Watching 15 minutes of “Christmas Evil” (1980) and then hoping it will get better is like asking a large woman if she is pregnant. You might be right, but it’s not worth the risk. As a service to my readers looking for reviews of classic Christmas slashers (maybe because it’s an early entry, this one appears on most lists), I stuck with it to the end. Instead of getting better, it piles on reasons why it’s terrible.
It botches the slasher basics
Something I still need to learn about bad Eighties slashers is it’s not guaranteed that they will at least be proficient at gore and titillation while failing at plot, character and theme. “Christmas Evil” (titled “You Better Watch Out” before its rebranding) has no game to speak of in the two foundational slasher categories.
The film opens in 1950 with two kid brothers peeking from the stairway as the “I saw momma kissing Santa Claus” idea plays out. Actually, Santa (the dad) fondles momma’s stockings for several minutes, and it never gets raunchier. So we’re cued that this movie is steering clear of censors.
“Christmas Evil” (1980)
Original title: “You Better Watch Out”
Director: Lewis Jackson
Writer: Lewis Jackson
Stars: Brandon Maggart, Jeffrey DeMunn, Dianne Hull
Once we jump to 1980, the movie has two gore scenes. One is a quick insert of a toy soldier’s weapon piercing an eyeball, the other is a quick insert of a neck being sliced open by an ornamental star. Multiple killings feature Santa using a tiny toy ax to conk people on the head. We know they’re dead from the wide shot of the corpses sprawled out. So “Christmas Evil” fails at the ostensibly easy wins of slashers.
Oddly, the acting isn’t awful, making it easier to keep hopes unreasonably high. Broadly, writer-director Lewis Jackson has devised a “Taxi Driver” riff about an autistic man, Harry (Brandon Maggart), who struggles with the disconnect between what people say Christmas means to them and how they actually behave. Until he snaps.
Why he snaps 30 years later and not in the intervening years is unexplained – unless we’re to believe it’s because a coworker has strong-armed him into taking his shift at the toy assembly line and then bragged about it. If that’s the last straw, we don’t see any previous straws. And while Maggart’s acting is fine, he’s hidden under the Santa beard every time we need to see Harry’s subtle shifts.
Character study buried under the beard
A bookkeeper for the toy factory, Harry has also been keeping naughty-and-nice books on the local kids, presumably for years, judging by his bookshelf. He’s nominally a peeping tom, but the theoretical tension doesn’t come from Harry being a pervert, but rather from the citizenry possibly catching him and assuming he’s a pervert and attacking him.
This idea of an innocent crazy man being mistaken for a dangerous psycho percolates at the edge of “Christmas Evil” but never lands, because it either has a bad script or no script. As Harry, dressed as Santa, delivers packages to various places (a children’s hospital, a church, an office party), we don’t know whether revelry or violence will ensue.
But it’s not because of tension or subtlety in the mood or even blatant triggering by the citizens, it’s because we don’t know what Jackson will decide. At one location, Santa is treated rudely but he delivers the presents; at another, he’s treated playfully and kills several people.
Harry does a Robin Hood thing of stealing from naughty kids (in a rare instance of characterization, one naughty kid desires a lifetime subscription to Penthouse) to give to nice kids. And Harry leaves sacks of dirt for bad kids, but we see absolutely zero reactions to this behavior. People only react to the murders. If he’s been thieving and redistributing presents for decades, that’s never mentioned.
One of the few things to its credit is the production design. “Christmas Evil” looks like Christmas in 1980, in the living rooms and the neighborhoods. No fake snow, no fake cold, and if the jollity is faked, it’s faked in the normal way. Which presumably irks Harry under his fake beard. But the “Evil” part of “Christmas Evil” is missing. Rather than “Evil,” this is “Inexplicable (Yet Rather Dull) Insanity.”