The Weather Outside Is Frightful

Year: 2015

Director: Mike Dougherty

Cast: Adam Scott, Toni Collette, David Koechner

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Krampus is probably the movie I’ve most looked forward to all year. I love Christmas horror, I love Toni Collette, and after seeing Trick R Treat for the first time this Halloween, I had faith in director Mike Dougherty. But, as often happens in this tempestuous business of film, reality imposed a different outcome. Krampus is a huge, gold-wrapped present under the Christmas tree that, upon opening, turns out to be a clothes hamper It’s not a bad or pointless gift by any means, but it utterly fails to match up to the visions of sugarplums dancing in your head.

‘Twas the month before Christmas, and all through the blog, these terrible puns your eyeballs did clog.

Krampus tells the holly jolly tale of a family that has lost the Christmas spirit. Father Tom (Adam Scott) is too busy with work to pay attention, mother Sarah (Toni Collette) is stressed and dismissive, and daughter Beth (Stefania LaVie Owen) just wants to smoke pot out of a ludicrously festive peppermint bong with her loser boyfriend. Only their son Max (Emjay Anthony) and their German speaking grandmother (Krista Stadler) seem to even notice there’s a holiday going on. When their annoying relatives, who even Roald Dahl would denounce as hyperbolically vile, come to visit – led by gun-totin’ trailer trash Howard (David Koechner) – Max is mercilessly taunted and ends up destroying his letter to Santa, scattering it to the winds.

This act of treason upon the Spirit of Christmas summons Krampus, the dark shadow of Santa Claus, to dole out punishment and re-instill the holiday value of giving. But instead of Barbies and golf clubs that you’ll need to fake enthusiasm for, they’ll be giving something much more valuable… Their lives.

Well, Toni Collette’s character’s life I valuable at least. You can take or leave the rest of ‘em.

Krampus has a killer opening. Perhaps the best opening of any film this year. An opening that is so ironic, winking, and silly that the rest of the film has all but no choice but to fail to live up to it. But Krampus makes another critical error that it had a veritable ocean of opportunities to avoid: it’s working from a script that, at the very least, needed a couple passes before it was anywhere near complete. From a technical standpoint, the film is a gas, but at the script level it’s a Vegas casino: full of glitz and glamour with very little payoff.

The sheer amount of story elements that are introduced in the first act and never come up again (Eagle Scout survival training, creepy snowmen, a big honking meat cleaver) would have Chekhov swallowing the barrel of his gun. In short, it feels like it was made by a careless teenager, an enthusiastic kid who was too lustily excited by the thought of what he could create to stop and focus on why. There are brief swipes at emotional resonance, but they’re immature and ill thought-out, carried by archetypical characters as broad as the tree in Rockefeller Plaza.

Krampus is a blizzard. A flurry of totally unique, crystalline ideas (including my personal, consumerism-lampooning favorite: the plan to take refuge in a local mall) gets caught up in the furious gale, forming an indistinct rushing mass. It’s pretty to look at, but you don’t particularly want to get caught in it. However, for all that its individual snowflakes don’t stand out the way they should, it’s still a memorable experience.

How’s this metaphor going? I live in Southern California, so this is all hearsay.

For all that Krampus sublimely disappoints one’s expectations, there’s plenty of good that won’t come out. Design-wise, Krampus is an out-and-out masterpiece. Krampus’ hulking, cloaked figure cuts an imposing silhouette through the falling snow, and his helpers are frivolous exercises in nightmare fuel. Especially the fleshy, snakelike jack-in-the-box monster. That guy will be knocking on the door of my fragile psyche for weeks. But, you guessed it, despite their beautiful, feral forms, these creatures get very little to do. There’s just too damn many of them and the film has almost no idea what actual purpose they serve in the narrative.

Krampus bumbles wide-eyed through its own ideas like it’s Alice touring Wonderland. Even the film seems surprised when it stumbles across a patch of pure, fairy tale fright, like the glistening storybook town surrounding the snowbound house. In these moments, which are admittedly pretty frequent, we get a boost of adrenaline to drive us to the next sequence, whether it be an ass-kicking sister in law or an attack by mutant gingerbread men.

I apologize if my ample complaints have been misleading, because Krampus is very fun very much of the time. It’s a turn-your-brain-off good time, a Gremlins for the Twitter set. It’s just that the deficits of the film hit even harder considering the talent that was poured into it. Its unearned emotional beats and stunted character arcs don’t prevent it from being entertaining, but they do cut it off at the knees every time it makes the effort to be something more profound than its cheesy Christmas horror brethren like Silent, Night, Deadly Night.

