Christmas-themed horror movies are a dime a dozen. Blending gleeful fits of carnage with what is — for most — arguably the cheeriest holiday of the year often offers a layup for genre filmmakers, providing the chance to turn some innocent yuletide festivities into a horrifying bloodbath. Even jolly ol’ Saint Nick is not impervious to such formulas, with the Big Man often found front and center of the action. The Silent Night, Deadly Night films have done it, the Terrifier films have done it, and hell, there’s even a Violent Night sequel with David Harbour due out this December.
Looking to cash in on the fun is director Kevin Lewis, who is no stranger to ultraviolent cinematic incongruities, having raised hell in 2021’s Chuck E. Cheese-inspired Willy’s Wonderland. His latest film, Christmas at the Kringles, pits an unsuspecting family against an insidious holiday threat festering in their new neighborhood. But while the film certainly indulges some moments of violence and other genre oddities, it primarily desites to be a comedy, calling in the efforts of a game cast but at the expense of the proceedings, which are ground down amidst scenes of incessant improvisation. Christmas at the Kringles is more lousy than inspired, aggressively running through cheap jokes while reserving precious little time for any actual hellraising.
Uprooting their city lives to move to the suburbs, married couple Mark (Ron Livingston, performing his classic hangdog everyman routine) and Julie (Rachel Bilson) are looking for a fresh start, moving into their new home with son Bobby (Jack Jewkes). Settling into their new neighborhood a week before Christmastime, the family immediately becomes acquainted with the neighbors, which includes a drunken Santa (Rob Riggle) and Daryl (Donald Faison), a man whose own relationship went south and who now lives in the garage of a home he shares with his mother. But the most prominent faces on the block are the Kringles, with husband Nick (Thomas Lennon), wife Carol (Arden Myrin), and their three children happy to celebrate Christmas all year round. Bewildered by their perpetually cheery spirits, Mark and Julie nevertheless play nice, even celebrating the holiday with their new blockmates. A couple months pass, the Kringles are still going strong on their Christmas celebration (keeping the festivities up through February at this point), and it’s not long before Julie and Bobby seemingly become indoctrinated in their year-round routine. But Mark smells something rotten in the state of suburbia, eventually uncovering a conspiracy that could spell doom for him and his family.
Christmas at the Kringles does at least kick things off with some suitable gore, finding an unfortunate woman meeting the business-end of an axe wielded by a figure dressed as Santa, who promptly adorns her freshly-decapitated head atop a Christmas tree. It’s a fresh kill to slap the audience awake, but Lewis, working from a screenplay by Zack Imbrogno, somewhat bafflingly chooses to withhold further bloodshed until the film’s third act, opting to take time to establish Mark and Julie’s woes. Their marriage is on the rocks, seldom leaving room for intimacy, but they hope their move might restore the spark in their relationship, even if Mark ultimately resents leaving the city life behind. But they have little time to get situated before the Kringles burst into their lives with literal song and dance, adding disruption in the form of infectious holiday spirit.
Lewis is not one to shy away from the antics of Lennon and Myrin in this stretch of the film, even utilizing jump cuts to edit together the actors’ torrent of punchlines as they steamroll scene after scene, playing every moment to the rafters. But the comedy onslaught grows tiresome in a hurry, leaving everyone sputtering around as they say the first thing that comes to their mind, hoping a shotgun blast of zingers will eventually hit a target, leaning heavily into improv over carefully-scripted humor (a blooper reel that plays over the end credits all but confirms this). The Kringles are obnoxious, but presumably that’s the point, with their house a particularly insane realization of Christmas decorations, spilling incessant cheer out of their busy home onto a Noel-shellacked exterior. There’s also some time set aside during this portion of the film to detail Nick’s meme coin trade, hoping to rope Mark into his cryptocurrency scheme to boost the value of his digital wallet. Thank god that made the cut.
Eventually, Christmas at the Kringles does return to the violence promised in the film’s opening moments, as Mark teams up with Santa and Daryl to save his family from the Kringle’s yuletide captivity. New characters are also introduced in this final third, including a holiday matriarch played by Beverly D’Angelo and Jingles (Rhino Michaels), a Christmas gimp unafraid to throw down. There’s even a cameo by alt-comedy funnyman David Wain as the lead conspirator behind the Kringles’ enterprise. But when Kringles at last presents every opportunity for Lewis and co. to let loose with some holiday blood-letting, what should feel like a proper massacre is instead oddly restrained, with the violent encounters covered by shaky-cam cinematography and dodgy editing working overtime to hide any lack of skill. It leaves viewers with the impression that Lewis is far more comfortable with the film’s comedic half than its genre half, which is not only strange for a horror director, but it’s also a bug that deflates the entire experience. There will always be room at the inn for another yuletide barnburner to add to the rotation of annual holiday viewings, but Christmas at the Kringles is pure stocking coal.
DIRECTOR: Kevin Lewis; CAST: Ron Livingston, Rachel Bilson, Rob Riggle, Arden Myrin, Thomas Lennon; DISTRIBUTOR: Briarcliff Entertainment; IN THEATERS: October 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 38 min.
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