A Christmas Horror Story – this could have been done better

Being a ‘Trekkie’ I do have the tendency to watch almost anything the great ‘Bill’ Shatner is in, so, coupled with my love of horror, I thought this one would be right up my street.  It wasn’t.  A kind of knew that ‘Captain Kirk’ would only have a small amount of screen time, so it wasn’t that I felt short-changed due to him only holding the intertwining stories together through use of his scenes as a radio DJ (which were arguably the best bits!).  My problem was with the story/s themselves.  Basically, the film is split into four different (Christmas-related) horror tales.  This wouldn’t bother me if it wasn’t for the fact that two of them aren’t really that good.

Perhaps it might have been better if the stories were told one after the other.  I watched this on DVD therefore this would have enabled me to simply skip to the next story if I was getting bored.  However, the narrative jumps back and forth between them all.  This means that, during the stories that you like, you’re just happily getting into when suddenly you’re wrenched back to one of the lesser interesting ones.

I would say that the highlight of the film (or rather story which appealed to me the most) involves the elves in Father Christmas’ North Pole toy factory developing a plague which turns them into flesh-eating zombie elves.  Therefore, Santa has to ‘kick a$$’ and take them down in a way that Rick and Darryl from The Walking Dead would be proud.  I quite liked the ‘changling’ story too, but mainly because I’ve always been fascinated by this – disturbing – type of fairy tale.  However, even that sort of lost its appeal once the lesser interesting stories have been interwoven within its framework.

Yes, William Shatner is the best part, but even his rambling brand of comedy wasn’t really enough to make me want to sit through an hour and a half of sub-standard Christmas stories.  I’d rather just see a twenty minute short of Santa bludgeoning elves to death in front of his mutilated reindeers and be done with it.  Pity.  Could and should have been much more fun.

4/10 You can watch this film while you're doing the ironing (you'll still get the general gist of it)