Holiday Horror: Secret Santa
A dysfunctional family gets together for Christmas at their isolated country home. Shenanigans ensue when a typical family fight explodes into crazy, over the top ultraviolence.
Secret Santa is a 2018 Horror Comedy from director Adam Marcus. This is yet another movie that I really couldn’t find all that much information on. It doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry. Still, it’s pretty impressive what the cast and crew were able to pull off on a budget of only one hundred thousand dollars. Add to that, the entire thing (from starting the script to finishing the movie) was done in ten weeks, and it’s just that much more impressive.
Once again, we have another one of those particularly rare birds: a Horror Comedy that actually manages to balance both the Horror and the Comedy. At least if you’ve got a fairly dark sense of humor, but if you don’t…why are you watching a Horror Comedy in the first place? Anyway. The humor lands way more than it doesn’t (at least for me). I know humor pretty subjective, so your mileage may vary. However, this flick also knows when to get serious, and it can get pretty darn disturbing when the Horror parts kick in. If you enjoyed movies kind of like The Sadness or comic books like Garth Ennis’s Crossed, this will be right up your alley.
The only real negatives I have to say about this is that there’s a pretty serious amount of shaky cam going on during a lot of the action scenes that makes it really hard to follow. Also, most of the outdoor scenes pretty obviously weren’t shot with a tripod, so the camera keeps moving around just enough to be kind of annoying. Some of the night scenes could have been lit a little better as well. There’s a lot of fairly obvious CGI blood effects as well, but to be honest I’ve seen way worse in movies with way higher budgets, so I’ll give it a pass.
Still, if you’re looking for an entertaining pretty low budget Horror flick that brings the ol’ ultraviolence real savage like this Christmas season, check this one out!