Secret Santa (

2015

) ½

Few things are more effective at capturing an audience's interest than an effective hook. Everybody knows that, even people who make shitty horror movies. However, a good pre-credits scene can only take you so far, indeed a good opening can even make the audience less likely to enjoy your movie if you spend the next half-and-hour dicking around with lame jokes and dramatic plot-lines that go nowhere. Today's film provides a perfect example to illustrate this lesson. It opens with a pair of party girls staggering back home after the lightweight of the pair got too drunk and got them kicked out of the bar. The soberer of the two heads back to her room, disappointed with the evening for obvious reasons, only to find a mysterious package laying on her bed. Figuring that it's just the gift from her dorm's Secret Santa, she opens it up and finds a power drill. I immediately thought “that's a pretty nice gift” but that's just my gender and age speaking because the college girl on screen seems to think it's baffling (just wait till you have a house that needs fixing up, you'll change your tune). Undeterred she heads to the communal bathroom to shower and get ready for bed, but when she returns she finds the present gone. For a moment she stands around confused in her room before a masked figure grabs her, smothers her with a pillow and then digs her eye out with the power drill. End scene and cut to title credits. Suspense, nudity, gore, and a fittingly lo-fi synth soundtrack all in the first five minutes. I wouldn't go so far as to say I was on the edge of my seat, thinking this might be a work of startling brilliance, but I was confident at the six-minute mark that I was watching a well-executed piece of genre schlock that would keep me entertained for the next seventy minutes.

My mistake was thinking that the film had begun as it intended to continue, instead, it will be about thirty minutes before the next murder and fifty minutes before the next killing that matters to the plot! So if we're not watching a slasher movie for the bulk of the movie, then what are we watching? Well, it seems like the characters and plot-lines were taken from the draft of an earlier project: a college boner comedy with a heart of gold, think American Pie (1999) without so much gross-out humor and you'll be pretty close to the general tone of Secret Santa. The characters are the sort of good-natured buffoons that you would expect from just such a project too. We have Nicole, who is up to her ears in student loans and has decided to make some extra cash by moonlighting as a camwhore. She's dating Brian, a jock with a huge face, who has just had a drunken one-night-stand with her dorm-mate Carissa. Both girls also live with Oliva (Liv), a girl with OCD who is dating her Professor, Preston Ramsey. Also, there's a one-man mugging machine named Duane who exists to make goofy faces and generate cheap laughs. These characters are surprisingly varied and well-rounded for a cheap horror movie (I didn't even have to look up any names when I was writing this summary), but this winds up being more of a detriment than an advantage. A tremendous time has to be spent establishing the characters and their various interpersonal conflicts, and since (spoiler warning) none of them are the killer or even have anything to do with the killer, it's all a complete waste of time.

Worse still are the film's continual, fumbling attempts at humor. Any scene involving Duane is particularly obnoxious. First, we watch him stay up three nights in a row to cram for a test, then we see him take the test while hallucinating. If this were it, perhaps it would be worth a chuckle but after that scene, we're treated to another sequence where Duane tries desperately to get some shut-eye only to be continually foiled by fire alarms and carolers. By this point in the film, I was ready for this “funny” character to be massacred if only so I wouldn't have to look at his clumsy mugging anymore. Humor is subjective of course, I cannot simply say “It's not funny” and expect everyone watching the film to agree. However, I can confidently say that the humor in Secret Santa is operating at an extremely juvenile level, so juvenile in fact that I doubt there are many people old enough to legally see an R-rated movie who would find it amusing. One of the jokes later in the film (after several gory murders) is a literal fart joke. If you're the type of person who bursts into laughter at the sight of a dildo, then stop reading this review and check out Secret Santa right now, you'll bust a gut. The rest of us should proceed with caution.

The film is not without its charms though, the gore is all first-rate practical effects that look either disturbingly real of so grotesquely over the top that they take on a bit of ghoulish fun and excitement. The first murder with the drill does a good job of setting the stage, with the camera zooming up on the gore and the eyeball dangling from the tip of the drill. Better yet, the special effects artist does not rest on his laurels and each subsequent murder is distinct and impressive in its own right. We see people killed by turkey carvers, butcher knives, and fireplace pokers (I don't think that you can just ram those through people quite as easily as this film seems to think, but hey I'll take it). The technical aspects are all excellent, like when Brian is killed and decapitated by the masked murderer. Fake heads for movie decapitations almost always look awful, so here the camera shoots from behind the killer as we see him lift the severed head by the hair and show it to Nicole who is watching from a nearby window. We never see the face of the mannequin head (which is always a dead give away), so the only thing that can break our immersion is the fact that the prop is way too small to be Brian's massive head. The murders are also the only scenes where the film's humor works. Take for instance the scene where Carissa is taking a bath and the killer bursts in with a hairdryer, ready to plug it in and toss it into the water. The only problem is the plug is way too short and the damn thing comes loose well before it can get anywhere near the water. Undeterred, and determined to use the hairdryer as a murder weapon (it is Carissa's gift after all) the killer grabs it and cracks the girl's skull open with it.

Secret Santa is deliberately trying to ape 1980s Slasher movies, but for ease of editing and budgetary reasons, it is shot digitally rather than on video. It seems weird to say that a production “doesn't have enough money to shoot on video” when for many years video was the go-to format for low-budget productions, but hey that's the march progress for you. You can shoot a feature movie on an iPhone camera now, so getting a functional video camera (presumably from eBay or an antique store) is almost certainly more expensive than a functional digital camera. However, the filmmakers of Secret Santa want to evoke the feel of shitty shot-on-video slashers from the 1980s, so they have slapped a filter over their pristine digital footage to make it look like it was shot on video. The effect works intermittently. The credits look fantastic, and I would easily believe that this was a genuine low-budget 1980s horror movie based on the opening and closing credits alone. Likewise, the interior shots, all have a nice, filthy look to them. However, anything in direct sunlight or even a well-lit area comes out looking much crisper than the rest of the film. I think it would have been a good idea for the production to transfer the digital recording over to video after filming wrapped and then transfer that shitty video copy back to digital. The movie would look awful, but all the better for capturing the style and spirit of those shitty shot-on-video slashers.