Here are 5 Alternative Christmas Movies For When You Need A Break From All The Sugary “Christmas Cheer”, & Need Something A Little Darker Than The Grinch.
Christmas week is upon us, folks! If you’re like me, you’re also coming up on week 4 of holiday movie watching (if you’re on week 8…your ways are alien to me). A whole month of schmaltzy Christmas movies, all about the importance of family and giving and being a kind and generous person, or, if you’re into the Hallmark stuff, about how your small town is just crawling with hot singles looking to meet you.
Either way, it can be a lot, with all that sweetness and messages of peace on earth giving you a sugar headache and a deep need for something a bit more hard edged. Well, look no further! I’ve put together a list of 5 Christmas movies that are anything but sappy; a mix of horror and action, with more well known titles and a couple deep cuts.
Here are 5 Christmas movies to watch when you need a break from all that suffocating Christmas spirit, and just want to watch something a bit more twisted, that still has that Noel flair.
(I’d also like to call out the 5 “non-conventional Christmas Movies” we featured last year on Cinapse, including Cobra, Green Knight, Tokyo Godfathers, Children of Men, and Batman Returns. Make sure to check those out, as well!)
Black Christmas
I wanted to start off my list with what is easily the most recognizable title, Black Christmas. Directed by Bob Clark and released in 1974, Black Christmas has the reputation of being “Halloween before Halloween”, which isn’t a totally untrue statement, even though I’ve viewed it closer to the “broken America coming home to roost” themes of Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Black Christmas follows a group of Sorority Sisters over Christmas Break, who are stalked by an unseen intruder who makes lewd and frightening prank phone calls. Slowly but surely, the faceless killer starts to pick off the sisters one by one, until only one remains. Can the police save her? Or is her fate sealed?
Unlike Halloween, Black Christmas has sadly not had the same cultural footprint. While Halloween is a yearly staple every October, Black Christmas has the tough distinction of being a horror film based around a very not-horror holiday, so it’s fallen into more of a niche space.
Which deeply sucks, because, holy hell, Black Christmas is arguably one of the best horror films ever made! Not only is it genuinely scary (I’ve always found the monotone “I’ll kill you” before hanging up that first call to be incredibly frightening), but it is an out and out great film. It’s funny, sad, thrilling, terrifying. Bob Clark was a world class filmmaker, and his tight direction makes for an incredibly propulsive thriller, as more sorority girls go missing and the cops keep closing the net tighter and tighter around the killer (or are they?).
There is a sequence here, or more correctly, two sequences that make up the climax, that are among my favorite movie scenes of all time; a cat-and-mouse chase to trace a call through a giant call junction building, leading into an incredibly terrifying chase through a warmly lit sorority house, the numerous Christmas decorations juxtaposing the intense violent actions. Movie making at its absolute best.
If this is one of those titles you’ve been meaning to get around to for years, do yourself a favor this Christmas season and finally watch it. It’ll be worth it, even if you will forever fear darkened door jamb openings.
The Long Kiss Goodnight
Disclaimer: This’ll be the only Shane Black film on this list, because if I didn’t cut it off at one, the whole list would be Shane Black. Went with the one with actual snow on the ground!
The Long Kiss Goodnight is a story about family; both blood and the one you find along the way. It’s about making new memories, even when your old ones have faded. It’s about how, even during the holidays, the CIA is hard at work staging black flag operations to start illegal wars to increase their budgets. It’s about how, sometimes, a villain is such a prick that he needs to “die screaming”. And, it’s about how sometimes, a drawing of a duck can look like a dick to untrained eyes.
The Long Kiss Goodnight is a blockbuster pairing of Shane Black’s script with Renny Harlin’s direction, with a cast that is absolutely game for how bombastic the story gets. Geena Davis is Samantha Caine, an elementary school teacher with no memories of her past. That is, until government assassins start showing up at her home looking to kill her, where she also discovers she has a hidden talent for murder. Now, she must dig deeper into her past to see who she truly was, and how she is connected to a shadowy organization bent on chaos.
