Review of Christmas Evil (1980) by Nathan N — 23 Jun 2009

While the poster art seems to promise a Christmas slay-ride along the lines of "Silent Night, Deadly Night", one-hit wonder Lewis Jackson's oddball holiday thriller is in reality something altogether stranger and more interesting.

Rather than simply dishing up a hamfisted story about a crazy guy who dresses up as Santa and hacks up a bunch of naughty teens, Jackson (clearly marching to the beat of his own insane drummer-boy) instead gives us a gloriously weird tale of a man who, for reasons never really explained, desires to be Santa Claus so fervently that he finally loses his grip on reality, decks himself out in Kringle drag, and spends one last, lonely holiday season driving around town in a van painted up to look like a sleigh.

Sometimes he does horrible things, like massacring a trio of churchgoers with a tin soldier toy (and an axe for good measure), but other times he does nice things like delivering a load of presents to sick kids at the local hospital.

You never quite know whether he's going to be naughty or nice, and therein lies this flick's uneasy charm. There's never any real indication as to why our Claus-worshipping hero (well played by Broadway thesp Brandon Maggart) goes off the deep end.

.. it's something to do with an unhappy childhood, which manifests as a spectacular case of frustration with the modern world's lack of true X-mas cheer. Jackson presents Maggart's spiral into insanity with an almost Fassbinder-like detachment, steadfastly refusing to play by the genre's rules.

.. ultimately there's a kind of sad poignancy to it all. Maggart's bloody, Quixotic quest to become the living spirit of Christmas for a world that's long since stopped caring plays out more as a demented tragedy than a gory serial killer flick.

Stick around for the mind-bending final shot, which seems patently lunatic until you listen to the director's commentary track (at which point it becomes clear that it was just a case of clumsy editing).