Happy Holidays!

Whether yours is filled with chestnuts or latkes or Wookie porn disguised as holograms of Diahann Carroll, I wish you all a wonderful season of warm fuzzy happiness in whatever form you most prefer.

Enjoy!

Many Reasons For the Season

So I queued up Red Christmas via Netflix because hey! I like a good seasonal horror flick. With Christmas looming, why not devote that Monday to a new yuletide slasher?

Then I slogged through the mean-spirited coal that was Red Christmas and thought to myself, you know Emily, this year has been ugly enough without ending it on such a negative, punishing, anti-choice, mixed garbage statement of a movie. Let's find a happier note to play, something seasonal but positive.

So here are a few random things to love about horror movies during the holidays. And if nothing here works, just screw it all and queue up The Muppet Family Christmas for the 9,00th time. No judgement here. 

The Crypt Keeper Singing Holiday Jingles

Easily the best item ever to be purchased in the '90s by a teenage Emily at the Spencer's Gifts, this album (originally on cassette tape, natch) includes a dozen holiday tunes with the lyrics rewritten to be more fitting of the singer, John Kassir's pun-wielding, tale-spinning Crypt Keeper. Can't get your Walkman working? Revel in the kindness of strangers with YouTube accounts.

The Very Fact That There Exists Not One But Two Killer Snowman Movies

And yet, the unrelated but weirdly similar Michael Keaton family film of the same name is somehow far creepier

The Choice to View Christmas Evil As a Magical Tale of a Lonely Santa-Loving Man Ascending to Angel Status

My (and John Waters) favorite holiday genre film can be viewed as a lot of things: a an early entry into the slasher Santa trend, tragic tale of mental illness taken to extremes, the chance to spot a way-pre-Home Improvement Patricia Richardson in a tiny role. For my money, it's something even more special (that's also all of those things). The key to keeping Christmas Evil on the right side of your heart is to make the conscious decision that SPOILER ALERT! Harry Stadling's van doesn't crash and burn after his killing spree is over, but rather, transcends into the heavens, transforming into a magical sleigh and changing our sad sack factory worker into the real deal Santa. 

Margot Kidder In Black Christmas, Goddess

Easily on the top five list of Film Characters I Want To Lost a Drinking Game To. She. Is. Divine.

Vincent Cassel's Insanity In Sheitan

The movie itself? Somewhat insufferable. The MAN himself? 

A god. Or, well, technically agent of the devil. 

The Most Feel-Good Pop Montage In the Least Feel-Good Slasher

I've said it again and I'll say it an estimated 781 more times before I die: Silent Night Deadly Night is memorable for a bevy of reasons, but none more so than the weirdly placed, tonally mismatched "The Warm Side of the Door" sequence, wherein a sweet country tune cheerfully plays as our soon-to-be-mass-murderer learns about friendship, work ethic, and the joy of having alcoholic bosses.

Eric Freeman's Case For The Academy Awards Adding a Category for Best Performance By a Pair of Eyebrows

I mean...

Clint Howard's Phallic Coven Mask

Everybody forgets Silent Night Deadly Night Part 4 because it doesn't have The Warm Side of the Door or eyebrows, but you what it does have? Murderous roller blades. Also, this:

Ray Wise & Lin Shaye In Dead End

A good but flawed little Christmas Eve ghost story, Dead End deserves to be seen more, mostly because, you know, Ray Wise and Lin Shaye. 

Disco Cameo Greatness

Don't Open Til Christmas is filled with a lot of wonderful things, among them, a smily plastic mask, Halloween costume holiday parties, charmingly innocent peep show conversations, a sleazy male flutist, and insanely slow motion overwrought flashbacks. But you know what REALLY makes it exciting? That it has Caroline Munro randomly performing a disco number. Because if that's not the real reason for the season, what is?

The Ugly Americans

As an American who lived abroad for a few years during my twenties, I can safely say that yankee expats can sometimes be the worst. While I like to think I was generally respectful and open to the cultures I was experiencing, I also spent a drunken dinner or two with a variety of fellow non-natives who didn't always charm those around them. Watching 1979's bizarre Bloodbath, I witnessed a nightmare version of those days. 

Thankfully, Dennis Hopper never taught ESL at any of my schools.

Quick Plot: A gaggle of awful Americans party together on a mysterious and beautiful Spanish island. Chicken (Hopper in full loon mode) shoots heroin and makes racist jokes. Treasure Evans (the treasure that is Carroll Baker) is a washed up movie star who kills time with booze and local men while waiting for her agent to call. Finally there's Allen (screenwriter Win Wells), a gay hedonist looking for just the right young fellow to seduce.

