Christmas Evil (1980)
Echelon Films
Singa Home Entertainment
Christmas
Evil aka You Better Watch Out (1980) is a superb example of an Eighties video
nasty. Directed by Lewis Jackson, it brings together all manner of perversion
and splatter to create a superbly anti-Christmas work of cinema. If you wonder
whether it is dangerous to tell your children lies about Santa Claus then watch
this film!
It
opens as a number of young boys and their all too nice mother are watching
Santa come down the chimney and deliver presents. Later on in the night older
of the boys tells the younger one that Santa as actually their father, so he
decides to creep down stairs to investigate for himself. He is horrified by
what he finds, Santa is eating something from between his mother legs ! Oh my God ! Is his mother having
an affair with Santa or is Santa really his Dad and hence he has been deceived.
In any events he loses his little mind, smashes a Christmas snow dome and
slashes his hands. This is now one seriously screwed-up kid.
Some
years later we now meet the disturbed child as Harry Stadling,
a very strange adult. He is totally obsessed with Christmas; his house is
filled with Christmas items, he wakes up in the morning to a Christmas clock
and does his exercises to Christmas music. He works at Jolly Toys and regular
lectures the other workers on the importance of Christmas and the beauty of
toys. When he is elevated to management he is viewed with suspicion by the
other workers and treated with thinly veiled contempt.
He
spends a large part of his spare time watching the local children with his
binoculars documenting their behaviour in two large books marked bad and good. The scenes where he is watching the local kids and recording what
they do is truly creepy.
He
begins to get more and more unstable and identifies himself with Santa Claus.
At Christmas Eve this year he has to decide who has been naughty and who has
been nice and along the way bring some discipline to any adults who haven’t
lived up to his strict moral code.
The
first half of the film is very disturbed and weird, Stadling
is superbly insane with his Christmas obsession and the film builds and builds
and builds, you know he will explode but you are just not sure when. Of course
as Christmas Eve hits, then the film moves into slasher mode and the action
hits the screen. At the same time there is a tragic aspect to Stadling, his is an adult-child who has never grown up, he
still sees the world in simple terms and somehow still believes in Santa, even
if Santa happens to be himself.
The
film also has some unusual surreal touches from the way Santa in the opening
shots floats back up the chimney to Stadling as Santa
flying off in his painted van posing as a sleigh across the moonlight.
Christmas
Evil is one of a small range of Christmas horror tales and stands out from the
genre in its truly weird subject matter and its mixture of gore, madness and
obsession. The edition from Singa has not been
restored but is certainly reasonable enough to enjoy.
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