A Christmas Horror Story

Better late than never! We kick off 2018 with a brief look back and Christmas with the EXCELLENT and supremely overlooked A Christmas Horror Story – starring William Shatner, among others!

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A Christmas Horror Story (2015)

Episode 110, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd,

Craig: and I’m Craig.

Todd: Well, we finish off 2017 with, as promised, one last Christmas horror movie. And this one, unlike most of the others we’ve done, actually has the word Christmas in the title. Yes. This this one, couldn’t be more Christmassy. This is a Christmas horror story, which I think was titled a holiday horror story for the sensitive Walmart crowd apparently. Go figure. This is a 2015 film, so it’s about 2 years old. And I was a little surprised by this because I think I might have seen it on Netflix like come up in my list or something, but I kind of skipped right over it because to be honest, it looked like one of those super low budget kind of crappy movies

Craig: from the

Todd: artwork and the fact that’s called a Christmas horror story, and I really didn’t see anything of it. Did this make a did this get a theatrical release?

Craig: I don’t know. I don’t know if it did or not. I gosh. I I’m hesitant to even speculate because I really didn’t read about it, but I felt the same way that you did. This is one of the ones that I saw like on the shelves at Walmart, and it kind of looked like one of those cheap Kompass knock offs that came out around this time. And so I didn’t really pay much attention to it either, until I think it became available on Netflix. I don’t know, maybe sometime before, maybe Redbox or something, I don’t know. But I decided to check it out and, I was actually really, really pleasantly surprised.

Todd: I actually think that this is

Craig: a really good anthology movie. Honestly, this

Todd: is kind of to Christmas as, maybe I’m going too far here, but this is to Christmas as I feel like trick or treat is to Halloween.

Craig: Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. Now I don’t know if it’s exactly on par, I don’t know if it’s quite as good, but it’s really darn close, and very similar in feeling. It’s fun and dark and, you know, I thought it did a really good job. Okay, so there are several different segments. What I think is interesting and unique about this particular anthology is that it’s unlike some of the anthologies that we’ve watched and talked about, in that a lot of those you kind of have stand alone segments, with some sort of wrap around or something tying them together. And this one’s a little bit different in that the segments all play out concurrently and you keep kind of jumping back and forth between them. And, I’ve now seen this, I think, three times. I’m pretty sure that I watched it last Christmas and I watched it again this Christmas forgetting that you and I had already planned to talk about it. And so then when we were preparing to talk about it, I sat down and watched it again. And each time that I’ve watched it, I’ve noticed different little connections between all of the stories. The characters Craig paths at different points in all of them. And I didn’t notice that the first couple times around. But so having seen it several times now, I I can really appreciate that they really wove these together in a very kind of natural way.

Todd: I picked out 1 or 2. I can’t wait to hear about more of them from a person who’s watched it multiple times. I I think that you could have played this movie, you know, with the segments back to back like you would in a traditional anthology, and it wouldn’t have changed it too much, I think. It would have changed the overall feel of the movie. I guess, I should say the emotional ride that you take through the film is one of slowly building tension, Whereas in an anthology story, you’re getting these little bite sized nuggets, so each story, you’re getting these little bite sized nuggets. Whereas in an anthology store, you’re getting these little bite sized nuggets, so each story you’re going up and down, and up and down, and up and down. In this one, you really gotta hold a lot in your head.

Craig: Yeah. That’s true.

Todd: As it goes along, and it’s at times, I felt it was maybe a little overbearing because we jump back to another story, and I’d be like, oh, where do we leave off with this? And then when everything’s, you know,...