{"id":21747,"date":"2016-08-06T16:34:35","date_gmt":"2016-08-06T20:34:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=21747"},"modified":"2020-07-29T11:10:38","modified_gmt":"2020-07-29T15:10:38","slug":"red-christmas-2016-fantasia-international-film-festival-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/06\/red-christmas-2016-fantasia-international-film-festival-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Red Christmas (2016) [Fantasia International Film Festival 2016]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"redchristmas\"<\/a>A mother wants to have the best Christmas ever with her family.\u00a0 During the traditional day, tensions come to a boiling point when a stranger shows up at their door and wants to kill them all.\u00a0 This sets the mother on a warpath to protect her brood.<\/p>\n

This Australian horror film is written and directed by Craig Anderson who starts by building a family with lots of issues and strife between its members.\u00a0 Most of their issues are the same as a lot of families while others are more unique.\u00a0 This family cares for each other against these odds and when all hell breaks loose, their bonds are tested.\u00a0 The writing here develops this family well and then brings some original kills to the table but the characters are not the most likable so it\u2019s hard to root for them.\u00a0 This is all well directed for most of the film so the few issues seen here and there are not entirely awful, but the film lacks a bit in fun.\u00a0 Sadly, the killer\u2019s motivation feels a bit preachy at times, making his condition a bit of a case of one too many things in the story.\u00a0 The way the killer is portrayed is unfortunately a bit grating and not really menacing.<\/p>\n

The cast does ok with the material but it\u2019s hard to tell if their characters were written that way or if they were directed to do this or if the way they act leads to this, but almost all the characters come off as unlikable and just disagreeable, selfish people.\u00a0 From the looks of things, it seems to be a combination of the three with other factors added to those.\u00a0 Knowing that Dee Wallace can play mother so well, her performance here is not as expected which may be due to putting too much hope on her.\u00a0 She is good, but some angles of her character are so dislikable, it\u2019s hard to look over those.\u00a0 The rest of the cast being less familiar, they did not have as much expectations put on them, yes they still come off as dislikable to despicable as well.<\/p>\n

As Red Christmas is a slasher, the kills and their effects are of high importance.\u00a0 The kills here are good with some original ones.\u00a0 However, the effects are decent at best with some pieces being not so good to just bad.\u00a0 The make-up and prosthetics on the killer look a bit like Toxie, with a low budget look and even somewhat of a family resemblance.\u00a0 Also an odd choice is how the kill set pieces are shot.\u00a0 In some cases, the lighting makes it hard to see what is going; on while in other cases, the shaky cam is nauseating, making the viewer look away and miss out on the scene.<\/p>\n

This film has a lot of potential, but does not go for it.\u00a0 It has good ideas for kills with effect that are just not good enough to support those ideas.\u00a0 The characters are not people the viewers can get attached to.\u00a0 The killer is one of those that could have been good but his background and reason to kill make him hard to get into or behind.\u00a0 This reviewer wanted to love this as the last few years have given us so many good holiday themed horror movies, but even after giving Red Christmas as much slack as possible, it\u2019s not a movie that can be considered good.\u00a0 A few good scenes here and there do not a great movie make.<\/p>\n

Fantasia International Film Festival ran from July 14th<\/sup> until August 3rd<\/sup>, 2016 and will be back in the summer of 2017.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A mother wants to have the best Christmas ever with her family.\u00a0 During the traditional day, tensions come to a boiling point when a stranger shows up at their door and wants to kill them all.\u00a0 This sets the mother on a warpath to protect her brood. This Australian horror film is written and directed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":21748,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497,1284,12],"tags":[200,219,337,367,419,477,813,950],"class_list":["post-21747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fantasia-fest","category-festivalsevents","category-movie-reviews","tag-christmas","tag-comedy","tag-exploitation","tag-foreign","tag-gore","tag-horror","tag-r","tag-slasher"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21747"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21749,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21747\/revisions\/21749"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}