The straplines made me think this was going to be good old fashioned Psycho Santa Slasher, but this is actually a horror story anthology with a Christmas motif and framing device. Which isn’t a problem as that’s prime quality festive family fun in the Super Fortress. Thus we fired up the streaming service and let the intro credits roll.

The credits feel five minutes long and whilst they have the normal job titles you expect to see, you’ll soon notice that each has about ten people doing it. This is worrying for nerds, because half that many names in those positions would suggest a very troubled production, and just annoying for normal people because there is a reason no one’s made a full movie of random people’s name appearing on a mostly blank screen.

It soon turns out that this is because it’s there are 13 stories to tell in a 105 minutes and each one is done by it’s own team. The average length of story is 7-ish minutes and it’s all low-end movie stuff. Some lands well, some crash and burn, but they all follow a four stage trick of set-up, tension/gore, payoff, twist that most scare scenes in such films do. You won’t notice that pattern until about mid-way through and then you won’t be able to stop counting it off in your head. It’s a bad technique in and of itself, but the lack of variety gets grating very quickly.

I won’t be listing off the sections, because there is so little plot even a mild description will give away the twist or over-inflate your expectations. They cover a lot of ground, no two are overtly samey, and they’re all YouTube quality horror shorts. Personal taste will play a huge role in you’re opinions, but I found a third actually good and the rest not worth watching. The best had me laughing my arse off, and a couple were works of pure genius that pertfectly executed ideas which fit exactly into the space provided. There is also the framing device, which is annoying and dumb as it has episodes every 15 minutes and never lays down any plot till the last five minutes. It’s a clearly wasted opportunity, which is frustrating. I’m also still deeply unclear why the producers decided to pair up the short stories, as that made an already bumpy ride even more uneven.

On the side of fairness; no one does a terrible job and a lot of the problems come down to lack of budget or lack of experience. As an idea it’s great and will hopefully give a lot of people a step-up to something bigger and/or better. But I would be more likely to hunt for individual clips to send on to specific people than to recommend the whole thing to anyone. On that level it feels like an idea 10 years out of its times. As it stands, I’d rather they had half the stories and gave them twice the time, as it’s all too quick fire to build up any real depth and avoid the Trash pile. That said, there is real talent and skill on display that is going to justifiably go in some people’s promo reels.

The Raggedyman