(a.k.a. A HOLIDAY HORROR STORY; directors: Grant Harvey, Steve Hoban and Brett Sullivan. Screenwriters: James Kee, Sarah Larsen, Doug Taylor, Pascal Trottier and uncredited Jason Filiatrault.)
Storyline
A Christmas-festive radio DJ (Dangerous Dan) helps links interwoven holiday-oriented horror stories involving a student documentary gone wrong, a Christmas tree with a supernatural price, a nasty family visit to a rich aunt with a terrible secret, and a flesh-eating infection in the North Pole.
Review
HORROR is an entertaining and memorable winter collection of grisly scare stories, loosely interlaced via characters, season’s screamings, and location: set mostly in the fictional Bailey Downs, this town is also featured in the GINGER SNAPS trilogy, 2000-4, and the BBC-America television series ORPHAN BLACK, 2013-7─not surprising, considering that the HORROR filmmakers worked on GINGER with director John Fawcett, who co-created ORPHAN.
The main wraparound glue that holds HORROR together is Dangerous Dan, a radio DJ (played by sometimes wistful, often jovial William Shatner), broadcasting and drinking his way through Christmas Eve. When the camera cuts away from Dan, other stories are told, all of them worth watching.
One of the not-quite-a-wraparound stories involves Santa Claus (George Buzza) who fends off flesh-rending, rabid elves, before moving onto a more insidious foe. Another involves a dysfunctional family whose visit to a frosty, wealthy aunt leads to truth-telling and supernatural punishment (Julian Richings, who played Death in the CW television show SUPERNATURAL, 2005-20, adds a Riff-Raff-like intensity to his role of Gerhardt in this multi-tale film). Meanwhile, student documentarian filmmakers break into St. Joseph’s Academy, the scene of a grim crime, some of them acting weirder and weirder as the night shoot progresses. Tragedy befalls a husband and wife after the husband (Adrian Holmes, who also guest-starred on SUPERNATURAL in 2008 and 2017) trespasses on forest land, cuts down a Christmas tree, and their son briefly disappears.
HORROR is an imaginative, clever and all-around fun movie, with especially effective, well-foreshadowed and disturbing twists, great and appropriately over-the-top acting, good and sometimes funny writing, and a welcome lightness to set off its─and the world’s─elements.
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