LETTERS TO SATAN CLAUS (2020)

 

(Director: Emma Jean Sutherland. Screenwriter: Michael Zara.)

Review

LETTERS is a B-movie fun, Hallmark Christmas sentiment-mocking comedy with lots of light banter (with underlying dark impulses), romance scenarios (promptly made fun of), pretty people, solid actors engaging in intentionally bad acting, and an edgy-for-Hallmark sexuality (the lead character, via light banter, makes no secret of her fondness for multiple-partner hookups).

The story: when five-year-old Holly Winters, angry at her parents and living in Ornament, writes a missive asking Santa to make her parents disappear, she accidentally writes SATAN on the letter. It’s not long before her parents are slaughtered, supposedly by an easily caught and imprisoned madman, leaving Holly and her older sister (Cookie) orphaned.

Twenty-two years later, Holly is a big-city reporter, now called Holly Frost. An Xmas celebration broadcast brings the misanthropic and foul-mouthed newswoman back to Ornament, a place she has not seen since childhood. Her hometown is still Christmas-bright, where everybody is cheerful.

Shortly after Holly’s arrival, people die (often off-camera, with bright-red fake blood in evidence). Holly is oblivious to this, contemplating the promotion she’ll get at work if she clenches her teeth through her hickville assignment (another Hallmark Channel cliché). She’s also trying to hook up with one (or, simultaneously, three) of the many hunky guys who live in Ornament, whose appearances prompt a swelling of light romantic music before it’s abruptly cut short, followed by quippy dialogue.

 Holly becomes aware of the satanic shadow-and-slaughter after her hunky co-worker (Cameraman Sam) disappears and she coughs up blood and his “dumb, sexy” earring at a public gathering. She also receives blood-drippy pic from one of the Devil’s victims. Eventually, the Fallen One reveals herself to Holly and those close to her although the rest of the town thinks Holly is a serial killer─even this last opinion is lensed in a Hallmark-light outlook, where the police (two of them hunky twins) give equal weight to the fact that Holly is Grinch-hearted and a serial killer.

Can Holly find the “Christmas giggle. . . inside her heart" and, in doing so defeat Satan and restore Ornament's romantic holiday vibe? 

As a Syfy Channel Original movie, this is a good offering. The film ends, with a sequel-friendly wink, before it wears out its bright-façade-arch-hearted welcome. Screenwriter Michael Zara’s dark humor, sexual vibrancy and chomping-at-the-bit sarcasm spices  LETTER’s kind-hearted and slick veneer, effectively created through its laid-on-thick use of music, cinematography, rife-with-Christmas-trappings dialogue and (almost) painfully obvious false cheer. Those who are not Syfy Channel fans might not view LETTERS in a favorable light.