WEREWOLF SANTA (2023)

DIRECTED & WRITTEN by  Airell Anthony Hayles

STARRING -

Katherine Rodden as Lucy

Mark Arnold as Charlie

Emily Booth as Carol

Cian Lorcan as Rupert

Charlie Preston as Dustin

Cory Peterson as Father Christmas

Dave Darko as Werewolf Santa

AND FEATURING  John Bloom as the voice of Joe Bob Briggs

PLOT - Lucy is a YouTuber who runs a site hunting for cryptids.

One cold Christmas Eve she returns to her home town of Hastings to visit her divorced parents for the Christmas holidays.

It's not long before she encounters Santa Claus himself who has just been bitten by a wandering Lycanthrope - it's not long before the Werewolf's bite starts turning the good saint Nick into a slavering, rampaging werewolf.

You better not laugh, you better not cry, you better not scream, I'm telling you why - Santa Claws is hunting you down...

PERFORMANCES - I went into this movie knowing absolutely nothing about it, I'd never even heard of it before. I was just scrolling through Tubi looking for something festive to watch and this just leapt out at me.

I could see this was obviously at the really cheap end of the B-movie spectrum, so I went into this expecting very little, ESPECIALLY in the acting department - so imagine my pleasant surprise when I found that the acting here was actually pretty decent.

Katherine Rodden plays Lucy - a sassy, sarcastic YouTuber who's dropped out of uni (much to her parent's disgust) to devote all her time to her monster hunting vlog. Accompanied by her on-off stoner boyfriend/co-presenter she makes her way to her home town to see her separated parents for Christmas.

Rodden manages to make Lucy both loud mouthed and acerbic but also extremely likeable - you can tell her tough exterior is just an act to cover up for the hurt she's suffered due to her parent's break-up.

Lucy's parents are played by Mark Arnold and Brit-horror babe Emily Booth. Dad - Charlie - is a womanising drunk, yet he's also a police detective and is privy to the werewolf activity that is taking place in the town of Hastings. Mum - Carol - is a sex starved middle-class woman, house proud, a bit prim but has a darker side (she's into dogging it turns out). Both parents still love each other, they just don't particularly like each other (this becomes apparent as the story goes along). Again, for a low budget film, these are pretty damn good performances - as with Lucy both characters manage to be likeable despite their flaws.

A quick note here - there's no way that Emily Booth is old enough to be Katherine Rodden's mum, I checked thier ages on Wikipedia and it turns out that Booth is only nine years older than Rodden in real life, so a bit of a gap but not much (unless Carol started dogging at a REALLY young age. No, let's not go there...)

The rest of the cast are all a lot more two dimensional in terms of thier characters but still do a decent job with what they've got to work with regardless.

SFX - A man in a werewolf suit wearing a Santa Claus outfit over the top of it - it's as ridiculous as it sounds - but it works in terms of it being a silly B-movie and just adds to this film's goofy charm. At least the director has the good sense to film it under low lighting conditions.

SEX & VIOLENCE - There's one scene where there's both simultaneous sex AND violence - Werewolf Santa interrupts a dogging party and proceeds to tear the outdoor serial shaggers limb from limb.

The gore effects are pretty ropey but strangely effective - at one point Lucy reacts to a murder victim by saying that she looks "like Lasagna" - she's not wrong.

Poor old Santa gets absolutely eviscerated by a rogue werewolf (it's this that causes him to become a werewolf himself) but don't worry once cured of his lycanthropic affliction he survives to deliver more presents to the kiddies for centuries to come - HOORAY!!!!!

RATING - This a fun little horror comedy - silly, schlocky and camp but with a lot of heart and some genuinely laugh out loud funny moments. It even has Joe Bob Briggs as a narrator at one point.

4 festive fiends out of 5. I think this may well become a new Christmas tradition for me to watch this over the festive season.

ART -