Horror Movie Review: A Very Flattened Christmas (2024)

From director, Shane Wallace, who co-wrote the story with Key Tawn Toothman, A Very Flattened Christmas is a comedy horror that promises a fun injection of blood and guts into the holiday. Alas, it’s a promise the film just can’t live up to, and what we end up with is a boorish, drawn-out, and unexciting low-budget comedy horror that fails to really embrace the season it is based around.

Listen, if you’re going to make a festive horror film, make it bloody festive. We want garish lights, tinsel hanging off everything, a constant slew of holiday tunes (which is something A Very Flattened Christmas does do), and enough ‘ho-ho-hos’ to keep us going all year long. It is incredibly disappointing to see A Very Flattened Christmas do so little, especially when the core concept is so simple and fun.

Taking place over the Christmas period at a roadkill collection company, a killer dressed as a reindeer is on the loose and everyone at the company is being targeted. Will anyone survive to see in the New Year? Will anyone get to enjoy some eggnog? Or will they all end up as roadkill?

The simplicity of the story both helps and hinders the overall A Very Flattened Christmas experience. It helps by keeping the focus where it should be, on a group of ‘unique’ individuals and the reindeer killer that is hunting them. They need to find out who is under the costume, a reveal that proves to be fairly satisfying (even if it does raise a few questions). However, it hinders by having nothing else to say, resulting in a lot of jammed in weirdness and talky segments.

The latter of which is not A Very Flattened Christmas’ strong suit. No disrespect to the cast who give it plenty of oomph, but there’s a lot of dodgy scenes and awkward moments of dialogue. Though there is a sense that this is part of the joke, and that A Very Flattened Christmas is intentionally trying to be bad in places. Attempts at humour come thick and fast, with the majority based in silliness, and very little lands. It’s not that it’s an unfunny film, it does have good jokes, it’s that it never gives time for the humour to breath. They want the viewer laughing along non-stop, but the comedy writing is nowhere near good enough for that to happen, especially as this kind of nonsensical humour has a very niche audience.

What is less niche, at least for a horror audience, is the violence and gore. Sadly, another area that A Very Flattened Christmas doesn’t quite manage to deliver on. This time because many of the actual kills happen off-screen and we only see the aftermath. These can be bloody, and some of the effects are decent, but in a film like this we need to be seeing the gruesome detail up close.

It’s all part of a package that just leaves you feeling underwhelmed in the end. An end that becomes a bit of a slog. There’s stuff to enjoy here, and clear heart and soul poured into it, yet the end result is something wholly run-of-the-mill and likely to be forgotten long before the holiday season is over.