• Written and directed by Peter Keir
• Starring
  • Jeff Samford
  • Michelle Samford
  • Lucien Eisenbach
  • Eric Spudic
  • Krystal Stevenson

I question the wisdom of Sub Rosa’s marketing strategy of releasing Psycho Santa on a double-feature DVD with Satan Claus (which I reviewed ages ago). Unless you assume that, upon watching one cheap and unimaginative Christmas-themed slasher flick, audiences will say, “Ooh! How ’bout another?”

You’ve heard me complain frequently about movies which take a Twilight Zone episode’s worth of story and stretch out out to feature length. Psycho Santa offers a good standard by which to keep those complaints in perspective, since there isn’t enough plot here to fill a Hallmark card.

While the credits roll, we’re graced with shots of a girl in a silver jacket being stalked through a field of abandoned cars, while Handel’s Messiah plays in the background. Well, “stalked” is too strong a word: She wanders, looking vaguely apprehensive and lost. Meanwhile, somebody in a Santa suit and carrying a machete wanders through the same field of cars. Were it not for the machete, there would be nothing to clue us in on the stalking; the whole sequence would seem more like “two people wandering cluelessly.”

And after three minutes of “stalk… stalk… wander… wander…” we cut to… a bored man, watching public-domain Christmas cartoons. Look, look. See man blink. After another couple of minutes of this (between the cartoon and the copious public-domain music used throughout the movie, is there even enough original content to qualify for copyright?), we get a second character. Oh, goodie! The man’s name is Ron (Jeff Samford), his wife’s name is Jess (Michelle Samford), and just to endear themselves to us, they immediately start sniping at each other about the Christmas party they’re about to go to. Would someone please find a way to stop the pernicious filmmaker meme which says that audiences like nothing better than watching bitter people belittle each other on-screen?

Boy, it’s like looking in a mirror.

So. They’re off for a long night drive into the country for a Christmas party that Ron really doesn’t want to go to. In fact, Ron’s not too hip on Christmas as a whole. After more sniping at each other about listening to Christmas carols (Ron: “Three hundred Mormons singing Hallelujah? I don’t think so”), he starts to tell Jess some of his hangups with Christmas. Please note: NONE OF THE STORIES HE’S ABOUT TO TELL HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH HIM.

As Ron tells it, about ten years ago there were three girls who traditionally met at a cabin nearby for a Christmas Eve sleepover. Through the magic of cinema, we’re taken to the day in question, with two of the girls so referenced (Sequoia Rose Fuller, last seen around here in Hellbound: Book of the Dead, as the redhead and Rachel Michelle Gnapp as the brunette, and no, they never get real names) driving to the cabin… driving… looking out the window… driving…

Eventually they get to the cabin (amidst copious greenery — I realize that this was filmed in a temperate zone, but could we at least have some leafless trees to indicate the season?). Apparently the third friend, Sarah, has already arrived, as indicated by the presents bearing her name under the tree, but has left again for something. In anticipation of the evening’s telling of ghost stories (an idea that catches the brunette by surprise — wasn’t this whole retreat a tradition or something), the redhead sends the brunette outside to find three white stones. Meanwhile, the redhead’s going to have a shower!

All right, call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think that women with more metal embedded in their flesh than Wolverine are sexy. So you can imagine how tedious the shower scene was, lingering over each of her adornments to confirm that, yes, she’s pierced in all the wrong places. Even more insulting is the entirely unnecessary nature of the shower scene, in any sense except that of “needing to fill out running time.” I guess that’s what you do when you’ve culled your actors from that available talent pool known as “local strippers.”

Meanwhile, the brunette walks around outside looking for white stones. Walk… walk… shower… shower… walk… shower… walk some more… shower some more… (“How long do we want the shower scene?” “I dunno, how much hot water we got?”) Having found three white stones, the brunette wanders a little farther — hey, when you’re in the groove, you just have to go with it — and stares at the pond across the road. As she goes back, the camera helpfully shows us a car superimposed on a shot of the water which is meant to have us believe that there’s a car at the bottom of the pond.

So. By the time the shower is over, it’s apparently night, so both girls dress in their skimpy lingerie for the “ghost story.” Which really isn’t. The redhead simply tells of an old tradition in which you write your names on white stones and throw them into the fireplace on Christmas Eve, then sift the ashes on Christmas morning; whoever’s stone is missing is destined to be dead by next Christmas. She and the brunette write their names on stones, helpfully marking one for the still-missing Sarah…

And then it’s time for lingerie dancing! The redhead sits on the couch while the brunette justifies my earlier assessment of the “local stripper talent pool.” She dances. And dances. And dances… dances… dances… dances… This is of course done with the blind open, so that an ominous handheld StalkerCam can look in the window and breathe heavily.

