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Color me shocked when I found out that Warner were not only releasing a Batman animated movie this year, but a Christmas themed one at that. The way they’ve been run lately, it’s not entirely shocking that this one snuck under my radar, I guess. “Merry Little Batman” is unlike any Batman animated movie I’ve ever seen. The animation style is wild, somewhat in the vein of “Chowder,” and focuses on a completely separate non-canonical narrative.
America has really done John Woo no favors in regards to his film legacy. And despite kind of hitting some gems in the 1990’s, director Woo has accomplished so much more in his heydays. “Silent Night” is proof positive that he needs a renaissance, as it’s about as basic and disappointing an action movie that you can get. I was cautiously optimistic about “Silent Night” as the premise seemed so interesting. An action movie with no dialogue based around a revenge plot akin “John Wick” seemed like a good time. Throwing in Joel Kinnaman was just the icing on the cake.
McG’s “Family Switch” is a movie we’ve seen a thousand times before. It doesn’t re-invent the wheel and doesn’t really seek to, at that. It makes it abundantly clear in the big turn of events involving the body switch as the four central characters make blatant references to “Freaky Friday,” “13 Going on 30,” “17 Again,” and “Big.” It’s tough to really judge a movie like this because it’s an easy slam dunk. It’s an easy paycheck for Jennifer Garner and Ed Helms, and current teen star Emma Meyers (off her debut on Netflix’s “Wednesday”) is allowed her own vehicle.
One of the aspects that hinders Magnus Marten’s “There’s Something in the Barn” from being a real home run of a movie is that it never quite decides what it wants to be. Sometimes it’s a horror movie, sometimes it is fantasy, sometimes it’s just downright comedy, and it builds up this intricate universe with not a lot of explanation or extrapolation. “There’s Something in the Barn” could be good. It could be “Krampus” good, but it leans so much toward this fish out of water comedy that it loses sight of the whole premise involving killer elves, and this weird pact that is never fully explored or fleshed out.
Like clockwork every year a studio releases a Christmas themed anthology for the masses, and almost always it’s a big letdown. It’s not really enough to inject the whole Christmas aesthetic. A genuinely scary story helps, too. “Nightmare on 34th Street” is a rambling, often nonsensical, unscary Christmas anthology movie that is literally all over the place. It re-uses actors, garners a whole cast that spend their time obviously reading from cue cards off screen, and director Crow doubles down a shoddy editing job that makes his film more confusing and jarring than scary.
It goes without saying that I like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and I enjoy the whole twist of implanting the formula in to a horror setting. The fact is though that “It’s a Wonderful Knife” is so much more concerned with being a dark bittersweet Christmas fantasy, rather than diving head first in to the horror framework. For a movie that advertises itself as a slasher movie and whodunit, there’s a lot of surprisingly low stakes, and not much suspense at all. The writers frame the movie as a whodunit with the killers’ identities being revealed almost immediately, all the while the slashings all take a back seat for a majority of the movie.
It was only a matter of time before someone would take Santa Claus and mix him with “Die Hard,” it was only a case of how good it would end up being. Tommy Wirkola’s Christmas action flick is the perfect kind of antidote for the folks that don’t mind a bit of cynicism with their holidays. “Violent Night” is very much a “Die Hard” with an adrenaline shot of Christmas cheer. It’s also deep down a great splatter flick that doesn’t mind giving us a Santa Claus who is about brutally punishing those that tick him off.