There are too many competing and overfamiliar ideas in this busy slasher reboot that’s sorely lacking in style
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here was a bizarre moral outrage back in November 1984 when seasonal slasher Silent Night, Deadly Night dared to put an axe in the hands of Santa. Despite being, you know, not a real person he was once treated with enough reverence to cause parent-led protests, a ban of all advertising and then of the film itself. It provided a sharp edge to an otherwise blunt and unremarkable post-Halloween knockoff and might help to explain why it managed to eke out four junky sequels and a 2012 remake.
We’re now at the inevitable second remake stage but the 2025 redo arrives after the gimmick of Killer Santa has now become a subgenre in itself. He’s cropped up in Christmas Bloody Christmas, Christmas Evil, Santa’s Slay, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, Deadly Games and last year’s Terrifier 3 and the makers of this December’s take are more than aware that seeing Santa with a weapon isn’t enough to shock today’s horror fans.
The lengths to which writer-director Mike P Nelson then goes to in order to refresh and reinvigorate the formula can, in brief moments, be something to respect, a film-maker unwilling to churn out yet another slice-and-dice rehash (he previously tried to approach his Wrong Turn remake with a similar ambition). But there’s almost too much on his mind here, at least for one film to tackle, and so a straightforward slasher soon becomes a vaguely political, sometimes supernatural and strangely sentimental cross between TV shows like Dexter and You and films like Venom, Mr Brooks and Bill Paxton’s lesser-known 2001 effort Frailty, a Christmas cocktail that could have done with fewer ingredients.
