Horror Movie Review: Christmas Bloodbath (2024)

Here is some advice for indie horror filmmakers, the kind that really shouldn’t need to be given, but constantly comes up because of a problem that few seem to be willing to fix.

Stop making your films so damn long. You are not a Marvel/DC film. You are not telling a Star Wars sized epic or giving the fans a ‘deep cut’ that they have been demanding. Nor are you telling a story that can’t be wrapped up in 80 minutes because of the person’s legendary life. You know, a person like Elvis, Gandhi, Jesus f**king Christ, or maybe even Santa Claus! You’re making a horror film, a festive themed horror film, that has very little money, but a game group willing to give it their all.

So, why in the holy hell is your film over 100 minutes long?! Any good will that Christmas Bloodbath could build up is washed away in a tsunami of mind-numbing boredom. Where the longer it goes on (106 minutes in the end), the worse it gets, and it simply didn’t need to be this way.

It’s not that a 70-minute film would have been much better, but it would be easier to digest and because of that, easier to praise. By time this film ended it, I couldn’t wait to see the back of it. It hadn’t just bored me to tears; it had made me angry and sucked all the Christmas cheer out of me.

Directed by Michael Leo Centri, the film stars Katie Hellman, Paul Clemente, David Dicola, Ashlie Walker, Elisa Fuentes, Chris Miraglia, Don Hill, Patti Culliton, Adele Crotty, and Joshua Anderson. The story, if you can make sense of it, sees several strangers, on Christmas Eve no less, trapped in a holiday themed museum with killer animatronics that have a will of their own. Will they be able to survive and escape? Along the way, relationships will be tested, love will blossom and betrayals will be exposed, comedy will fall flat, actors will really need a few more takes, and the director gets his monies worth out of his green screen.

That last point might sound like a joke, but it’s not. Most of this film takes place in front of a green screen. There’s cheap, and then there’s Christmas Bloodbath. I don’t mean ‘no budget’ either as we’ve also seen no budget offerings produce miracles. No, anyone that bothers with this film will be owed money. Michael Leo Centri should be paying people to watch it.

Again, so much of this comes back to its length, and how much padding there is. If this had been 30-40 minutes shorter, so much of the bad bits would have been palatable. Hell, it would have almost been charming. Which it is, in places, as the cast and crew are very game and you can tell everyone wanted to try their best here. You can’t polish a turd, but goodness, does everyone give it their best shot here. Except it just keeps going, and going, and going, and all that charm evaporates into nothing. No festive horror, no matter how bad it is, should make you angry, but that’s what Christmas Bloodbath manages to achieve.