“Look, Tori, we know you didn’t murder anyone, but we’re having a hard time believing what you’re saying.”

Drake’s rating: Happy [censored] holidays!

Drake’s review: A good slasher flick, or even just a decent one, is heavily reliant on a few key ingredients. One of those is having a solid slasher villain, of course. It’s much easier to startle the audience with a hockey-masked behemoth than it is with, say, Bob from accounting. And Christmas Bloody Christmas is well aware of this, and so it leans heavily into having a heavy-footed, lumbering, robotic Santa Claus stalking through a small, snowy town on Christmas Eve.

But another important ingredient is the cast of (generally young) victims, who ideally should get the attention — and sympathy — of the audience before they’re violently dispatched in bloody and often Savini-esque ways. The characters don’t need to be fleshed-out and three-dimensional so much as reliable sketches that are relatable enough that you don’t necessarily want them to die at the hands of the slasher. At least not right away.

And it’s here that Christmas Bloody Christmas doesn’t so much slip; it steps on a banana peel, does a pratfall onto a freshly waxed floor, and slides down the grand staircase, hitting each and every step on the way. Because the characters here, from abrasive record/video store owner Tori and her desperate employee Robbie to the needlessly aggressive cop just looking to make a big arrest in their tiny town, run the gamut from simply annoying to downright tiresome. Five minutes into this flick and you’re honestly just waiting for the killer Santa to show up and go to work, with a good dose of hack-hack-hack to go along with the ho-ho-ho.

And we do get there, eventually. But by that point we’ve had far too much attention paid to this bothersome bunch and are cursing the fact that it’s taken our killer Santa half the movie to get his not so jolly self in gear and start laying waste to the citizens of Small Town, USA.

It’s hard to lay the blame on the actors here, though, since the dialogue they’ve been given is an unfortunate mixture of references to a pop culture that’s older than the characters and f-bombs delivered in such rapid succession that it feels like Quentin Tarantino drank a six-pack of Jolt Cola and then suddenly developed Tourette syndrome. And I am not one to criticize a movie for its language — and have in fact been known to curse like the proverbial longshoreman — but the cursing here is not creative in the least, and it’s not shocking. It’s merely spit out in such rapid and seemingly endless succession that the characters grate on both the ears and the nerves mere minutes into the film.

Still, the back half of Christmas Bloody Christmas is a better-than-average slasher that almost makes up for the aural assault of the first half. The killer Santa in question, a robot originally designed as a military weapon, reverts to its original programming. Which seems to simply be “kill everyone.” And as played by veteran actor Abraham Benrubi (The Program), RoboSanta is a fearsome sight indeed, stalking with implacable menace and squishing heads with frightening ease. It goes from a simple toy store display to a deadly threat, stalking Tori and unemotionally dispatching anyone in its way.

Christmas Bloody Christmas also leans heavily into its holiday setting, with a snow-covered town and lights and decorations everywhere. It’s a surprisingly colorful film with a unique look, which helps it to stand out visually from similar low-budget efforts. Holiday lights bathe RoboSanta in a red glow, neon green lights shoot from its eyes and bright yellow sparks erupt from its exoskeleton as it takes more and more damage. It’s a garish comic book come to life, but that only works in its favor.

Honestly, it’s a shame the early dialogue is so weak because there’s a nice little holiday slasher here that has a lot going for it. And if you can make it through the early character-building scenes that do nothing to build character and everything to push the audience into wanting to design their own murderous robot Santa instead, then you might find Christmas Bloody Christmas to be a nice enough little cinematic stocking stuffer.

But just in case, you might want to stuff a pair of earplugs into that stocking as well.

Intermission!

• “Fully replaces your degenerate mall Santa!” Well, sure, but very few mall Santas go on murderous rampages.
• Santa brought an axe to a shotgun fight.
• Aaaand now Santa has a shotgun, too. Ho ho ho.
• Get your very own Santa zapper this holiday season.
• Not the video rack! Nooooo!!!
• I guess her new nickname is going to be “Lefty.”
• Man. This town lost about half of its population overnight.