It seems that, if you're making a Christmas-themed slasher movie, one of the key points to your film has to be some sort of childhood trauma at Christmas time. Bonus points if it actually includes Santa. In the case of Christmas Evil (also known as You'd Better Watch Out), this trauma takes the form of a young boy, Harry, seeing Mommy being naughty with Santa Claus one Christmas Eve and then cutting himself on a snowglobe. Years later, he's become an adult so obsessed with Christmas that he celebrates it every day... which wouldn't be too bad except for his additional habit of spying on the neighbourhood children to put their names in the "Good" or "Bad" books. When all the mocking and everyone taking advantage of him and general lack of Christmas spirit becomes too much for him, our erstwhile Christmasphile snaps and decides to become Santa, giving out presents to the good children and bags of mud to the naughty ones, and killing the adults who made his "naughty" list.
This is a very strange movie. If you cut out the murders (and the frankly creepy way Harry spies on the neighbourhood children, disturbingly almost-worshipping one little girl who he considers to be very good indeed) you could probably pitch Christmas Evil as a family-friendly film about a man who loves Christmas so much he decides to bring it back and remind people what it's supposed to be about. It's a cerebral, slow-building movie - Harry doesn't even don his Santa suit till about 45 minutes in - and there are only a total of 4 deaths in the whole film, which makes it rather an anemic slasher film. At the same time though, Harry is a much more sympathetic villain protagonist than you usually find in these films, because you can actually empathise with his desire to make the children happy and bring the true spirit of Christmas to all. After all, no-one wants to see Santa killed by a torch-wielding vigilante mob in front of a group of children, do they? (Yes, there is a torch-wielding vigilante mob looking for Santa in this film)
However... As I mentioned above, it's a slow slasher film, and its gore effects are frankly terrible (which I guess means it's a good thing that there was actually very little death in the film). Thick poster-paint red blood runs from wounds made by a blunt mini-axe whose blade is quite obviously wrapped in tinfoil. A slashed throat dribbles blood. And that's the extent of the gore, really. All of which makes it even more confusing that Christmas Evil somehow ended up on the DPP's Section Three list of video nasties in the early 1980s (considered unlikely to get a conviction at the High Court but had gotten a guilty plea at Magistrates Court). Was it the idea of Santa doing the killings, or possibly the pedophilic overtones of Harry's voyeurism of the children that got it into hot water?
Today, Christmas Evil has garnered something of a cult following, with one of its biggest champions being none other than director John Waters, who has described it as the "greatest Christmas movie ever made." It's not too hard to see why; as I said above, take out the murders and it's a film about the true spirit of Christmas and a man helping others to discover happiness while punishing hypocrisy. Oh, and Harry's younger brother is played by none other than Jeffrey DeMunn, who is well-known nowadays for being one of director Frank Darabont's favourite actors, appearing in The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and The Walking Dead TV series, to name a few roles.
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