12 Deaths of Christmas (AKA Mother Krampus)

Dir: James Klass

2017

*

2017’s 12 Days of Christmas is so bad that it was renamed Mother Krampus to try and poach die-hard fans of the equally awful Krampus films. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Krampus, nor does it feature a female version of the festive beast. It is actually based on the German urban legend of Frau Perchta who has become known as the Christmas Witch. Legend has it that she took a child each night over the 12 days before Christmas in 1921, taking them into the woods and presumably killing them for reasons unknown – other than it is the sort of horrible thing Witches do. In James Klass’s reworking of the story, the Christmas Witch is British and set about her killing spree in the winter of 1992. Her 1921 murders are mentioned in the beginning of the film but are long forgotten by the muddled conclusion but she essentially alive (not undead) in 1992 and certainly wasn’t over a hundred years old as she would have been, if she were the same Witch. I’m unclear on the lifespan of Witches, so I will let them off the hook with that one but everything else I openly criticise. She was killed by the parents of her victims in 1992 and is essentially a Mrs Freddy Kruger but with without the cool dream sequences. The story makes little sense but then it clearly wasn’t the focus of those involved. The lighting was fine, the composition was fine, the sound was fine – I’ve seen this sort of film a thousand times before. It’s clearly made by ex-film students and I bet they had a decent catering van and all the permits they needed. It just lacks imagination and real talent for storytelling. Sure, the budget is small, but that should never matter when making a horror film. Some of the best horror films ever made were made on a shoestring. This is just a cheap and rubbish Christmas horror that is all about the DVD cover and catchy title. The acting is some of the worst I have ever seen. At least with most Christmas horrors you can tell they were made by a group of friends who clearly enjoyed themselves, this just looks like an am-dram performance gone bad. We are reminded it is Christmas by our Witch strangling people with fairy lights and slicing chunks of skin off her victims with gingerbread man cutters but there is no dread as the 12 days of Christmas pass. I’m not sure she even keeps to the promise of killing a child a day for 12 days either. Her motive seems to be the taste of people’s kidneys, and while I totally agree that you should always eat what you kill, you can get them in most supermarkets nowadays. This lack of motivation makes for rather an anaemic horror film. The rule that ‘what you don’t see is what scares you’ is woefully overlooked and by the end of the film you wonder why you are watching a film about a bored-looking woman painted grey wandering around people’s houses. The one actor that can actually act looks bored and impatient, as I’m sure she was. None of it makes sense, it isn’t frightening and it makes cannibalism look almost acceptable. There are no redeeming features.