SANTA JAWS (2018)

 

(TV/Syfy Channel Original film; director: Misty Talley. Screenwriter: Jake Kiernan.)

Review

SANTA, a Syfy Channel Original film, is fun in parts, with serious lag time in others (even for viewers like me, who don’t take films too seriously). For the most part, I don’t blame screenwriter Jake Kiernan for SANTA’s boring parts─after all, the film has a microbudget, limiting its story and FX, and required padding for it to be a feature. SANTA, with its limited budget and natural-length storyline, is a forty-five-minute short at best. It doesn’t help that the acting is less than convincing, even for an on-the-cheap self-aware horror comedy.

What follows could save you from possible time-wastage (if you must see SANTA, for whatever reason).

After energetic Cody (Reid Miller) gets his supernatural pen as a gift and draws Santa Jaws (also the name of Cody’s comic book) and someone gets killed, you can fast-forward to the next kill scene. There’s a lot of characters-running-around footage, so you probably won’t miss important talking points. SANTA becomes focused in the last quarter, highlighted by Cody’s priceless “It’s not a shark─it’s Santa Jaws!” as well as memorable, schlocky-humorous kill scenes that are sprinkled throughout the movie. While SANTA is a bad-in-a-bad-way flick, fast-forwarding (which I wish I could have done as a non-review writing viewer) might make it (more) fun, with only a half-hour to forty-five minutes of your time spent on it. SANTA is worth checking out if you’re quick on the fast-forward draw or turn some of its elements into the basis for a drinking game.

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.

TOYS OF TERROR (2020)

 

(TV/Syfy Channel Original film; director: Nicholas Verso. Screenwriter: Dana Gould.)

Storyline

A family (two adults, three kids) move into a mansion with the intention of flipping it, unaware of its angry, active-spirits past.

Review

The building that once housed the Saint Germaine Children’s Hospital (established in 1918) has long stood empty─all because of one night, years before, when a black-robed and -masked figure left a trunk with a dead boy’s (Jason’s) toys on the doorstep. Now, a house-flipping couple (Hannah and David) and their three children (Alicia, the teenager; Zoe and Franklin, pre-tweens in serious need of discipline) have moved in. Strange things happen─ghostly look-away-and-they’re-gone figures in the mirrors; toys that appear where they weren’t seconds ago; etc.

The children are the first to notice the toys, who encourage the children to misbehave, angering the adults (including their nanny, Rose) who don’t understand why the children are acting badly. It’s not long before the adults understand, too, after Rose is almost knocked off the second story bannister OMEN-style, their handyman (Emmett) is horribly killed in front of them, and then it’s Christmas Eve. . . when bad situations explode in films like this.

This being a Syfy Channel Original film, there’s a certain level of cheesiness to the special FX (some are practical, as opposed to CGI) and story padding to flesh it out to ninety minutes. Thankfully, this is one the television channel’s better and more imaginative films, its screenplay written by comedian Dana Gould (STAN AGAINST EVIL), with occasional lags in the story (due to the aforementioned necessary padding), but mostly Old School Horror fun, not gory and laugh out loud funny in parts. The acting is mostly solid though a few scenes are not only CGI-bad they’re acting-bad (e.g., when slivers of shattered Christmas ornament are slicing Hannah’s cheeks─sans blood, because it’s TV-14-related television─and she doesn’t even flinch).

Mostly entertaining despite its tale-longish running length, sometimes cheap FX and not-great acting, TOYS is worth watching if you are a connoisseur of genre-smart writing, and low-budget flicks.