This thing is an absolute blast. Filled with gunfights, car chases, explosions, and dialogue that cracks like a whip, The Long Kiss Goodnight isn’t just a great Christmas movie, it’s also one of the best action movies of the ‘90s. Geena Davis is able to be both sultry and menacing here, playing an ice cold assassin lost in her own head for nearly a decade. Samuel L. Jackson puts in an incredible supporting performance, one of his more comedic roles, the type of role he doesn’t seem to get to play much anymore. The rest of the cast is made up of top tier character actors putting in top tier Noir performances.
If you’re looking to fill one of your holiday nights with violent gunfights, genuinely insane pyrotechnics, and one of the most satisfying villain deaths you’ll ever witness, check out The Long Kiss Goodnight!
Turbulence
Do you like Die Hard? How about Die Hard on a plane? How about instead of John McClane, you had Mary from Dumb and Dumber making the most bone-headed decisions you’ve ever seen, and instead of Hans Gruber, you have Ray Liotta giving one of the greatest unhinged villain performances of all time? That’s Turbulence, baby!
Turbulence starts out as a vastly different film. We open on Ryan Weaver (Ray Liotta) having his door kicked down and being arrested on charges of serial murder. Only, the arresting officer is corrupt and known for planting evidence, and Ryan is adamant that he is innocent. He, and another inmate, Stubbs (Brendan Gleason, trying his damndest to hide his British accent in a southern one, which gives us something closer to Creole), are flown back to California for trial, on an almost empty commercial flight on Christmas Day.
The plane is decked out in full Christmas regalia, never letting us forget what holiday it is (or what other action film from the past decade it wants you to associate it to…), creating a very surreal landscape as the film begins to twist and turn towards violence and destruction.
After a violent altercation on board, Stubbs is dead, as well as all the air marshals and both pilots. Now, flight attendant Teri Holloran (Lauren Holly) must figure out how to land the plane, while also deciding if she can trust Ryan, whose meek, quiet exterior seems to hide something more nefarious, as they begin a cat-and-mouse relationship of “trust”.
Which is all thrown completely out the window at about the 40 minute mark. Ray Liotta shifts from a quiet, polite man with a secret to a brash, screaming psychopath after one bad phone call, and stays an agent of complete and utter chaos from there on out. What was gearing up towards something more akin to a sexy thriller, instead becomes an extended Looney Tunes episode, as Liotta essentially becomes a gremlin, oscillating between drunkenly cackling to himself and ripping the plane apart with his bare hands.
It’s made even more absurd by Teri’s actions, where she continuously puts herself in harms way for no discernable reason, constantly having to do battle with a living breathing cartoon, seemingly animated by pure grade columbian marching powder (there is a bit here, with Liotta standing outside a door, where he is wiggling his tongue and grinding his jaw so hard, I’m surprised he still had teeth).
I’ll end on this; one of FilmTwitters favorite questions is “what movie would you remake with the muppets?”, and I would honestly spend a small country’s GDP to see this remade with Liotta either being the only muppet or only person on the cast. RIP to an out and out acting legend.
The Day Of The Beast
With all this consumerism, sometimes we forget about the true meaning of Christmas; the birth of Jesus Christ, the lord and savior of the Christian religion. Well, The Day Of The Beast didn’t forget; but, this time, someone a little less nice and a little more full of hate for all mankind is being born during the Yuletide season.
The Day of The Beast follows Cura (Alex Angulo), a Catholic priest who has just learned that the Devil will be born on Christmas day. The only problem is, he doesn’t know where. The only way to reveal the Anti-Christ’s whereabouts is if Cura becomes evil himself. Thus, our small, meek priest begins his journey towards wickedness; he steals from the blind, pushes old women down, and listens to death metal. It’s not in his nature, as he winces with each sin, but it is the only way to stop evil from being born.
