On Christmas Eve 1950, the only thing roasting at the Wilfred Butler mansion was Wilfred Butler himself! Mysteriously dying by fire, he left his estate to his only surviving family member, grandson Jeffrey (James Patterson, In the Heat of the Night), with explicit instructions to leave the house untouched. Twenty years later, Jeffrey and his attorney (Patrick O’Neal, The Stepford Wives) — neither of whom has stepped foot inside the place — come to town to negotiate its sale.

Coinciding with their yuletide arrival, the sleepy small town is terrorized by an escaped lunatic out for revenge, citing the ol’ crimes-commited-years-earlier reason. What director Theodore Gershuny (Sugar Cookies) attempts to pass off as suspense is actually poor story structure. By not revealing pertinent facts until the second half, viewers are left to wonder just what the holy hell is going on.

That’s why the back half of this mouse-quiet shocker is better, if not gorier. The extended asylum-revolution flashback is genuinely disturbing, as is the finale. Alternately stylish and amateurish, Silent Night, Bloody Night is often slow-moving, but effective in building atmosphere that’s palpable even in the shoddy public-domain prints.

Over the years, I’ve found it’s a movie that improves a bit with each viewing — all but its gratuitous Mary Woronov voice-over — once you come to peace with what it is and what it is not. And it is most definitely not Silent Night, Deadly Night, so don’t confuse the two. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Rumor has it that a recent rash of suicides among young people in Japan is due to a bully taking revenge for past transgressions. Why else would the victims have a large “X” branded so crudely onto their faces?

After his sixth-grade teacher “leaps” to his death, Hideaki (Hirofumi Araki) strongly suspects it to be the work of Mariko, a pale, homely girl who was teased mercilessly that year of grade school before transferring. Her abusers engaged in a game called “X Game,” in which Mariko was made to pull slips of paper from a pink box; whatever demeaning act was scrawled on those scraps was what they would do to her, from forcing her to sit atop thumbtacks to lighting her hair on fire.

Karma’s a bitch, as Hideaki and three former classmates find out when they find themselves trapped in a caged room made to look like their elementary school room and guarded by two hooded men armed with cattle prods. Mariko has infused ye olde X Game with modern technology; as monitors explain to our captive quartet, they’re to enact 13 punishments, with the victim of each determined at random. Whether that’s being force-fed gallons of milk via a tube or eating a meal of fried rice and maggots, they have three minutes to comply or they’re whisked away for a branding, then returned to the game.

I need not tell you that X Game is a J-horror response to Saw; you might surmise that simply from reading the title. So was director Yôhei Fukuda’s earlier pair of Death Tube movies, but this effort is more polished in both script and sights. At a hair under two hours, it’s still too long by a quarter, yet devious enough to satisfy fans of the madman-run-contest subgenre. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.