it manages to cut open his mitt just goes to prove how weak our main character is. But, to be honest, it looks more like the thing simply falls apart when he picks it up... I can't stand any of this, it's giving me a new hatred for the holidays... maybe it was made by angry Jewish people... Anyway, it's still a ways off till Christmas, Thanksgiving time to be exact, as Harry's scheduled to spend another awkward Thanksgiving dinner with his brother Billy and his lovely family. Instead he decides to stay home and drool over Santa's appearance at the Macy's parade, while stitching together his own St. Nick suit and painting his van up all festive. At this point, I can only ask that somebody mugs this guy and kicks his ass a whole lot while singing "Jingle Bells", finishing off with a golden shower and a rain of egg nog vomit. Later on, Harry attends the Jolly Dream Christmas party, where he babbles incessantly about "playing tunes" and gets disgruntled over the company's screw-over policy concerning a promotional run to give free toys to retarded boys and girls at a local hospital. "Screw over" in that they don't intend to dish out as many free goodies as they say, just so long as they quilt trip the employees into increasing production.

To make sure that the company doesn't get the last laugh, Harry steals a bag of toys from the warehouse and hides them until he can deliver them himself. When X-Mas Eve rolls around, Harry goes about his work as the living Claus, breaking into peoples' houses, stealing their good presents and replacing them with crap so he can redistribute the good stuff to kids more deserving, just because they're retarded and crippled... what did they do to deserve that shit anyway, not die?! Fuck charity. After Harry bestows the brats with free merchandise, Mr. Claus heads to a local church, where the greedy big wigs of Jolly Dream are attending midnight mass. When they come out and mock his homemade costume, Harry greets several of them with a present of his own: a tin soldier stabbed in the eye for one guy, and mutilation with a not-so-artificial Indian hatchet for two others. Meanwhile, a crowd of twenty-or-so witnesses look on in stupefied horror and incompetent terror while the whole thing happens, CONTINUING to do so as Harry Claus drives off in his magic Christmas van. Harry's next stop is a Christmas party that he pretty much wanders into, where he dishes out more toys for more brats who've done nothing to deserve free stuff, then he dances to German folk music, Polkaing himself stupid before driving off into the night again. Nothing says yule tide like polka music. From here, our killer Chris Cringle slips into the home of a fellow Jolly Dream employee, a jackass who took advantage of Harry's ignorance and gullibility, getting him to work overtime to cover for him, while he went out and got trashed.

Still sticking up for himself and his personal ideals, Harry slashes the man's throat with the star from the top of their X-Mas tree, leaving the children with a dead daddy for the holidays. See, Harry's actions are flawed here. The children are now screwed, as the entire family was probably living off the guy's meager income from putting together cheap plastic toys. Now, with father dead, the innocent children, not to mention their mother, are left with no money and no way of supporting themselves. Mommy will have to whore herself to various drug dealers and pimps, leaving her children to watch on as she's abused and sodomized over and over again by fat Puerto Rican coke heads and skinny white heroin addicts. Eventually the widow gets hooked on her own drug problem, let's say something over the counter like Valium or Morphine. Eventually she's been banged so many times and loaded with the semen of literally hundreds of different strange men, that not even the desperate STREET TRASH hobos want to take a stab at her, and she has to trade her kids for two teaspoons of Pepto-Bismol and half a Flintstones vitamin (likely Pebbles). What happens to the kids afterwards isn't something that you'd want to hear, as it's too disgusting for even my words to explain. All this because some psycho their father worked with didn't like it when dad took a night off of work... way to go Harry Claus, so much for bringing joy to the children of the world you dickhead.

The next morning, Christmas Day, Harry celebrates trashing Jolly Dreams. Meanwhile, in the search for the Santa gone wrong, the NYPD round up anyone in a red suit within a hundred mile radius and sends them through a police line-up... an image I'd like to get for my site! Back to Harry, he's confronted by a group of kids who think he's really Santa, and everything's fine and dandy until the concerned parents, afraid Harry is the killer Santa, corner him and threaten to knife him up... with that kind of holiday trauma, you're just asking for a whole gang of Bill Caldwells down the road... The kids stand up for "Santa" though, fending off their parents while Harry escapes down an alley. Then, in an insipid attempt to get us to pity Harry like Frankenstein's monster, the adults of the area take up torches (in NYC?!) and chase the grungy clothed man through the avenues and alleyways, until he evades them with the help of his big Christmas van. Running to brother Billy for support, Harry instead finds malice, as Billy knows he's the one behind the previous night's Christmas sleighings... uhm, "slayings". So, Billy and his angry carnivorous nostrils that could devour a small child whole, attacks Harry, strangling him until Harry fires back with a sock in the face and runs out to his van. Alone and with no one to fend for him anymore, the mildly retarded Christmas zealot drives his van into the mob of angry villagers, err, city folk, then takes his clunker for a nose dive off of a bridge. But, instead of sinking into the murky depths below, Harry gets a happy ending as his Christmas van flies him off into the Christmas sky... the new champion for the most retarded ending ever. As for Billy, well, he pursues Harry, and in his pursuit falls down a blanket of snow... literally. Yes, it's actually a white blanket covered with fake snow, of which the entire fake piece shifts together when Billy falls onto it... in JACK FROST it was funny, here it just makes my ulcer bleed like Niagara Falls.

I'm not really in the mood to wax intellectual on the various facets of CHRISTMAS EVIL, because ever part of it sucked mistletoe, namely the mistletoe dangling betwixt my legs. Just know that it was all horrible and follow this last statement. Don't worry, it'll all be over with soon. Whereas the premise may have worked for a good natured, braindead slasher flick that exists simply so we can watch blood fly and tits jiggle, this might not have been so bad. But, instead the crew tries to make us sympathetic towards Harry, and you can't spell "sympathetic" without "pathetic", which is exactly what Harry was. I didn't feel sorry for the stupid pud, I was GLAD to see him get pushed around and insulted and harassed without remorse! The insipid little shit deserved every bit of it because he LET it continue! It's like my problem with Henry in BRUISER, you can't sympathize with a guy who deservedly get his balls busted all day everyday, then just goes on a rampage and kills those who "wronged" him. If anybody wrongs these guys it's themselves. It's like those "trenchcoat mafia" douche bags, they lashed out with gunfire because they were too pussy to put an end to their harassment earlier on, making them more and more vulnerable for attack everyday, until one day they just go blitzkrieg kamikaze and shoot everybody. I'm not feeling sorry for the "innocent" people who were killed, nor am I promoting people being bullies. I myself was never a bully, but bullies never fucked with me or my friends, because we stood up for ourselves, all STAND BY ME and shit. So, as you can see (provided you're hacking into my unique brain waves and SURVIVING the confusion), the message I'm trying to convey is, everybody get along, stand up for each other and live and let live, and nobody has to make horrendous movies like CHRISTMAS EVIL.

Also Known As: TERROR IN TOYLAND; YOU BETTER WATCH OUT

Sequels: None

If You Liked This Flick, Check Out: crucifying your children and having them eaten by rabid circus clowns in Santa costumes... now THERE'S a movie!