Review #356: Hanukkah (2019)
October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #29 - Hanukkah (2019)
Oh wow. This movie is... really something. I 100% guarantee the entire plot for this movie came about because the writer thought up a few Hanukkah-based puns and decided they could flesh out the script as they went.
Hanukkah is about a group of friends who go out to a party and then get killed. That's really it. That's the whole plot. The IMDB plot synopsis suggests that they get killed for being "bad jews"- that is, for not following Judaic law- but there are several people who get killed in this movie for seemingly no reason, so although this is all clearly meant to be Hanukkah-themed, the theme doesn't really seem to go very far.
This movie is a complete mess. Not just a mess, a boring mess. It is utterly incoherent from one scene to the next and despite feeling like I couldn't wait for it to end (not to mention I was watching this on Tubi where there are numerous commercial breaks with 6-7 commercials in them) the ending came out of nowhere and took me by complete surprise because nothing happened in this entire film. Let me try to give a more thorough plot synopsis:
We start off in the 1980s, when a serial killer (the "Hanukkiller", a portmanteau which I guarantee was the starting point for this entire script) is about to ritually sacrifice his son for... some reason, while his wife is chained up naked in the bathtub for... some reason. (This wouldn't even have been worth mentioning as it never serves any purpose in the film, but she is featured in every trailer as far as I can tell.) But the cops show up and kill the Hanukkiller, and later on we learn that his son eventually grew up to carry on his dad's murderous legacy for... some reason. Fast forward to the present, and a group of friends who all clearly hate each other (the bread and butter for bad horror movies) are about to drive to a party two hours away. (The only reason the distance is relevant is because otherwise, the plot of the movie couldn't happen because they would all just go home long before any of the murders start.) This "party" ends up being like three people, none of which any of the protagonists know, and then their car's tires get slashed so they decide to stick around for like three extra days instead of calling a cab. Then people start getting killed, a weird Jewish guy shows up looking for the killer, most of the characters get apprehended and killed offscreen, and then the movie just kind of... ends. I really thought this second telling of the synopsis would have some more meat to it but there just isn't anything there. I guess I didn't mention that a HUGE portion of this film is a subplot involving some unnamed woman the killer has chained up in a hole, with MULTIPLE scenes dedicated to her trying to escape while the killer just sits there saying and doing nothing.
The dialogue in this movie somehow manages to both feel like the actors are reading lines off a page, and also like every scene was just made up as they went along. Nothing any of the characters do makes any sense. One scene has a guy eating dinner with his girlfriend's mom after the girlfriend stood him up on a date; they then proceed to talk about the boyfriend asking the girlfriend to marry him despite the fact that neither the boyfriend, nor the mom, nor the girlfriend will ever do anything meaningful in the entire rest of the movie. When the friends arrive at this "party", the two girls immediately go off and watch TV by themselves instead of hang out with anyone else at the "party". The main characters spend the night at this party for whatever reason, but then when their car's tires are slashed, they proceed to wait several days at this other person's house rather than call a cab or an Uber and go back home. (There's a little bit of lip service paid to this point- first they're waiting for the boyfriend to come and pick them up but they have to wait 24 hours because it's the Sabbath, and then when he arrives he finds out his girlfriend was unfaithful so he leaves without them. But then they still don't call a cab, because the car's owner doesn't want to have to get a second cab back out here to get his car once it's fixed. But the end result is that four people spend SEVERAL DAYS living in some random dude's house, when at any point they could have just paid for a ride home and nothing bad would have happened.)
This movie really has an issue with time. Because Hanukkah is a multi-day celebration, there seems to be the need to extend the events beyond just one single house party. (You literally could have had all of these events happen in one night, but then you wouldn't get the rising tension of watching the killer light another candle on his bone-menorah, and then another candle, and another.) But it makes no sense- literally ZERO sense- for the characters to stick around for more than one day. In fact, the owner of the house they are staying at- as well as his roommate- are both killed AT LEAST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS before the final confrontation of the film, and none of the characters seem to notice or care that they are the only people in this stranger's house. And then, the majority of the proposed action in this movie takes place entirely offscreen- of the four main characters, three of them just disappear from the movie until the fourth one eventually stumbles across the rest of them chained up in the killer's dungeon. It's like they intentionally refused to show anything interesting in this movie in service of another long boring shot of nothing.
This movie had some real potential and completely squandered it. This is both Sid Haig and Dick Miller's last film, and it even had Felissa Rose credited as a producer and Kane Hodder as stunt coordinator. The scene that feels like the climax of the movie has the one surviving protagonist (who I think is meant to be the hero of the film but from the start has been a jerk to everyone) get into an argument with the killer about which of them is a better adherent to Judaic law. It honestly would have redeemed the film in my eyes if this slasher villain was taken down by philosophical debate, but alas, the killer just says "no" and kills him instead. And then the movie ends with a long monologue from a new character in a new location that has nothing to do with any of the characters we have been meant to care about.
This movie is bad. It's very bad. Not the worst I've seen this month but it's down there. Spare yourself the hour and forty minutes and watch something else. Anything else, it doesn't really matter.
Overall Rating: 3/10 Scars of David
Self Promotion: This movie has only 8 reviews on IMDB, but one of them immediately caught my eye. It reads as follows:
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10/10
Scary, Erotic, Original, and Torah-fying!
Props to the director and writer.
What a great, erotic and original horror movie. This is also one of the Sid Haig's last performances.
I hope this film create some new jewish trends in the horror genre.
Merry Christmas.
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This caught my eye for a few reasons. First, the bad pun (which is used in some of the movie's promotional materials so I don't think this user created it). Second, the fact that they call this "erotic" twice, when it is anything but. Third, they say "Merry Christmas" in response to a Hanukkah film, in a review that was written in November. And fourth, the username is "shaho-53879", which I can't help but notice is similar to "Shaun Hokanson", one of the crew members who did sound engineering for the movie. So, uh... yeah, I suspect this 10/10 review might be a bit biased.
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