I heard that the movie begins with a kid being killed after his mom gets raped for five minutes. This set my expectations high.
What really happened was that a chainsaw came close to what was very obviously a plastic or rubber doll. I wasn’t sure if this was cheesy on purpose or if the people who made the movie really thought that this was shocking. There was no gore in that shot, just blood. Grisly images were not depicted.
The rape was also shot as something that was implied. There was no nudity.
In the first ten minutes of most movies, you see enough to decide whether you accept the deal or if you stop watching. If you continue, it’s after you accept the rules that the moviemaker set. In this movie, it seemed that the rules were that there was going to be no nudity, and if there was going to be any gore, it would be cheesy.
Adding to the difficulty of accepting the boundaries of the movie, what at first seemed like bad color correction turned out to be a visual choice. I found it distracting. Instead of establishing a mood, it made me wonder if the quality of the footage was bad, and the bad color was a way to distract the viewer.
The characters speak Norwegian, which is interesting to hear. There are some sites that show the country and the architecture.
The main characters are in scenes that seem mundane, but some horror movies do the same. It might be that you are supposed to become familiar with the victims before they get abused so that you react more strongly, but I have often complained about this because we humans are a social species. We do not need to know a person in order to feel pity.
When I saw the bonus material, I wondered if I had seen the same movie that people were gushing over.
People were talking about how affected they were by the brutality. Did none of these people ever see a horror movie before?
The rape scene in the movie “Irreversible” is hard to watch. The rape scenes in “Christmas Cruelty” are like Disney in comparison, feeling like the filmmakers were afraid to depict such things. The scenes should have been left out because they were disappointing. Their omission would definitely improve the movie because the comical gore is like something in a Troma flick, but the bad rape scenes just seem like a cop-out.
The behind-the-scenes make the creators look like cool people, except that they seem delusional about what they made. I don’t know if their region of Norway is so secluded that “Christmas Cruelty” is considered over-the-top, but I don’t consider any of the content to be extreme. It works as a comedy-horror, to some extent, but I can’t enjoy a movie that seems to be afraid of its ideas. It’s like me making a movie about rabbits, but due to my irrational fear of those creatures, no actual rabbits are filmed.
