Built by the U.S. military for defense, an animatronic Santa Claus goes haywire to turn homicidal on Christmas Eve. Why? Like the old joke about a dog licking its testicles, because it can.

And also because Joe Begos’ movie is titled Christmas Bloody Christmas, shot through a head-shop haze. 

The Final Girl of this self-knowing slasher is Tori (Riley Dandy, 2022’s Interceptor), owner of a record store patronized by hipsters. After a night of liquor and oral, she and cashier Robbie (Spiderhead’s Sam Delich, here a dead ringer for John Oates), find themselves targeted by the fire ax-wielding RoboSanta+ (a mute and committed Abraham Benrubi, The Belko Experiment).

Bloody’s highlight arrives all too early as we see the robotic Kris Kringle awaken through its POV, each metallic boot step clunking as it hunts its first fornicating victims. From there to the bitter end, when RoboSanta’s green laser eyes come in handy, Begos (Almost Human) hasn’t supplied a story to hold attention between slaughters. He opts for that laziest of indie-horror solutions: time-biding NSFW conversations, from Robbie telling his boss to “flick your bean” to a toy store employee ordering her boyfriend to “eat my ass out” — all so utterly uhh-noy-ing and free of imagination, you’ll root for RoboSanta just to be done with the thing.

Fatally pitched as a Silent Night, Deadly Night reboot, Christmas Bloody Christmas seems conceived as a seasonal Terminator parody. That kernel of an idea is all Begos has, though, short-circuiting any chances of holiday horror immortality. —Rod Lott

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Henry Primo’s turning a suh-weet 16! And thanks to his wealthy parents, he’s throwing quite the rager at a local motel, complete with live band, swimming pool and rented rooms. Maybe — just maybe — Henry (Randy Ackerman) will finally get that cute Becky (Laura Sellers) into the (possibly bedbug-ridden) sack.

Or perhaps Henry’s drink will be drugged, causing him not to pass out, but to slaughter seven classmates. After all, the movie under examination is called Party Crasher: My Bloody Birthday, suggesting creator Mark Mason (2003’s The Prize Fighter) couldn’t pick between two titles, so he used both.

Fast-forward 15 years, the now-obese adult Henry (Mason himself) and his Hannibal Lecter half-face mask are discharged from a high-security loony bin to his parents’ home. They’ve “spared no expense” to turn a wing of their abode into a replica of the mental hospital for Henry’s comfort. Because he no longer speaks, Henry communicates solely via pen and paper, like when he’s hungry and writes, “BIG MACS.” His mother asks, “How many?” and he responds with the number “8.”

Perhaps his atrocious dietary requests fuel his ESP abilities? Yes, Henry also possesses the power of ESP. It never comes into play.

Well, Mom and Dad must have skimped on something in the security features, because police are called to investigate a message left on the now-married Becky’s front door … in his own poop: “BECKY WHY DID DO THIS ME.” So many words scrawled so large must have required a great deal of fecal matter, but remember: eight Big Macs. The math tracks. (Plus, this thing was shot in Tulsa, in a state with an obesity rate near 40%.)

Anyway, everyone’s on edge until Henry saves a little girl from a dog mauling and all is forgiven. Naturally, his former classmates — well, the surviving ones — decide to bestow him with an award of courage at the high school reunion. This goes over great until Kizay (Tom Wescott), the Mickey-slipper from the jinxed birthday party, is able to surreptitiously attach jumper cables to Henry’s wheelchair, shocking him into a hulking monster of rage that no amount of all-beef patties can pacify.

You can’t blame Mason for trying. But you can blame him for failing. He’s not just the “star” of Party Crasher: My Bloody Birthday, but also its producer, editor, writer, director and, somehow, second-unit director. —Rod Lott

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Through camcorder footage, Home Movie follows the foibles of the Poe family from Halloween to Easter. Shortly after moving to their wooded Connecticut home, Claire (celebrated soap star Cady McClain) and David (Adrian Pasdar, House of Frankenstein 1997) notice their children (real-life siblings Austin and Emily Joy Williams) aren’t acting like their usual selves.

Like how, you ask? Like throwing rocks. Like not using their words. Like … well, as Claire records on her video diary, “Yesterday morning, the 25th of December … Christmas … Jack and Emily crucified the family cat.” Ho-ho-holy shit, kids!

