The story was very good and had me interested, but the lack of horror/action confused me as to why it was rated R.
I would have preferred to see more of the attacks, rather than just offscreen, and I really wanted to see that giant Santa come out of the ice.
It was building up to a climax that never came. It kind of just sputtered and died.
It has penises in it and if a kid sees a penis before they turn 18 and get married, they will go to Hell.
shareThat was our big problem with the movie too: it's one big tease but never actually delivers at the end. We don't see the evil Santa. At all. Ever. He never actually even kills anyone the entire movie. His elves are the ones taking the children, and they didn't even take the main kid. Everyone turned out just fine - none of the main characters really even got injured, much less killed. Where was the tension?
A strong buildup is important and a great narrative device if used correctly. However, it requires two things: a strong ending, and a very skilled director/writer to keep even the downtime well done. This had none of those things. Compare it to say, Jaws. The buildup works great, we don't see the killer until far into the movie. Here we NEVER see it. That's the big difference.
The biggest villain in the movie is a naked old man. Yeah, real scary. It wasn't that funny or interesting either. Stuff just kind of happens, then it ends. Anyone with a snowy locale and a camera could have made this movie...
'Get yourself a real dog. Any dog under 50 lbs is a cat and cats are pointless' - Ron Swanson
Yeah, I just watched it last night and this is EXACTLY the same issue I had with the movie: they built up the real SANTA as some kind of all-powerful and deadly beast that, if released, would unleash a mess a' hurt on the world...and not only was there never any real tension he would get free, we never got even the slightest glimpse of him/it.
And yeah, except for that one guy from the mining group who fell into the stake-pit trap, we never saw any badness happen to anyone. I do think the Elves were creepy, but I'm not certain if that wasn't because they wandered around totally naked half the time in a film with young children as characters.
All in all, not a terrible horror film, because it was a novel idea and had a few ooga-booga moments, but it had a lot of potential i felt it could have lived up to and generated more suspense and menace.
6/10
"Those who would trade Liberty for Security deserve neither"