Next up, the frightful festive freak that refuses to die makes yet another appearance. That’s right, it’s our old goat-boy pal in another shameless cash-in, 2016’s Krampus Unleashed from Robert Conway again. This one is confusing as despite being from the same director as Krampus: The Reckoning and being released only a year later, this isn’t a sequel, has a very different monster and has seemingly bugger all to do with the earlier film. This time a group of foolish old west treasure hunters dig up an ancient ‘summoning stone’ that awakens the beast, then years later an unassuming family stumble upon the stone and the Krampus is, yes, unleashed.
It's not great. I’m not even entirely sure this one is set at Christmas. Rather, this seems like another case of shoehorning the Krampus character into an already existing (lame) script to cash-in on the success of Michael Dougherty’s film. This one also lacks the mildly compelling ‘imaginary friend’ hook of Conway’s earlier effort, instead plumping for 40-plus minutes of dull exposition, followed by a lot of screaming and badly-filmed evisceration.
The creature himself looks very different this time and is at least portrayed by a dude in more aesthetically pleasing prosthetics, as opposed to crude CGI. The effects are all much more practical but it’s all filmed so choppily and mostly with bad lighting, so it’s hard to work out what you’re looking at half the time.
The film shows some potential for fun by introducing some real dick-ish characters you’d be quite happy to see gutted. Teenager Troy (Taylor Buckley) with his bum-fluff ‘tache and perma-scowl is an irredeemable dweeb with an attitude problem, perving over his own cousin and generally being a knob to everyone. His dad David (Daniel Link) is also established as a controlling berk, while the rest of the clan are all thinly sketched. It’s set up nicely for some conflict with these people who hate each other having to work together to survive, but that’s swiftly abandoned in favour of lots of running around in the dark with heads and arms being lopped off.
Also, a hot neighbour is introduced late on, solely as an excuse to get some boobs in there. You gotta have the boobs.
It's that kind of film where nobody ever seems suitably traumatised after seeing family dismembered right in front of them and there are a lot of unintentional laughs. The editing is confusing, with the monster mostly shown in close-ups to disguise how crappy his full costume is. The face make-up is excellent, but the rest of him is just covered in rags and he walks slowly and clumsily as he’s clearly a guy on stilts struggling to stay upright. Credit to them for going down the practical effects route, though.
I can barely recall seeing any reference to Christmas in this at all, which seems criminal considering the legend they’re very, very loosely adapting. Despite a short runtime, the film is also padded out with loads of scenes of rambling dialogue that seem to exist solely to get the movie up to feature length.
The gory parts are slightly fun, with heads getting ripped off and entrails yanked out, showing that at least somebody was putting some effort into this production. But the writing is mostly lazy and dumb with characters doing things that make no sense, like stopping for a smoke with the monster hot on their heels.
Later, the kids will coincidentally just happen to knock on the door of the one crazy old man who knows how to stop the Krampus – something to do with an ‘evil moon’, or something? It’s not really explained and I can’t say I care that much.
There doesn’t seem to be any point or moral, other than you really shouldn’t take home a magic stone you find in the lake when hunting for gold? This is, unfortunately, the movie version of that nasty lump of coal in your stocking, a sad reminder that the festive season is full of chancers peddling cheap knock-offs to try and get your money. I’m not sure that anyone would really choose to watch this un-ironically and with the advent of streaming, I doubt these film-makers can continue to rely on short-sighted grandmas picking up the wrong DVD box.
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