Krampus : The Christmas Devil - (2013)
Directed by Jason Hull
Written by Jason Hull
Starring A.J. Leslie, Paul Ferm, Samantha Hoepfl
& Richard Goteri
Like an air crash investigator, I tried piecing together where all the Krampus movies we get these days originally came from, and although I did get as far back as
Rare Exports (2010) I never really pegged on to a satisfying explanation. I could point to
Krampus (2015), which is popular and has a respectable reputation (which also features actors such as Toni Collette) but this film came along two years
after the film I'm looking at here -
Krampus : The Christmas Devil (2013). Now, I'm pretty sure the 2015
Krampus wasn't riding on the coattails of the microbudget 2013 one, so none of it makes a lot of sense. The only thing that does make sense is that 'Krampus' can't be copyrighted or trademarked - so like 'Amityville' we're destined to see a never-ending series of 'Krampus' films from here on out into eternity.
Krampus : The Christmas Devil has Santa Clause and his Demon partner hiding out from the cops in a cave near a U.S. town - and there's so much wrong with that sentence I'll always remember typing it. These cops - including Jeremy Duffin (A.J. Leslie) who remembers being kidnapped by the Christmas Demon Krampus when he was a child - are focusing their attention on a patch of land where kids are going missing. Three troopers go out, heavily armed, but they're captured and taken back to the lair, where Santa has procured a big-breasted, innocent young lady for his demon friend to rape. Krampus kills a trooper before Duffin escapes, desperate to return with backup, fire and vengeance. In the meantime, a bunch of local hoodlums are needlessly torturing Jeremy's wife (Samantha Hoepfl) and their confusingly adult child - but the evil Krampus has other plans for all of these naughty people tonight.
Around the time Father Christmas hollers obscenities at a scared child, threatening to torture and kill him, before facilitating the rape of a young woman, I knew I wasn't watching an ordinary movie. He wonders aloud what the elves at the North Pole are doing while he's away on such arduous and grimy duty, and I expect it's something awful in the very off-center universe this takes place in. I hope I'm not spoiling things when I tell you that I saw a preview for the sequel to this, and in it Jeremy is pointing a shotgun at Santa with the intent to gun him down - shouting "Hey Santa!" as he pumps a few rounds into him. All this before I even get to Krampus himself - a boring horror character really, when you consider the bizarro Santa. All of this happens in a film so cheap and unimpressive that it easily qualifies as z-grade. In this film, when punches fly in a barroom brawl, they come quarter-speed slow - perhaps because of a lack of stunt performers.
The fact that's there's a sequel to this shows that there's something fundamentally wrong with the people at Snow Dog Studio, along with writer/director/cinematographer/editor Jason Hull (who probably is Snow Dog Studio in it's entirety) - but at least he stepped back from taking the lead role. I have one of these "do-it-all" filmmakers in my family - their habit of performing all of the filmmaking roles kind of indicates a 'shoestring' budget (basically, no budget at all) and their films could almost be classified as "projects" instead of motion pictures - but to be fair,
Krampus : The Christmas Devil takes the cake, and is a little worse than most of the other microbudget films out there. It's more juvenile, and has no audience. It's most definitely the wrong side of weird, where instead of being eccentric and interesting it's obnoxious and ill-considered. Even if the film was made in jest (and I don't know if it was or not) the joke falls down flat, and when everyone involved started filming the scene where Santa is facilitating a rape, someone should have stopped and said, "hey wait a minute guys, what are we doing here? Are we nuts?"
This movie, it's dumb, and the writing is very basic and unappealing, the production design consists of nothing more than finding locations to shoot in, and the overall inexperienced direction is from a guy who probably thinks he's a natural. The daughter the Duffins have looks older than her parents - which confused me at first. "Who is this?" I thought. "Does Jeremy have
two wives?" The make-up effects for Krampus himself are cheap, and as such the demon's face never contorts, changes or moves at all. The credits are so cheap I could replicate them right now on my PC. The cinematography is
atrocious - people aren't kept in frame, and the camera wobbles and shakes. The acting is bad. The sound is at least on a level where everyone is understandable, but if we're crediting a film for that, then we really are in strange territory. When I hear an appropriate score, I'm thinking "good for you" because everything else is such a disaster. It's not good, but it's there, unlike other aspects of good filmmaking.
To any small children out there who has had his or her Christmas turned into a terrifying ordeal because of
The Christmas Devil, all I can say is that as a representative of the adult world I'm very sorry. There is hope though, because ever since directing, writing, starring in, filming and editing
Krampus : The Devil Returns (did the original even make any money?) in 2016, there's been no further output from this creator of festive season classics. Don't worry, Father Christmas is a lot nicer in person, and even his horrifying demon brother has his good points. This film in no way accurately depicts them - in fact, it doesn't accurately depict anything pertaining to barroom brawls, the age-gap between parents and their daughters, or police investigations. It's only a movie. A really,
really bad one.