Dances… dances… dances… (“I can TOO dance as long as you shower!”) until the brunette’s foot nudges one of Sarah’s gifts under the tree, revealing a puddle of blood. They look at each other in shock –

Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, or Vixen?

– And we’re back in the car, as Ron finishes up telling the story to Jess. Ha ha, those weren’t nametags, they were content labels. Sarah had already been carved up by the killer, who then went on to kill the other two. Boy, that’s good cinema there. Yeah, sure, some other director might have gone ahead and actually shown some of the action, but then what would we do with all of that grade-A footage of driving, walking, showering, and dancing?

And just to point out a perhaps-unnoticed level of insipidity to the script, Jess asks what happened to the stones, and Ron replies that they “vanished, so they say.” Which makes you wonder who would even have known about the stones, since the only people who knew about them all got killed?

We’re only at the twenty-three minute mark, and my optic nerve has somehow slipped down my trachea in an effort to cut off oxygen to my brain and force unconsciousness.

Well, the killer was caught, and supposedly died since then, but then Ron goes into what happened just last year at Christmas, when two robbers broke into a house that they thought was empty…

And yes, we get copious footage of the robbers (Lucien Eisenach and Theodore Ward) sneaking across the back yard… sneaking… sneaking… getting out their lock picks… inserting them in the lock… maybe wiggling them a little bit… sneaking to the house… sneaking to the picture that hides the safe… (Look, when you make a killer Claus movie, it’s the SANTA COSTUME that’s supposed to be padded, NOT the movie itself!)

While one robber is glacially opening the safe, the other is mildly startled to see a woman in underwear and a dressing gown (Gayle Elizabeth) go into the bathroom and turn on the water in the tub. Then she walks right past him into the kitchen to turn on the coffee maker. The robber deduces, from the convenient presence of a white cane, that the woman is blind, so he watches as she makes coffee… makes coffee… walks back toward the bathroom past him…

She’s almost undressed when the other robber makes a noise, alerting her to their presence, so the robber who had been watching her grabs her and shoves her head into the tub until she drowns. I don’t know if the woman was supposed to be mute as well as blind, but the whole scene is one long soundless exercise in tedium.

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Call Acme Security at 1800-555-1212!

Until now, when the robbers here someone or something moaning. They follow the sound to a padlocked door, go in, find a dirty cot and a pottie chair and a music box that plays “Silent Night” and some girlie magazines in the dark…. And then one robber is grabbed by something and drops his flashlight. And the other is dispatched by a misshapen-faced something, in a series of still shots. Huh. Well. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the completely adrenaline-free slasher flick.

Follow us now to the police station, where young Detective Caskey (Steve Sessions) interrogates the husband of the blind woman (Robert Lanham) — and father of the misshapen “Chris.” In somnabulistic tones more commonly associated with pretentious French cinema, Dad explains how Chris, the killer in the first story, had been confined to a state institution until a fire burned it down, supposedly killing all inside. But their severely-burned son somehow made it home, so like any good parents they decided to hide him in a locked room for most of a decade. While admitting that Chris is “the very picture of dangerous insanity,” the father also characterizes him as having the mind of a three-year-old. Judging from the handwriting on the gift tags in the first story (not to mention the whole idea of chopping up and gift-wrapping his victim), I’d call that one hell of a precocious three-year-old.

So now Chris is out, and the first thing he does is kill a Salvation Army Santa for his clothes. Then he enters a house where a girl is home alone reading a magazine. Read… read… look up at the sound of Chris breaking the window in the back door… read… read… until Chris chops her in the head with a machete he found in her kitchen knife drawer (!!!). Oh, and she had been eating cookies and drinking milk, so he drinks the milk and eats the cookies. Because, you know, there’s supposed to be a Santa Claus motif in here somewhere.

And as Ron back in the car explains, “He’s out there, in the same woods we’re driving through right now.” Because something like a competent police manhunt for a killer with the mind of a three-year-old dressed in a bright red suit would be out of the question.

Ron then tells us that “his third victim was some kid smoking pot,” and yup, there’s a kid wandering in the woods smoking pot, and yup, Chris walks up to him and slashes his throat with the machete. (Boy, that was uncharacteristically quick.) And while the kid bleeds to death on the ground, we have enough time to wonder if Ron is missing a few fingers or something. How is this Chris’ third victim? I suppose if you discounted the original three girls, and the two robbers, then this is his third victim since he left the locked room in his parents’ house, but it seems an awfully arbitrary point to count from.

