Red Christmas (

2014

) ½

Take this low rating with a grain of salt because Red Christmas started at a serious disadvantage in my book. It's a found footage, torture porn movie; a combination of the two sub-genres of modern horror I hate the most. In my mind, The Blair Witch Project (1999) is a boring pile of crap and Hostel (2005) is a boring pile of crap that occasionally makes me go “eww.” The thought of a film that combines two unappealing schools of horror into one great big cauldron of crap sends shivers down my spine. Add into that a budget so tiny that it's better suited for a student film than a commercial endeavor and I began to despair. However, there was some reason for me to be optimistic stepping into this one, because in addition to being torture porn and found footage, it's also a character study, and I love character studies. Particularly when said character studies are about twisted, disturbed, or abnormal people operating at the fringes of human society. Film provides a way for me to see their lives and acknowledge our common humanity without having to smell them or risk my own skin in the process. The problem with character studies though, is that if the character doesn't make any damn sense or if the actor can't sell the role, then the film falls apart. Red Christmas has a little bit of both problems.

Tara is a serial killer, and like a lot of serial killers, she's obsessed with the infamy that she will enjoy after she is eventually brought to justice. To facilitate that infamy, she's decided to make a documentary about herself, her methods, and her approach towards murder. When she's captured, this documentary will leak and make her the object of revulsion and fascination for millions of ghoulish aficionados across the world. She starts by explaining why she kills, and particularly why she kills men. Turns out Daddy yelled at her when she was growing up and some boys teased her in Elementary School (the latter part of this smells like bullshit to me, as everyone knows that girls are the more ruthless teasers, especially at that age). She especially likes to kill during the Holiday season because growing up that was the only time she felt any familial warmth and domestic happiness, and that was only through the TV specials and Christmas movies she watched. Not exactly the most grandiose origin story, but hey we can't all be Victor Freeze.

Say what you will about her motivations, Tara is pretty smart when it comes to her methods of selecting and executing her victims. For the past few years, she's gone halfway across the state to find people to kill. The reason being, that the FBI knows that a serial killer's first few victims will usually be somewhere in their comfort zone. This year is the first year she can “shop” close to home. This does raise some questions because later we'll see that she likes to kill and torture her victims in a soundproof room in her house. If she was an hour's drive away how'd she get them home? She also doesn't drug or subdue her victims either, preferring to lure them in with her feminine wiles. How did she get her previous victims to hang out in her car for hours on end? Did she set up a makeshift kill-site in these new places? If so how did she make sure they weren't discovered by the authorities? This is a persistent weakness in the script, as neither Tara's motivations nor her methods are though out in a significant way. Little details and throw-away lines undermine the believably of the character and the world she lives in. Obviously, this is not the best move for a character study.

Tara quickly acquires a new victim in the form of Bill, a guy in a goofy sweater-vest that is out doing his Christmas shopping. She poses as a documentary filmmaker to get him alone and then seduces him to get him to come back to her house. She suggests a little BDSM, and Bill cheerfully agrees (protip guys: don't let the weird girl you just met tie you up, save that for people you know and trust), once he's secure she proceeds to gleefully torture him. Now, this is where the characterization of Tara really begins to fall apart. She says that she derives no pleasure from torture, she's only interested in killing. She only wastes time with the whole torture thing because she needs to throw the FBI off her trail even further and female serial killers generally don't mutilate their victims. However, when she's torturing Bill she's laughing maniacally and plainly enjoying herself, probably in an attempt to seem scary. It would have been far more consistent with her character (and also far more frightening) if she was uncomfortable or (better yet) disinterested in the act of torture. Imagine her halfway through, consulting her checklist and remembering that she forgot to pull out his toenails with an exasperated sigh. Now, that would be both creepy and funny.

Indeed, I think the whole characterization of Tara is more than a little bit flawed. Part of this is just the fault of the actress who is simply not up to the task of such a demanding role (playing someone so completely unhinged, particularly when you have nobody to play off of for most of the film, is no small feat). She just doesn't come across as sufficiently crazy. This would be fine if the film made her one of those movie psychos that are adept at disguising themselves as a normal person, but she doesn't come off that way either. To her credit, the script can't make up its mind which type of serial killer she is supposed to be and veers wildly back and forth between the two archetypes despite the fact that they should be mutually exclusive. The whole movie rests on this character, and unfortunately, Tara just isn't well-thought-out or well-portrayed and as a result, the whole film collapses into an exercise in tedium and pointless cruelty.

The script and character guarantee that this is a bad film, but the gore is what makes the film slips from being a bad movie to an unforgivably bad movie. This is, after all, torture porn and the only real enjoyment there is to get from this genre is in the form of well-made practical effects. There's nothing like that here, the limbs that Tara dissects and amputates are all obviously rubber and a totally different color from the rest of Bill's body. If your props are that bad, please find an excuse to cut away from the gore, or at least give me something that obstructs the more obviously fake moments (Tara walking in front of the camera would be fine, but the camera running out of battery and Tara whining about in the next scene would have been better). A less significant problem, but much funnier one, shows up in the scene where Tara yells at Bill for knocking off the Christmas lights she's wrapped him in. Tara says she'll have to stick them there and gets a staple-gun to do the trick. Bill whines in fear and terror as Tara staples the lights to his body, but we in the audience are not fooled for one second. The illusion is ruined because as soon as Tara “staples” one of the strings to Bill, they just fall right back to where they were before. Clearly, this scene was not thought out before filming started.

After murdering Bill and screwing his corpse (which is the only genuinely disturbing moment in the film, if only because it goes on for so long), the plot takes a weird turn, because Tara discovers and quickly captures an ax-wielding psychopath after he breaks into her house. She says that he is a “Slasher” to which he confesses. She then says that this is bad news because she's trying to avoid attention from the FBI and the “Slasher Hunters.” Ok, hold-up, since when are murderers called Slashers and what the fuck is a Slasher Hunter? The film drops these terms like they're things we've already been acquainted with, but they've never been mentioned before in the script. I took a quick look at director Steve Rudzinski's oeuvre and discovered, in addition to a few other horror movies he's also directed a short called The Slasher Hunter (2011). This raises the question: Is Rudzinski trying to make his very own MCU or Conjuring Cinematic Universe? Doesn't he realize that for this approach to work you're movies have to have a large or committed audience? It warrants further investigation so once the holidays are over I will make an effort to track down a few more of Rudzinski's films and see what I can find out. Maybe it's just an awkward piece of dialogue, or maybe it's a whole shadow horror movie universe.