Review #366: The Christmas Tapes (2022)
Twelve More Slays of Christmas #8 - The Christmas Tapes (2022)
The Christmas Tapes is a low-budget found-footage horror anthology film starring Greg Sestero, of The Room fame. The framing device starts off with a family celebrating Christmas Eve by having each member open one present first, and the daughter's gift- a video camera- comes in handy when a stranger knocks at the door after apparently having car trouble. The family invites him in to share the warmth and community, but this soon turns to fear and danger as he takes them all hostage and forces them to watch a series of short horror films centered around Christmastime. As each story comes and goes, the family has to grapple with whether the horrific events they saw- both mundane and supernatural- have any basis in reality, and whether any of them are going to make it out of this alive.
Apart from the framing device, there are four stories told in this movie:
1. Travel Buggies- A couple of travel bloggers are planning to spend Christmas camping out in the hills of Colorado. After telling their viewers about a local legend of a murderer who posed as a scarecrow, they begin to feel like they're being watched by an unknown force...
2. The Christmas Gift- A man wants to surprise his children for Christmas, so he plans to seal himself inside a shipping container and he's hired someone to drive the container over to their house and drop it off. But it turns out the person he hired might have other plans- and a grudge.
3. Untitled- A man wakes up in a field with an implant in his head giving him instructions to deliver a package to a nearby hotel within fifteen minutes or he'll die. Unfortunately, the implant also makes him see hallucinations and lose time, so... it doesn't go quite as planned.
4. The Christmas Spirit- A couple moves into a new home, and are frightened by some strange activity once they set up a box Christmas decorations they found in a closet. They call a paranormal expert (who isn't available, so he sends a paranormal novice in his place) who conducts an investigation- but does this man know what he's doing, or is he making things worse?
Regarding the whole movie, I really need to say that this is not.... good. I love Greg Sestero and will give anything a shot if he's in it, but like... seriously, this movie was pretty terrible. I often complain about how the found footage subgenre is typically used as a way to make a cheap and low-effort movie, and not because it improves the movie at all, and that's exactly what this feels like. None of the four stories (nor the framing device) really feel like they were enhanced by being found footage, and only two of them (Travel Buggies and Untitled) even feel like it was appropriate for the story being told.
For example, The Christmas Gift makes no sense as an in-universe recording; the dad's plan was to record himself in the box to show to his children, AFTER he's already been delivered in the box? He treats it like the video itself is going to be a surprise but the surprise will necessarily be over before they get a chance to watch the video. And even then, what's the video going to be? Ten minutes of him riding in a guy's car to drop off the box a block away from the house, then five minutes of him waiting inside the box being wheeled to the house, and then they open the box so that's it? Maybe if he was going to be in the box for a long time- like if he was actually trying to illegally ship himself in a crate so he'd be in there for like a couple days, maybe it would be interesting to have him make video journals to pass the time- but this whole thing was supposed to be over in just a few minutes so I don't understand what the purpose was, other than the filmmakers deciding all of the segments needed to be found footage. (That segment also has numerous moments where one of the antagonists announces he's handing off the camera to the other antagonist, and then announces he's taking it back, and back and forth again. None of that was necessary, the audience can piece that together based on the fact that the scene cut and now someone else is in front of the camera.)
The only entertaining part of this film was the paranormal expert guy in The Christmas Spirit, because I could tell he was just doing improv the entire time and some of it was funny. (Not all of it was funny, and I kind of hated him for the first few minutes, but eventually he made enough goofs that I started to appreciate what he was doing.) All of these segments are WAY too long (except for Untitled, which is only like three minutes long but still felt completely unnecessary) and contain way too much obviously-unscripted banter. It's so bizarre to me that Greg Sestero's character claims to want the family to watch "unique" films instead of the classics, so he puts on cheap knockoffs of other cheap horror films that are nothing but unscripted, unrehearsed patter for twenty minutes until they can get one good scare before the movie ends. I know this is a low-budget production but still, it doesn't feel like anybody was trying to make something better than that.
It wasn't offensively bad, but it was incredibly boring. I don't recommend this one.
Overall Rating: 3/10 Ornaments Inherited from Grandma
Bad Timing: Despite all five parts of this movie ostensibly taking place on or around Christmas and in or around Colorado, four of the five parts appear to have been filmed in the middle of summer. Whoops!
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