Then Chris finds another house a secluded one, naturally), attracted to the sound of a young boy practicing Christmas carols on the piano (Dylan Cole). He almost avoids killing the boy when he starts playing “Silent Night” — see, as Ron has absolutely no way of knowing but tells us anyway, Chris had had a music box that played “Silent Night,” and that music always puts him into a passive trance. But then the kid switches to another carol, so Chris hefts the machete, and…

The kid’s mom (Kimberly Lynn Cole) also gets macheted, but doesn’t immediately die, so instead she drags herself across the bedroom floor toward the phone… drag… drag… drag… (Gee, and here I was just thinking, “It’s been way too long since our last pointless, drawn-out bit of padding!”) Eventually she gets to the phone — I think we’re full into Easter season by this time — but she accidentally pulls the cord out of the wall, so she has to drag herself further to plug it back in… drag… drag… drag… Then once it’s plugged in, she collapses, overcome by the sheer numbing banality of her single scene. Or something like that. (A warning to Peter Keir: If we should ever happen to meet, do not introduce yourself as “the writer/director of Pyscho Santa,” unless you’re really itching to get yourself dope-slapped.)

Fa-la-la-la-la, la la la la.

And then Ron tells us about ANOTHER couple of victims. (Same year? Next year? I don’t remember anymore, and can guess how little I care.) It’s a brother and sister, Josh (Eric Spudic, most recently credited around here as the writer of Aquanoids) and Alice (Krystal Stevenson), who’s the silver-jacketed girl from the opening credits. They’re off into BFE to get a Christmas tree, with Josh complaining about having to get a real one instead of a fake. Dude, just because you’re supposed to get a real tree doesn’t mean you have to drive so far into the hinterlands that you enter territory never before seen by white men, okay?

So. Their car gives out, so guess what they do? They walk… and walk… and walk… Oh, and they walk some more… and they get themselves lost on roads that are getting progressively narrower and less maintained. So just to prove Darwinism in action, they decide to take a shortcut overland through the woods, as if they knew where they were going.

And then Alice gets tired, so Josh goes on alone. Then Alice decides to follow him, but takes a wrong turn. So they’re both lost and alone in the woods. A killer Santa is superfluous at this point! These two are proving quite capable of dying in the woods on their own!

But our killer Santa does indeed show up, his red suit looking none the worse for wear what with him living out here in the woods and all, and chases Alice into the field of abandoned cars. Thankfully, we aren’t treated to all the same footage over again. No, we’ve got some different stalking… wandering… stalking… wandering…

And then cutting back to Ron, telling us that Alice did escape after all. Boy, thanks for preventing any of that from becoming suspenseful or even moderately interesting.

Josh, on the other hand, discovers a cabin in the woods, enters, looks around at the Christmas decorations, and discovers a dismembered body in the bathtub. He promptly faints until nightfall, when Chris decides to come home. And just as Chris is about to attack — Dad shows up! With the music box — you know, the one that puts Chris into a trance! And once Josh runs away, Dad douses the place with gasoline and lights a match…

Better than hunter’s orange!

And we’re back to Ron. Of course, he says that according to rumor, Chris made it out alive (now more hideously burned than ever before!) and is still stalking the forests in the area in search of children who don’t eat their vegetables or somesuch.

Which could of course be the end of the movie as well as any other spot, since none of it had any point whatsoever, except that union rules require that every slasher flick must have a shocker ending, so here it is: Jess asks Ron if he remembered to bring the presents for the party, Ron thinks he may have put them in the trunk, he pulls over and gets out to check, and… Yeah. The end. It seems like the movie’s been on for about four days, but in reality it was only the world’s longest 75 minutes.

It’s almost unbelievable that someone could make a movie that so deliberately skirts the edges of being entertaining. Here’s a plea to all you low-budget directors out there: When you think up your story, pay special attention to the parts that are interesting. THOSE are the parts you’re supposed to film, okay? NOT the other stuff. I know it’s hard to believe, but trust me — no one actually wants to see a movie that makes them bemoan the entire medium of cinema.

And here’s a plea to anyone who may be the friend of a micro-budget filmmaker: Insist on seeing your friend’s script before he starts shooting. And if it sucks, TELL HIM THAT IT SUCKS. Friends don’t let friends make craptacular movies.

And if he refuses to believe you, you’re under no obligation to prevent him from drinking and driving.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 13
• breasts: 4
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0