The Day of The Beast is an absolute hoot, man. Never taking itself too seriously, but also never allowing itself to fall into an out-and-out comedy, it’s able to walk a very delicate and unique line, where it is able to be funny, frightening, exciting, and bleak when it needs to be.
It comes as no surprise, though; director Alex De La Iglesias has made a career out of films that walk this wire of genre and tone shifts. Films like Perdita Durango and The Last Circus are incredibly odd but fantastic films that deal with heavy subject matter (political assassination, spousal abuse, rape) in a way that can be darkly comedic, grotesquely frightening, and incredibly empathetic.
The Day Of The Beast is no different, as Cura slowly starts to put together a team of “satanists” to help in his cause, including a heavy metalhead, Jose Maria (Santiago Segura), who wants to be evil more than anything, even though he doesn’t really have it in him, and a B-grade television host, Cavan (Armando De Razza), who doesn’t believe his own bullshit, why would he believe this? This ragtag group of sinners come together to do what no else could; stop Satan.
If you’re a fan of off-kilter foreign films, filled with cultural idiosyncrasies, gorgeous cinematography, and pitch black humor, The Day Of The Beast is a great film to ring in the new year with!
Deadly Games (AKA Dial Code Santa Claus)
I’ve saved the best (read: absolutely insane) for last! A French children’s film released in 1989, a few quick similarities will pop out at you; namely, how similar the film’s plot is to Home Alone, which was released a year after this. Plot points such as a young boy being left home alone, forced to defend his house against outside intruders, and using a combination of his wits and booby traps he’s set throughout the house.
That’s where the similarities end though, because this thing is genuinely unhinged and deeply strange. Instead of living in a well off suburban home like Home Alone, our pint sized hero lives in a castle. Not “castle” as in a descriptor for a large home. “Castle” as in an actual, fairytale castle. Does it take place in a fantasy world? Nope! Everything else is regular ol’ late ‘80s Central Europe.
He is also the heir to a toy company (which seems to be equal to a Fortune 50 enterprise-sized corporation in this world), so his play room is the size of an airplane hangar and includes rope bridges, mountains of toys dating back decades, and an actual derelict WWII-era fighter plane.
All goofy fun up to this point, right? Welp, meet the villain! instead of brutish but cartoonish burglars, said intruder here is just a straight up pedophile. Sure, it’s an implied sin, but boy howdy do they really make you squirm every time they “imply” it. What isn’t implied is that he’s also a murderer, as he cuts his way through the house staff, all while dressed as Santa, on his way to the boy (How does “Santa” even know about the castle, you ask? Why, by convincing the little tyke he was the real “Santa” through an online message board, that’s how! Again, real scuzzy at times, here).
And once said home invasion actually begins, it’s not the same sort of happy hijinks we’ve come to expect from our Christmas robberies. Nope, this is a genuinely frightening cat-and-mouse situation where our young child protagonist barely escapes every encounter, as our bloodied fake santa paints a rictus grin across his face as he chases the boy through surreal rooms filled with false walls and impossible corners. What started out like dreams of sugar plums quickly becomes an out-and-out nightmare of dead dogs, evil Santa’s, and grandfathers stuck in suits of armor.
But, don’t worry; the film still stops here and there to give the boy a workout montage, as well as a tearful “funeral”. In all of this, I almost forgot to mention he is dressed as Rambo the entire film; not just military attire, but specifically “Rambo”.
Deadly Games is an absolutely insane genre mash-up, playing up wistful childhood fantasies against harrowing home invasion terrors. It can be playful and fantastical, while also being deeply mean-spirited and frightening. A film I could never recommend to an actual child, or really to any sort of sane adult. A film distinctly made for the sickos out there, that are always on the lookout for cinematic maleficence. If that sounds like you, pop on Deadly Games. But, maybe make sure the kids, and pretty much everyone else, is asleep first.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Years from one Cinema Weirdo to another!
