Secret Santa is a Nasty Yuletide Nugget for Naughty Ghouls and Boils
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I have happily covered a disproportionate number of darkly comic Christmas horror movies for this column. It’s a genre I have a lot of affection for because I like Christmas and its gaudy, soothingly familiar pageantry but I like it even more when that sentimental Yuletide horseshit gets the shiv in the small of the back it so richly deserves.
Christmas brings out the misanthrope as well as the corny sentimentalist in me. I’m not alone. There is a rich tradition of agreeably nihilistic Christmas dark comedies, ho-ho-horror movies about terrible people getting what’s coming to them on December 25th.
Most recently, as part of my patron-funded exploration of the films of Virginia Madsen, I wrote up Better Watch Out, which suggests what Home Alone would be like if Kevin McAllister were even more of a bloodthirsty, murderous sadist.
For my previous jaunt through the films of Rebecca Gayheart I wrote up the nicely nasty, punningly titled 2005 shocker Santa’s Slay and now I am turning my attention to the grisly 2018 Yuletide bloodbath Secret Santa.
It’s a film that belongs not just on the naughty list but the naughtiest list. The blood-splattered fright fable chronicles one VERY eventful Christmas evening in the life of a family seemingly in the midst of a fierce competition to see who can be the most hateful, disgusting, repellent human being.
The leading contender for that dubious distinction is malevolent matriarch Shari (Debra Sullivan, who co-wrote the screenplay), a hateful monster who cannot open her mouth without revealing a new, regrettable side to her toxic personality.
She’s loathed by her stuttering, closeted gay son Kyle (Drew Lynch) and resentful, dowdy wallflower daughter Penny (Ryan Leigh Seaton) and just barely tolerated by her favorite daughter April (Leslie Kies).
April is a recovering alcoholic whose mother honors her sobriety and willpower by repeatedly admonishing her to stop being such a spoilsport and have some of her famous alcoholic holiday punch.
Things only get more tense with the unexpected arrival of Leonard (John Gilbert), Shari’s estranged ex-husband and the deadbeat dad of her children. It’s one of those families where everybody hates each other for a very good reason: with very few exceptions, they’re all terrible people.
You can cut the tension with a knife even before the holiday revelers begin slicing each other open with knives and various other weapons. It’s a real pressure-cooker situation that brings out the worst in everybody before things take a turn towards the homicidal and then the horrific.
Cutting remarks and bitter resentment boil over into a physical altercation that quickly turns deadly. In a seeming heartbeat, an unusually tense and holiday dinner morphs into a crime scene and a misanthropic comedy of Yuletide becomes a gore-fueled bloodbath that grows grimmer and more brutal by the moment.
Someone has put something in that famous Christmas punch that forces everyone who drinks it to do something admirable in theory but calamitous and deadly in practice: be honest.
For these liars, hypocrites, sociopaths and degenerates, honesty is most assuredly NOT the best policy. They can’t handle the truth. The flimsy charade of civilization requires them to repress their intense innate awfulness.
Without white lies and polite fictions, the families’ volcanic rage towards each other, cultivated over long years of bitterness, passive-aggression and resentment, bubbles to the surface in bursts of staccato violence.
It eventually becomes apparent that something is VERY wrong with the people at the party who have drunken the punch. It doesn’t just make people who have imbibed angry, sweaty and intense: it changes them on a biological level as well.
I did not recognize anybody in Secret Santa’s cast. The biggest name in the credits belongs to special effects legend Robert Kurtzman, who Executive Produced and headed up the make-up department.
If you’re going to splurge in a low-budget project like Secret Santa, gore is the place to do it. Like the simpatico Better Watch Out, Secret Santa saves money by limiting the action largely to one house.
Co-writer/director Adam Marcus ratchets up the claustrophobia and the tension as the film progresses and the family members go from merely behaving monstrously to becoming out and out monsters.
Being stuck with family during Christmas is a crucible in itself even without horrific variables being added willy-nilly into the mix.
Secret Santa is a nasty nugget, a sledgehammer satire of All-American awfulness that depicts the nuclear family as the ultimate evil and Christmas dinner with the folks as something to survived, not just endured.
It’s not sophisticated or subtle or nuanced but it is unapologetic and unashamed in its ugliness.
I’ve now seen a number of Christmas-themed horror movies and dark comedies without seeing classics of this dubious genre like Bob Clark’s original Black Christmas, Krampus or the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise.
If I might drop some minor news in a place where it’s sure to be ignored or at least attract very little attention, next month I plan on launching a Substack called Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas.
The general conceit is that I’ve experimented with a lot of very good ideas here and they haven’t exactly panned out so it’s time for me to begin experimenting with very bad ideas on the counter-intuitive logic that that’s what the public really wants.
What kind of bad ideas? I’m planning on writing about all the Ernest movies in order as well as the complete filmographies of either James Belushi or Gary Busey.
Who would you rather have me write about, James Belushi or Gary Busey? I’ve run a couple of polls on the subject so far and Belushi somewhat surprisingly has been eking out a small lead.
Another bad idea I’m excited about for Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas involves writing up the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise in its entirety for my new project.
But that’s a bad idea for another time and place! A VERY bad idea that hopefully will get a good response.
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