Luckily, if you desperately want to see a Dougherty holiday flick that will knock your socks off, you’ve got Trick R Treat. And I do hope Krampus makes boatloads of money, but more for the sake of studio horror in general than any genuine devotion to the property, which I fully expected to be a gem. But a good time at the movies is a good time at the movies, even if it isn’t quite as grandly consequential as you’d planned.

TL;DR: Krampus is a fun Christmas horror flick that squanders its potential to be truly great.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 983

Every Ship Needs An Anchor

Year: 2013

Director: Adam McKay

Cast: Will Ferrell, Christina Applegate, Paul Rudd

Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Although I know in my heart that I've seen 2004's Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, I can't for the life of me remember a single thing about it. So that leaves me in a bittersweet spot approaching its nearly a decade later sequel. On one hand, I can come at it with a pair of fresh eyes, but on the other, I have no idea what the hell is going on.

Perhaps it's for the best, because I seemed to enjoy it markedly more than fans of the original.

Heathens just don't know how to appreciate a good cowboy hat.

The plot picks up in real time in 1980 - about nine years after the events of the original. When Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) is passed over for a big New York promotion in favor of his wife Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), he loses control of his life. He abandons Veronica and their son Walter (Judah Nelson) and moves back to San Diego.

After hitting rock bottom, he is approached by producer Freddie Shapp (Dylan Baker) to be an anchor for a brand new station in New York - the Global News Network, the world's first 24-hour news station. Seeing that this would put him in direct competition with his estranged wife, he takes the position and reassembles his old news team.

Once he gathers Champ Kind (David Koechner) the racist cowboy sportscaster, Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) the sleazy field reporter, and Brick (Steve Carell) the eccentric weatherman, they head off to New York and start brainstorming ways to make their 2AM - 5AM slot a ratings bonanza.

Singlehandedly inventing fluff news, Ron Burgundy quickly shoots to superstardom at the expense of his friends and family, at which point the plot structure adheres to that of every other movie of this type. You know how it goes. Right down to the idea that he can't miss his son's piano recital. Let's not get into that.

Why discuss that when we can discuss how Paul Rudd rocks that perm?

You can't go in expecting sophistication, although I don't know why you would. But Anchorman 2 is surprisingly slim on the lowbrow humor and high on absurdity. You still have to sit back and shut off your brain's filter and let it all wash over you unadulterated. And even though your face may look like this:

 more often than not, gosh darn it you're gonna laugh.

There are quite a few belly laughs to be had in Anchorman 2 (and quite a few angry stares from other theater patrons who need to remove the sticks from their butts) and most of my notes are rendered completely useless because I spent most of the time just writing down my favorite jokes.

Perhaps it would be better at a taut 90 minutes, but no individual part felt particularly saggy or dragged out. And there are several scenes (not to give them away, but look for a shark, a park, and interracial sex) that are all laugh out loud funny and patently absurd. This film is essentially a live action cartoon and the veritable avalanche of celebrity cameos and escalation that occurs makes me pray they'll never make an Anchorman 3 because it's impossible to top.

It's all good natured and totally weird in a way that safe studio comedies haven't allowed themselves to be in quite a while and I really respect that.

Although I wish they had released promotional still that had ANY other character in them.

The film's biggest sin is being a little too on the nose about why things are funny. Most of Will Ferrell's lines pointedly explain the punchlines of other jokes in a way that's incredibly insulting to the intelligence of the audience.

In fact, throughout the entire film Ferrell's performance is of a particularly grating and pedantic vein that could have derailed the entire film if it weren't for a stellar supporting cast. Steve Carell is great as the non sequitur-spouting Brick and has great chemistry with Kristen Wiig. Wiig plays a love interest of equal dopiness and I'd say she's underutilized but perhaps any more of those characters would have been a little too much.

Aside from Ferrell, the only other weak link is Judah Nelson. Although it's perhaps not fair to bemoan a child actor's terrible performance, the kid might as well have been wearing a carrot costume on an elementary school stage for all the wide-eyed and wildly unmodulated line readings he gave.

All in all, Anchorman 2 is a fun film that has natural laughs and a less questionable use of female characters than other films in its vein (although there's still progress to be made). As a sequel, it uses callback and character humor well while still standing largely on its own as a separate entity. It's not perfect, but it's lively and fun entertainment.

TL;DR: Anchorman 2 isn't going to be a cult classic like its predecessor, but it's a good natured and absurdly fun comedy.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Why not catch a matinee? Don't overpay but it's an enjoyable way to pass the time.

Word Count: 883