Synopsis:
Jeremy, a local police officer is still trying to find answers from when he was a child into the identity of his kidnapper. Jeremy pieces together the truth and realises that his childhood kidnapper could be a creature of ancient yuletide lore, Krampus, who is the brother of St. Nick, and punisher of children who perform acts of unspeakable evil without repercussion. Can Jeremy kill Krampus and prevent more missing children?
So the editor told me that he is sending out a couple of DVDs through the post so that they can be reviewed for Scream Magazine. As always, I am excited by the prospect of having new films to watch because it is like a lucky dip, with each time hoping for a winner. The DVDs arrive and when I opened it and saw the words Krampus, I went into a temporary state of shock believing that it was the new one by Michael Dougherty. I say temporary because I then read “The Christmas Devil” which was written and directed by Jason Hull.
I didn’t know this title, but I am always open to watch something different. I followed it up by watching the trailers and my aspirations of having a good quality indie film slowly started ebbing away with each second passing.
Fingers crossed and biting my lip I started to watch Krampus – The Christmas Devil. It saddens me to say that with the good comes the bad and Krampus wasn’t very good. I didn’t like it. Not because it was an ultra low budget film but because there were so many wrongs, it could never have been right. There were countless schoolboy errors from the initial plotline all the way right through to the finished product. These faults lie with poor continuity, naff script, unconvincing actors, terrible stunt work and Krampus himself.
Starting with the first, the continuity was way out. For example, in one scene where Jeremy (A J Leslie) and his two friends are tracking Krampus in the snow – one moment it’s dull and snowing, then in the next shot it is bright with no snowfall.
The acting was not very good but a part of me felt that this could have been because the script wasn’t that great. There wasn’t the cohesiveness that I would expect in a feature and the actors didn’t seem to believe in what they were saying. On occasions it felt like that they were reading their lines from bits of paper placed in front of them. If there was what you call ‘stunt work’ then it really was rubbish. During a bar fight they all seemed that they didn’t want to hurt each other, so the best way was to actually punch in slow motion – for real life.
As depicted by traditional story telling Krampus is an imposing beast of a creature that struck fear into the hearts of all those naughty girls and boys. But this guy seemed to be wearing Poundland monster slippers and rubber gloves with extra long built in nails. There was a close up shot of Krampus grabbing an object; unfortunately you could also see the rubber gloves bend at the fingers because they were too big for the actor.
One other part that seemed a tad ridiculous was that Krampus appeared to have his own personal sex slave. Not entirely sure if he was diddling the girl but he definitely had a half naked fair maiden chained up in his dungeon.
I know that I will be put onto Santa’s naughty list for berating the film but unfortunately there is no other way to explain it. During the end credits we had bloopers and although it allowed us to have a sneak peak behind the scenes, unfortunately even they seemed staged.
Despite all the negativity, one thing I got from the film that was a lot of fun because I continually kept laughing at all the mistakes. Hull has created a really low budget film that does not even dip its gnarled up little toe into the horror genre. If this wasn’t enough, he is set to make another one “Krampus the Devil Returns”. Aaarrrggghhhh………
Words by Amanda Hunt @Man_ders11
