Carnage for Christmas

Lola (Jeremy Moineau) comes home for the holidays for the first time in ages. She’s changed. The town has changed. What happens in the center is a collision of forces that haven’t seen each other in over a decade. Lola hosts a true crime podcast called the Nancy Crew Show and as the movie opens, she tells the story about the crime that got her interested (obsessed) with true crime in the first place. In her small hometown, there was a myth, a legend, about a killer named the Toymaker, a once-generous soul who would dress as Santa Claus each year for Christmas and hand out gifts to children… until he snapped. He murdered his entire family. As a child, Lola went into the Toymaker’s abandoned house and had a terrifying encounter with someone who may or may not have been the spirit of the Toymaker himself. Ever since then, she took an interest in it.

Once she arrives in her small hometown, the bodies begin to pile up. The police, of course, aren’t doing their jobs, so it’s up to plucky Lola to do what she does best and to investigate these crimes herself. If anything’s going to stop this murderer, who is dressing up as the Toymaker and mimicking his M.O., it’s going to be her.

Carnage for Christmas feels like an intersection at a series of Venn diagrams. It’s an investigative piece akin with a light spirit, akin to a Nancy Drew mystery. It’s got a grisly vibe, almost like a 1970s giallo. But the visual aesthetic borrows heavily from early 2000s TV and movies, replete with oversaturated colors and a heavy hand on color correction, and energetic jump cuts in between expository info dumps. Carnage for Christmas works best when director Alice Maio Mackay is playing in the proverbial toy store of filmic references and creating a whole, unique world for the movie. It takes a while, but it does find its footing and the investigative scenes with Lola drilling everyone she can for information are some of its best material. The horror elements, with the murderer donning a Santa suit and committing violent murder, are less good and feel tacked on to add weight to the murders. The tension during these scenes never elevates beyond a basic set-up with a quick dispatch.

Carnage for Christmas is a good movie. It’s well-made and has a unique voice, playing out almost like a queerly cast episode of Law and Order made for MTV circa 2001. And when it works, it works. The frustrating thing about Carnage for Christmas is that a very good movie is in there somewhere and it somehow settles into being decent when there’s so much more to mine. Mackay finds comfort in storytelling tropes and cliches that burden the movie with familiarity when it frequently works so well when it eschews the comfort of those tropes. I understand Carnage for Christmas isn’t Silence of the Lambs (and is a more positive portrayal of a trans character) and it’s not an overly-serious work, but I think it falls just short of being something genuinely special.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray
Dark Star Pictures delivers Carnage for Christmas under the Christmas tree in an attractive packaging with cover art reminiscent of 70s horror like Black Christmas, with an artistic rendering of a wreath and ironically cheery font for the title. The movie and supplemental features are found on a single Blu-ray disc, housed in a standard case. Inside the case, on the reverse side of the cover art, is a screenshot from the film.

The video presentation on Carnage for Christmas is far from perfect, but it’s quite ambitious, and ambition makes up for a lot. The movie is presented in 1080p high definition and was shot on video in a style that feels reminiscent of early 2000s film and television—bright, over-saturated greens and blues with the occasional horrific sequences awash in a bloody red filter. For the film’s intended aesthetic, it works incredibly well. There are both intentional and unintentional imperfections—intentional glitch art, some unintentional color banding that comes with compression issues and low budgets. These imperfections work in its favor. It’s got a DIY-punk homemade zine look and feel.

Despite what the back of the case says, Carnage for Christmas does not have a DTS-HD MA 5.1 audio option available. It has two stereo options: One encoded in DTS-HD MA and the other in Dolby Digital. Given the movie’s retro vibe, I don’t mind the stereo-only audio at all.

My one overall issue with both stereo options is that, near the beginning, the dialogue audio is mixed significantly lower than the music and other sound effects, so when you turn it up to hear the actors speak, WHAM! You’re smacked with the slice-and-dice sound of a knife going across someone’s torso and slammed with a musical cue. After the first ten minutes or so, this does seem to work itself out and the dialogue rises above the musical score and the action so everything is audible. Ambient sounds like the chitter-chatter of a crowded bar, get a lot of play on the front-only soundstage. After those first rocky ten minutes, the rest of the audio is great.

For supplements, viewers only get a handful of goodies in their stocking, but they’re likely to please fans of the movie. You have a good, in-depth conversation with the filmmaker and a full-length film made by them, too.

• Interview (HD 12:10) – A conversation with actor Jordan Gonzalez and co-writer/director Alice Maio Mackay
• Satranic Panic(HD 1:20:16) – Full feature film directed by Mackay
• Trailers

Carnage for Christmas, from Dark Star Pictures, is a fun throwback horror/thriller to films across the ages. It’s campy, it’s funny and it’s a pleasant outing from co-writer/director Alice Maio Mackay. While it’s a decent refinement for her voice as a filmmaker and shows a lot of promise yet to come, I maintain that there was a very good movie in there somewhere, waiting to get fleshed out a bit more. Still, with an ambitious video presentation and good audio mix once the bugs got worked out, Carnage for Christmas on Blu-ray is Recommended.