As our ugly Americans frolic and sin their way across the island, the locals take part in their own mysterious traditions, from child marriage to child sacrifice. A caravan of hippies arrive just as things start getting truly weird, with hallucinations and dead bodies turning up every scenic way you turn.

Directed by Silvio Narizzano, Bloodbath (aka The Sky Is Falling, which makes a whole lot more sense in terms of a character being named Chicken) is a surreal, strange little movie that plays with religious iconography and Manson-esque cult violence. The oddest thing about it (of which, seriously, there are many) is that for being such a product of the late '60s/early '70s, it comes with a 1979 date.

I don't know how much I can say I enjoyed Bloodbath, but it certainly was an experience not like much else. For Dennis Hopper, however, I'm guessing it was pretty much casual Friday.

High Points

It's always a pleasure to see Carroll Baker, but it's even more of one when she gets such a juicy mess of a person to play

Low Points

It may be more Amazon's fault than the film's, but it's a shame that the visual quality feels so compromised

Lessons Learned

Never call a snotty Britishman an expatriate if he's simply living abroad

Real pearls are what you would call "proper'

There are few things worse than a white expat with easy access to liquor

Rent/Bury/Buy

Bloodbath is certainly not for everybody, but if you're looking for something way off the beaten path, it's definitely one to try. You can find a poorly lit grainy version streaming on Amazon Prime if your eyes are up for it.

The Time Traveler's Abs

Back when I watched The Butterfly Effect 2, I was angry. Here was a case of a potential franchise with a good central premise being applied in the worst possible way on the least possible interesting characters and situation. 

While it's far from a masterpiece, The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations (because every franchise eventually needs an entry subtitled "Revelations") makes a batch of good decisions that put its predecessor to shame. Easy tip for new filmmakers: want people to enjoy your movie? Don't center it on a white millennial startup tech salesman.

Quick Plot: Sam is a handsome young butterfly effector. Somewhere between presumed four hour ab workouts, he finds the time to assist police on murder cases by butterfly effecting and care for his agoraphobic sister Jenna. Advising him is a friendly weed dealer/former high school teacher named Goldberg who somehow knows a thing or two about butterfly effecting and when not to do it...namely, if it involves saving someone close to you from a violent death.

Some years earlier, Sam made that very mistake, going back in time to spare his sister from a house fire only to lose his parents in the tradeoff. Now a somewhat happy and well-adjusted young man, Sam's life is rocked once again when the sister of his brutally murdered high school girlfriend comes to remind him that there's an innocent man on death row.

Against all common sense and rules of butterfly effecting, Sam heads back to the scene of the crime. In the process, the murder adds another victim and seems to officially launch the birth of a serial killer who continues to take the lives of other young women. Sam continues to butterfly effect at various points in the past, disrupting his life and status each time.

But never his four-hour ab workouts

Like Part 2, The Butterfly Effect 3 (REVELATIONS!) has nothing to do with the rest of the franchise, which is perfectly fine. The other key part to that is how it trusts its audience enough to not dwell on the details of butterfly effecting, assuming (probably rightfully) that they've seen the first film and get the general gist. In a world where every superhero movie has to be an origin story, this is refreshing.

At right around 90 minutes long, the story moves quite well, wasting no time on subplots. Directed by Seth Grossman from a script by Holly Brix, it plays like a straight murder mystery with a much more standard horror movie feel than the other installments. It even makes intense use of its Detroit setting, milking the city's reputation for crime and abandonment several years before It Follows and Don't Breathe. When you add that with the ridiculous (in a good way) twist ending, you end up with something far more satisfying than you'd expect...especially if you suffered through the slog that was The Butterfly Effect 2. 

High Points

I won't reveal it here, but the aforementioned ending is rather glorious, and the subsequent coda has a weirdly black comedic tone that makes the movie feel a little more memorable than your typical third installment

Low Points

At the risk of spoiling a big reveal, there's a sparseness (which might be a nice way of saying low budgetness) about The Butterfly Effect 3 that keeps the cast of characters so slim that our suspect list can't help but limit the surprise factor

Lessons Learned

Detroit is such a dangerous place that even a bear trap will get you when you least expect it

Seeing your mother bludgeoned to death will not leave you unharmed

Proper butterfly effecting requires a steady supply of ice cubes and journals

Rent/Bury/Buy

While it's probably a little below par of the first Butterfly Effect, Revelations is still a decent and engaging watch (and it goes without saying but I'll say it anyway: miles better than part 2). It's streaming on Amazon Prime and requires no familiarity with any of the other films. If you're looking for a darker crime thriller version of the first film, go for it.