Professional clowns have been having a tough time of it for the past few decades, because of a cultural shift - brought on by fact, the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy, who was also a professional clown, and fiction, Stephen King's supernatural clown character Pennywise - have combined to make clowns into creepy figures. Santa Claus has been subject to the same treatment in American popular culture for at least as long, if Christmas Evil is anything to go by.
When we first meet Harry Stadling, the hero of the movie, he's a little boy who, with his big brother Philly and his mother, is sitting on the stairs watching as someone dressed as Santa Claus comes down the chimney, eats some bread and honey and drinks milk left out for him, places gifts under their Christmas tree and in their stockings on the mantle, and then, just as in the Clement Moore poem, "laying his finger aside of his nose,/And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose." Back in their bedroom, Philly tells Harry it was their dad dressed up as Santa, and calls Harry "crazy" for thinking it was really Santa. Harry insists that it was Santa, and sneaks back downstairs to discover Santa and his mother making out. Harry angrily runs upstairs to the attic where he takes a glass snow globe and smashes it, a la Citizen Kane, on the floor. He takes a piece of the broken glass and cuts his hand. The blood falls on the roof of the broken snow globe house and the credits roll. (1)
Segue to "the present," a man dressed as Santa wakes and goes about his morning routine to the accompaniment of Christmas records through rooms filled with Santa paraphernalia. Next we see him on the roof looking through binoculars at windows across the street, but he isn't exactly a pervert - he's spying on children doing their chores, playing with dolls (the good ones) and one who is cutting centerfolds out of a Penthouse magazine (a bad one). The music suddenly turns into jarring electronica as Harry runs to two big books, one for good children and one for bad, in which he inscribes the names of the children he just spied on.
Harry has a desk job at the Jolly Dream toy factory, which makes perfect sense knowing his fixation on Santa Claus, but he misses working on the assembly line. He lectures employees on their lunch break about making quality toys. They look at one another and grin. The assembly line workers don't care that their toys are poorly made. Another assembly line worker named Frank needs someone to cover his night shift so, knowing that Harry misses the line, he talks him into covering for him.
Later that night, on his way home from the factory, Harry sees Frank in a bar and overhears him calling him a schmuck for taking his shift. Harry rushes home and, almost apoplectic with anger, he takes a small doll in his hands and, humming "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" slowly crushes it. Harry is clearly becoming unglued, but this is just the beginning. It's almost as if, when he finally dresses up as Santa Claus, which happens at the 40 minute mark, Harry becomes an avenging Christmas angel.
Harry goes to a mental hospital for children and, despite some initial resistance from the staff, hands over a van-load of toys for the children. The nurses cheer him as he drives away in a van with a sleigh painted on the side. His euphoria changes when he stops at the church where his boss is attending Midnight Mass. As soon as they see Harry on the sidewalk still dressed as Santa, some of the exiting worshippers begin to taunt him. He responds by stabbing one of them in the eye and striking three of them in the head with a hatchet.
The entire scene of Harry's visit to co-worker Frank's house - beginning with his attempt to fit down his chimney (he gets stuck and only extricates himself after strenuous effort), his attempt to smother Frank with his sack of toys, with his wife asleep beside him, finally slashing his throat with the star atop a bedside Christmas tree, his wife waking and her breathless scream, and Harry's flight through a glass door that slowly closes - is utterly macabre.
Christmas Evil is a movie with insurmountable problems. The biggest problem is the obvious psychotic who is the center of the story. We're given clues to indicate what drove Harry over the edge, but not what got him to the edge in the first place. And we're not even sure where the edge occurs. He switches from being jolly St. Nick to a homicidal maniac without any apparent transition. There is no connective tissue between these two Harrys. It's as if the director simply decided that he'd shown us enough of Harry being subsumed in the character of Santa Claus and it was time for him to go berserk.
The movie muddles its way to whatever point it's trying to make, which has something vaguely to do with the corruption of Christmas into the meaningless commercial circus that we have to endure today. The cast has several familiar faces, including Brandon Maggart, whose performance as Harry has been lauded by a lot of people who clearly don't understand how easy it is for an actor to play a mentally unbalanced character. (Practically everyone still swoons over Adam Sandler's psycho impersonation in the terrible Punch Drunk Love.) When an actor acts as if he has lost his mind, who other than someone with experience with lunatics can tell if he's getting it right? At first, Harry comes across as a fairly common functioning sociopath. Then, for no apparent reason, the movie veers into criminal insanity.
I can sympathize with the desire of apparently so many to see Santa made into a sinister figure - a supernatural being who spies on children to learn if they're naughty or nice, who invades people's homes when they're sleeping and who invariably disappoints them with gifts they hadn't asked for. Christmas Evil has its moments, as when an angry crowd chases Santa down a nocturnal street with flaming torches. And Harry's final apotheosis is almost poetic. Having followed him thus far into his delusions, we are as amazed as he apparently is when his sleigh/van takes flight, turning left towards the moon, "ere he drove out of sight."
Merry Christmas!
(1) The title of the version I watched was You Better Watch Out.
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