You Better Watch Out! CHRISTMAS EVIL Screens Midnights at The Hi-Pointe This Weekend

“If you’re bad boys & girls, your name goes in the ‘Bad Boys & Girls’ book, and I’ll bring you something… horrible!”

CHRISTMAS EVIL screens midnights this Friday and Saturday (December 5th and 6th) at The Hi-Pointe Theater (1005 McCausland Ave., St. Louis, MO 63117)

Yippee! I love CHRISTMAS EVIL! Originally released as YOU BETTER WATCH OUT, it was an instant favorite of the Killer Santa movies that have intrigued fans of exploitation cinema for so long. John Waters loves it so much, he hosts an audio commentary on the DVD!

Brandon Maggart should have received an Oscar nomination for his role as the supervisor of a toy factory who goes insane as a six year old watching his Santa Claus costumed father go down on his mom on Christmas Eve. He finally snaps the week before Christmas thirty years later and decides that he wants to be Santa Claus because everybody loves Santa while failing to see the duality in the character’s nature: he sneaks into houses or confronts worshipers coming out of church – and kills them!

The best scenes in the film have Maggart dressed up in a classic Santa outfit complete with a beard and driving around in his Chevy van with a Santa Claus sleigh painted on the side and bellowing out “MERRRRY Christmas!!” at the top of his lungs in a manner that can only be described as disturbing. The standout moment in the film for me was when the village rabble takes up torches to track down the serial killer Santa and a group of children act as human Shields to protect him from their own parents.

CHRISTMAS EVIL was but one of a spate of Killer Santa themed movies from the early 1980’s that were condemned if not outright banned in some places because they mixed the very potent imagery of Christmas (with its religious overtones) with that of a serial killer run amok dressed up as Santa Claus (SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT, BLACK CHRISTMAS – both have played Late Night Grindhouse – also see the British-made DON’T OPEN UNTIL CHRISTMAS for the opposite effect: a serial killer who preys on anyone dressed up like Santa). What is amusing is to note that anyone who would have supported such a ban obviously never bothered to watch the movie because it actually has some very poignant messages about how Christmas should be thought about by people in our greedy, self-obsessed consumer culture. I liked it when Maggart lectured a bunch of kids at a Christmas party about the need to be good, obey their parents, and do well in school.

MERRRRY Christmas, everyone!!…. OR ELSE!!