Deadly Little Christmas

Year: 2008

Director:  Novin Shakiba

Cast:  Felissa Rose, Anthony Campanello, Barbara Jean Barielle, Leah Grimson

A young boy who brutally murders his father and his housekeeper while they are engaging in an affair escapes from his mental institution fifteen years later to return home and continue his killing spree.

Films like Deadly Little Christmas annoy the hell out of me simply because there is not an ounce of creativity or originality present.   True filmmakers have a vision.  Even with the most absolute cliched and terrible script, a talented filmmaker will bring his or her own unique vision to the material when filming.  Deadly Little Christmas is nothing more than an awful and blatant rip-off of Halloween and virtually every 80's slasher film that came after it.   There is nothing original about it.  There is nothing memorable about it.  There is nothing interesting about it.  There is nothing effective about it.  And most importantly, there is nothing good about it.  The production values are horrendous look extremely cheap and dated.  The acting is terrible to the point of being distracting, even from horror veteran Felissa Rose who, bless her heart, tries to do something with her character that she either just doesn't have the acting chops or inclination to pull off.  The script feels like it was literally written in a night and follows the Halloween formula so closely that it's laughable.   If this was 1980, it would not be such a big deal, but why, in the year 2009, would a filmmaker choose to create such a film with a plot that has been beaten to death and then do absolutely nothing original with it is beyond me.  My guess it that the "twist" ending was an attempt at originality, but true horror fans will see it coming ten miles away.  The film doesn't even have gore in its favor as a redeeming quality, as the murders are sloppily shot and cheap looking.

In the end, Deadly Little Christmas takes is place in the annals of other holiday-themed slasher films, but shamefully so.  It is an example of exactly what went wrong with the slasher genre in the mid to late 80's, only produced twenty years later.   My guess is most casual viewers won't even make it to the end of the film before shutting it off.   That, I promise you, will be the best present--Christmas or otherwise--that you could give yourself.

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