All Through the House (

2015

)

Christmas horror movies are, by and large, a sub-genre that is riddled with low-effort, low-budget trash that is hardly worth the plastic that it's printed on. Sure there is the odd masterpiece like Christmas Evil (1980) or Gremlins (1984) but for the most part, these are the tasty undigested kernels of corn in the massive pile of shit that is the genre. For every decent Christmas horror film, there are a few dozen on the level of Elves (1989) and a few more on the level of Red Christmas (2014). I don't think most people realize how many of these things there are or how low the average quality of films in the genre is. I have made it a hobby every year since I began monsterfromtheid to catalog and review Christmas-themed horror movies every December, and I'm beginning to understand the futility of that task. There are literally hundreds of these things and more keep being churned out year after year. So if you think I'm being a bit too kind to All Through the House keep in mind that I'm reviewing it in the shadow of such exquisite garbage as Mother Krampus (2017), Santa Jaws (2018), and Sick for Toys (2018). Sure, this film is pretty crappy but at least it manages the basics required of a low-budget by-the-numbers slasher, and when compared to its peers that is something of an accomplishment.

We begin with a random couple getting ready for bed. The guy is impotent, and clearly, the two have had issues with this before because his girlfriend is plainly sick of it. She tells him flat out that she doesn't want to see flaccid cock flopping about and if he can't get it up by the time she gets out of the shower, then she'd just as soon go to sleep. This is an extremely unusual decision by the filmmakers, as normally when introducing a couple of expendable characters to kill off in a slasher's pre-credit sequence you won't make them a couple with a dysfunctional relationship. They will be bitchy, or stupid, or obnoxious, or something else to make the audience feel ok at laughing at their gruesome execution. Making them stuck, for whatever reason, in an unhappy relationship just makes the whole thing feel faintly depressing. Not that any of their characterization matters a damn anyway because within five minutes a crazed killer dressed in a Santa Claus suit stabs the girl through the boob before hacking off the dude's dick.

If for some unimaginable reason you've chosen to watch this movie, I hope you like this scene because you're going to see it two more times as the movie progresses. No, the film does not recycle footage but it might as well considering the next two times this scene happens it's more or less the same thing with different actors and subtle variations. Always there's a couple with some underlying issues in their relationship getting ready for bed before the girl is killed horrifically and the man is castrated. In the last of these three scenes the film mixes it up a little bit and gives us a lesbian couple who are not castrated but after the second woman is murdered the killer, in what is probably the only genuinely funny moment in the entire film, takes their vibrator.

These killings are all self-contained vignettes and have little impact on the main story except showing us what the killer is up to when he's not onscreen. The real story focuses on Rachel, a young woman whose mother vanished mysteriously when she was a little girl, leaving her to be raised by her foul-mouthed grandmother. Now Rachel is an adult with abandonment issues which causes her to preemptively break up with her wimpy, beta boyfriend Cody (at least that's why he thinks she's trying to dump him, I can see several other reasons why she might want to ditch him).

I'm not sure what Rachel does, I think she might be a college student home for Christmas break, which would go some way towards explaining why she has agreed to take a job decorating the house of her crazy neighbor Mrs. Garrett. When you're in school you have to get creative with how you make your beer money. Though that doesn't really explain why Mrs. Garrett is looking to hire somebody for this job. Her house is already decked out tits to toenails in Christmas decorations. What is Rachel suppose to do? String up some lights in the basement and root cellar? There's not enough work here for one person, so I don't know why Rachel feels the need to drag along two friends, Gia and Sarah, to help her out. Maybe this is intentional as once the girls are in the house they don't seem to do very much in the way of decorating.

Of course, Mrs. Garret doesn't want the girls to decorate her house. From the start, it's obvious the old woman is completely insane, driven mad by some mysterious tragedy in her distant past that caused the disappearance of her daughter and husband. She's decked out her whole house in Christmas decorations and arranged a series of mannequins around the house dressed up as Santa Claus, including one especially disturbing one in her bed, and she talks to them like they're real people. However, she doesn't address them in friendly conversation but instead bickers constantly with them and seems to be faintly afraid of the dolls. She also has a female mannequin that she dresses up and addresses as Jaime, her long-lost daughter. If you've seen a horror movie before you can probably guess that Garrett invited the girls to her house not to help her decorate, but to murder them or have them murdered by someone else.

There is a persistent wrongness to the film's dialogue, which points to both the subpar acting and the subpar screenwriting. Everything just sounds faintly awkward and wrong. The lone exception is Mrs. Garrett, whose actor seems a bit more adept at delivering the film's absurd lines. She's also totally unhinged, so any wrongness in her dialogue comes across as building the character rather than displaying the script's weakness. It probably helps that she's one of the only actors in the film who was not chosen for her cup-size.

However, despite its obvious shortcomings All Through the House does manage to deliver just enough to warrant a tentative recommendation from me; provided you're absolutely desperate for a Christmas-themed slasher and have already seen Silent Night Deadly Night (1984). The chief selling points here are practical gore effects and cleavage, both of which the movie delivers in spades. Indeed some of the murders are downright horrific, even for a genre veteran (the opening hedge-clippers through breasts is particularly memorable). There's also unusual care taken to the set dressing, every room is decked out in Christmas decorations that reinforce the yuletide theme of the movie and remind you that you're watching a Christmas slasher, not just another generic slasher. It may not sound like much, but it goes a long way towards making the movie more tolerable.

Other than that, the only point of interest here is the curious relationship between the director and the lead actress. They share the same last name, so at first, I assumed they were husband and wife but after looking into the film a bit it turns out they are brother and sister instead. The makes the whole bit in the film's final act where Rachel is forcibly changed into a fetish costume rather awkward. We're not dealing with Dario Argento directing his daughter's rape scene in Stendhal Syndrome (1996) or anything, but still, some things are best kept outside the family.