Saturday, December 23, 2017

Red Christmas (2016)

Diane, her children and their spouses are getting ready to open their Christmas presents, when there is a knock on the door. Diane opens it to find a creepy man with a speech impediment wearing a cloak who has slightly oozy bandages obscuring his entire face.  His gloved hands hold out an envelope which has the word Mother scrawled across the front in pencil and it is obvious there is something very wrong with him.

Diane does what anyone would do in this situation and invites him in to sit down with the family. Keep in mind that it is a beautiful day in sunny Australia and the home has a huge front porch on which this stranger could have cooled his heels.  Based on the mans odd behavior, there is no way even the most compassionate person would have invited him into their home, especially when among the inhabitants are a very pregnant woman and a teenager with Downs syndrome.  What about the safety of your family?

Things get even weirder when the stranger, who's name is Cletus, insists on reading his letter to Mother and it is revealed that this is the child whose birth Diane terminated twenty years earlier.  The clinic was bombed while she was there and someone pulled the baby from the trash... the living baby... the large living baby who would never have been terminated at that age of development. It even waves it's larger than a newborn hand at the man who picks it out of the garbage.

There are two huge problems with this film.  Diane's family is completely unlikeable and ungrateful, other than Jerry the teen with Downs Syndrome who is totally in the Christmas spirit.  And the film is a complete bummer.  You don't care about the family, you don't care about Cletus, and when the movie ends you just feel yucky.  It's completely depressing and worst of all, it's just no fun. The only reason we managed to make it through this thing was Dee Wallace.

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