Occasionally funny, intermittently scary, but mostly hectic and sloppy, Krampus tries very hard to be a different kind of Christmas movie. It wants to have its store-bought fruitcake and eat it too, to satirize the meanness and materialism of holiday-observing Americans and also connect with the vaguely defined real meaning of the season.
A family prepares to gather for festive meals and the exchange of gifts. They are not necessarily bad people, but they behave horribly. Mom (Toni Collette) and Dad (Adam Scott) are snappish and stressed out. Beth (Stefania LaVie Owen), the teenage daughter, has a boyfriend who smokes pot. The dreaded cousins arrive, four of them, with boorish parents (Allison Tolman and David Koechner) and a boozy great-aunt (Conchata Ferrell) in tow. The nicest of the bunch is the son, Max (Emjay Anthony), who believes in Santa Claus and who has a special bond with his German grandma (Krista Stadler).
Omi (as they call her) knows all about Krampus, Santa's "shadow," a horned, hoofed demon who comes "not to reward, but to punish; not to give, but to take." When Max, humiliated by his cousins, tears up his letter to Santa, the wrath of Krampus is unleashed, and Krampus turns into a noisy, timid, family-friendly (or at least not entirely family-hostile) horror movie.
The demon brings with him some creepy minions, a few of whom -- homicidal gingerbread men and hungry predators with the faces of porcelain dolls -- provide the movie's only real moments of freakiness and wit. Otherwise, Krampus, directed by Michael Dougherty from a script he wrote with Todd Casey and Zach Shields, lurches between treacle and terror as it stumbles toward a too-easy ending.
A. O. Scott, The New York Times
Krampus (C)
Directed by Michael Dougherty. PG-13 (sequences of horror violence/terror, language and some drug material). 98 mins. In wide release.