That’s small stuff compared to the rest. Although Shutter Island actor Christopher Denham’s first feature as writer and director breaks no ground, especially for the found-footage subgenre, he does two things really right. The first is how differently Claire and David — respectively, a child psychologist and a pastor — approach possible solutions to their offspring’s disturbing behavior: She hopes to prescribe an answer; he spritzes holy water and shouts commands at imagined demons.

And the second is how Denham doesn’t wuss out on taking his established dark path to its logical end, making the down and dirty Home Movie mean-spirited in the best of ways. The last 15 minutes are something else, with a final shot dripping in hand-wringing eeeevilllll. It almost makes up for Pasdar’s Annoying Dad with No Off Switch routine, what with his silly voices, cartoon accents and more fart talk than the annual convention of the American College of Gastroenterology. —Rod Lott

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For Halloween-set horror films that aren’t Halloween, 1988’s Night of the Demons is a fun night’s rental that quickly earned cult-classic status. Annnnnd Night of the Demons 3 is a sequel.

En route to an All Hallows’ Eve costume party, two high school good girls (Patricia Rodriguez and Decoys’ Stephanie Bauder) encounter car trouble. They reluctantly accept a ride from a van full of their no-good classmates swapping “yo mama” jokes. The most juvenile delinquent of the bunch (Kris Holden-Reid, Habitat) demands a stop at Quicky Mart for smokes and ends up shotgunning a cop.

To hide from the police, they head to Hull House, the old, abandoned funeral parlor. It’s still haunted by the witchy woman Angela (a crazy-eyed Amelia Kinkade), who specializes in sexually charged pranks. Few, if any, of the teens will live to see daylight. Probably not the girl (Tara Slone) with her hand in a sock-puppet snake that Angela turns into a real reptile that slithers straight to the crotch. And definitely not the dweeb (Christian Tessier, Battlefield Earth) who asks Angela if she can “suck a golf ball through 10 feet of garden hose,” to which she responds by fellating his gun … then spitting the bullets into his palm.

Previous installments were directed by such VHS-era horror faves as Kevin S. Tenney (Witchboard) and Brian Trenchard-Smith (Dead-End Drive-In), whereas Night of the Demons 3 comes to us from one Jimmy Kaufman, who’s helmed a lot of Canadian television. He likely was eager to live a little, which could account for this entry containing the most leering nude-teen shots of the franchise — and I do mean leering, as if it were shot with a zoom lens across the street.

And that’s about the most effort we see put into this tired threequel. I enjoyed Vlasta Vrana (Brainscan) in a showy part as the magic-obsessed police lieutenant, but he’s the only one invested. Even Kinkade, whose kitchen pantry likely depended on this gig, seems to be running on fumes, which at least corresponds with the production value. Other than an ill-received 2009 remake, this was it for the series — about 85 minutes too late. —Rod Lott

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Every so often, I experience a harrowing dream in which no matter the location, I face the same two-pronged conundrum:
1. My bladder is full.
2. There’s nowhere to pee.

In The House of Witchcraft, Luke (Andy J. Forest, Bridge to Hell) also is vexed by a recurring nightmare with larger stakes, I guess:
1. He enters a gorgeous country house on a spacious estate.
2. In its kitchen stands an old witch.
3. She’s boiling his disembodied head in a goddamn cauldron.

When Luke awakes, he’s hardly better off: His six-month marriage to queen of the harpies, Marta (Sonia Petrovna, Not for Publication), is on thin ice. Attempting to salvage their union, Marta’s rented a gorgeous country house on a spacious estate. No points for assuming the home is straight from his slumber, because of course it is.

Therefore, freaky things freak. Like, you know that scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds where Tippi Hedren is attacked in the attic? That happens here, but in a bedroom and with birds replaced by pillow feathers. In other sequences, writer/director Umberto Lenzi presents a sleepwalking Marta, a black cat with bloody paws, a maggot-ridden skeleton and — hey, did Luke just witness some old hag (Maria Cumani Quasimodo, Nosferatu in Venice) crowbar a priest on the grand lawn? I’ll never tell. But her face is terrifying.

In terms of how The House of Witchcraft stands against among the rest of Lenzi’s haunted house output, the man has fared worse (The House of Lost Souls) and more delirious (Ghosthouse). This made-for-TV chiller may not be “too damn sinister,” to borrow a phrase from the estate owner’s niece (Marina Giulia Cavalli, Alien from the Abyss), but for those seeking ’80s Italian horror with all the fixtures, it scratches the itch. And whatta view! —Rod Lott

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