Krampus is an unusual Christmas movie, with a horror flair. While not entirely unwatchable, it suffers from amateurish direction and overdone CGI work.
The premise is this. A dysfunctional family’s constant fighting causes the youngest child, Max (Emjay Anthony) to lose his Christmas spirit. As a result, a deadly demon, Krampus, attacks the family with a ton of holiday themed monsters. The family members, including mom (Toni Collette), dad (Adam Scott), sister (Stefania LaVie Owen) and Max need to work together to survive the holidays.
So it’s a unique crossover premise. The last pure horror Christmas movie I saw was Silent Night, Deadly Night, and if that’s the only thing to compare Krampus to, then Krampus deserves an academy award. But as a fantasy/horror, stacked up against other offerings, it fails.
I will aid that failure has nothing to do with the cast. Honestly, with such a heavy comic cast, I was expecting to not buy the premise, but they really did make me buy it. I think their work was well done.
The problems came with the editing, and direction, and overdone CGI. The movie doesn’t have even pacing. One minute it’s building up, and then the next, it’s exploding with an attack from just about every Christmas based monster you can think of, from evil trolls to gingerbread men. At that point, it’s near impossible to know where to look. There’s way too much going on at once. It comes off as disjointed over scary and fails to deliver on fear.
It’s cluttered to the point where it feels like the director has ADHA. I could practically hear him screaming “more gingerbread men, more monsters, more, more, more…screw it, add the Easter bunny!”
I will say it was a clever idea. The story is based off of folklore and I’m surprised no one did it before. It started off as a movie with lofty ambitions, that easily could be franchised. It just feels like there was too much crammed into the premise, despite the fact that the storyline is relatively simple.
One thing that really brought this movie off to such a strong lead is its competition. Other than Victor Frankenstein, there’s really no other movie in the same competitive niche, so the release date was perfectly timed. If I had to choose between Krampus and Victor Frankenstein, I’d totally go with Krampus.
The score was well done, featuring some Christmas favorites that add a bit of a festive flair, while not going too heavy on the Jingle Bells. It was an understated, but appropriate score for the movie. Even the CGI was visually stunning, it was just poorly timed. Too much going on at once really pulled the pin out of a movie that could have been great.
Buried under the clutter is a watchable movie. It’s just that you’ll likely have a hard time to knowing where to look when the action scenes start. That being said, it’s still worth checking out. Take a chance and take out the family. At the very least, it will put them in a Christmas mood.
WE GAVE IT : 3 STARS! Watch the Official Trailer and See the Official Movie Poster below
