Movie Review: Deadly Little Christmas (2009)

Day 10 of the David Hayes 12 Days of Christmas Crap Review-a-Palooza and, boy, the holiday shenanigans just don’t seem to end. Today, holiday shoppers, we will be visiting one in the long line of David Sterling crapics. A film so daring, that it manages to not only rip-off a genre classic but also rip off it’s head and crap down it’s neck even better than Rob Zombie did.

On the tenth day of Christmas, the Head Cheese gave to me… nine lame-ass characters and a tranny plot twist.

Oh the horror. Oh the snowy, festive horror. Remember when Gus Van Zant was on everyone’s naughty list for making a shot for shot remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho? Apparently, David Sterling (he of Curse of Pirate Death, Camp Blood, Blood Legend, etc. fame, so we know where this is going) took a page out of Gus’ book and threw a little dash of b-movie auteur onto a classic storyline. Let me shake up my magic b-movie snow globe and peer with me into a A Deadly Little Christmas!

Buy A Deadly Little Christmas on DVD!

Fifteen years ago, Devin, a young, happy boy opening Christmas presents, walks in on his father bumping uglies with the housekeeper. Angry, Devin must have goaded the cinematographer into stabbing his father and the tramp (because that’s what it looked like in terrible POV-vision), takes the knife and stands outside the home, staring dully across the street. Right off the bat, we’re ripping off John Carpenter’s Halloween. In fact, all this movie really did was take Halloween and set it during Christmas. Regardless, Devin is taken to an asylum and fifteen years later he escapes after being visited by his mother, who is a nutcase. This escape, mind you, is one of the most nefarious in asylum history. Using a plan that would make Danny Ocean jealous, Devin apparently engineered a mass-layoff since there were all of three actors in the hospital. Genius, I tells ya! Devin comes home, people die at the hands of a killer with a Christmas Ornament mask on and blah, blah, blah… it’s over. Is Devin the killer? Do I care?

What kills me the most isn’t the horrible acting (knowing how the Sterling Machine works, I’m assuming most of the performers are ‘pay to play,’ I’ll let you figure that out). It isn’t the production values reminiscent of a proud father videotaping his clumsy daughter’s dance recital. It isn’t the horrible writing (actually, the dialogue is brilliant comedy… but I don’t think that was intended). It is the fact that these people, over and over again, keep getting away with this! Is there no decency?! A Deadly Little Christmas not only rips off the Carpenter classic, it rips off the real life of it’s one and only star. Felissa Rose, who I think is absolutely gorgeous, plays Devin’s mother. She is a good performer, and a nice person, who has, recently, been cropping up more and more independent genre gaggers. Her claim to fame, though, is in playing Angela, the little girl with a huge penis at the end of Sleepaway Camp. Keep that in mind as the final denouement of A Deadly Little Christmas plays out. The plot twist of all plot twists or, as I suspect, the plot twist invented when they figured out enough bad actors paid for their parts that the production could hire Felissa Rose… I’m not giving it away, but I will quote the character, “I should have aborted you when I found out you were a boy!” Grrrr.

I think I’ve come up with some titles that would have fit this movie a little better. How about, It’s the Great Ornament, Michael Meyers or Friday the 25^th or My Own Personal Nightmare Before Christmas.

And now, for you viewing pleasure, the greatest, protracted death scene in all of Christmas movie history!

And some of the fine acting we talked about!