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Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)
2010 | Fantasy, Horror
8
8.3 (4 Ratings)
Movie Rating
Rare Exports is a proper gem of an alternative Christmas film.

It revolves around a British company drilling into the mountain Korvatunturi in Lapland, hoping to find a legendary gravesite. A local child Pietari spies on proceedings, and is convinced that this company have found the grave of the original Santa Claus, not the jolly red and white icon that everyone is familiar with, but the proper monstrous version spoken about in fairtytales in Piertari's books. This being a child centric horror, of course no one believes him, until all the other children in the village start to go missing, and shit starts going sideways.

Rare Exports strengths lies in its strong cast. Greta performances from Onni Tommila and Jorma Tommila (father and son in both the film, and real life, just for that extra layer of believability!) The pair, alongside the supporting cast keep everything pretty grounded, despite the absurdity going on around them.
The film's dialogue is largely in Finnish, and this coupled with it's sparse and snowy setting, lend the narrative a truly otherworldly but authentic feeling.

It's also effectively creepy, especially the skinny old man "Santa" that the group capture and cage up. The need to figure out what is really going on never lets up either, even as the plot flies towards it's increasingly WTF climax (there's a silly amount of dong by the way, just FYI).

Rare Exports is certainly worth a watch. It's delightfully barmy, and is a great tonic if you become weary of "traditional" Christmas movies. 🎅
  
Black Christmas (2019)
Black Christmas (2019)
2019 | Horror
Verdict: All Over the Place

Story: Black Christmas starts as we meet our sorority sisters Riley (Poots), Kris (Shannon), Marty (Donoghue), Jesse (O’Grady), Helena (Adams) and Fran (Morris) who are preparing for the Christmas break, with Riley having history with the alpha sorority, which never got dealt with by the authorities.
They decide to get revenge through song and soon find themselves getting picked of by a masked killer, where they need to find themselves fighting to survive.

Thoughts on Black Christmas

Characters – Riley is previously a victim of sexual assault by one of the rich college students, 3-years-later she is still dealing with the effects, being the big sister to the rest of the sisters and is one of the few that worries about the locations of the other girls. Kris has been on a crusade to get equality, she spends most of the time preaching about how men have it easy and mostly gets annoying. Marty is another member of the sorority and like Jesse, we don’t learn much more about any of the other girls.
Performances – Imogen Poots is a talent actress when she is given something to work with, she is the strongest of a weak story, where nobody comes off like they are giving a good acting performance.
Story – The story is meant to be following a group of sorority sisters that get picked off and attacked by a masked killer over the Christmas break. Well, where do we start to break this story down, first thing, this isn’t any sort of remake or sequel to either movie seen before, it uses the location of the house and one look at a death, don’t think this is a remake. Secondly, we spend more time trying to get the message over about men thinking they can walk all over women and the only good men in life are nervous wrecks around the women. Thirdly, this is meant to be a horror and doesn’t even know what tone to stick to. Finally, the trailer gives away everything. This is a social message that uses an existing horror franchise to try and get a point over, without using any sort of subtitle approach.
Horror/Mystery – The horror in this film is almost non-excitant, it tries to use the slow slasher traits early on, which show glimpses, only to go, ‘you know what, we want to do an action horror now’ by the end. The mystery is also poor, because we get zero potential suspects and the only person it could be is revealed in the trailer.
Settings – The college location is fine, though it is the weird college I have ever seen.
Special Effects – When it comes to the effects, we get basic horror ones, sadly, the film decides to hide away from showing any actual gore, even though the injuries are designed to show it.

Scene of the Movie – Nate grabs an axe.
That Moment That Annoyed Me – The girls leave a party at what they say is midnight, we cut to one that left early and it is suddenly 10.45, seriously can people not tell the time?
Final Thoughts – This is a very bad social message horror that spends more time banging you over the head with the message, than actually giving us a coherent story or any scare.

Overall: Social Message, without a scare.
  
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Damien Echols recommended Halloween (1978) in Movies (curated)

 
Halloween (1978)
Halloween (1978)
1978 | Horror

"Now I just said I don’t like slasher movies, but this is the exception to that rule — because it’s the exception to horror movies. The Rob Zombie remake of Halloween — that thing is f**king genius. It’s like he violates every rule of horror movie making and makes it work. Most horror movies are atmospheric, they’re really dark or they’re at night and they’re creepy; his is taking place in bright noon sunshine daylight, out in the yard. And the way he goes into the story of the Michael Myers character, you know, the reason why he’s making all these masks. That is a great movie. I guess I also like it because of the outside scenes. You know, when they show people walking down the sidewalk or something — it feels like Autumn. You see leaves skitter across the sidewalk as the wind blows ’em, and you feel Halloween when you’re watching ’em. I remember the first time I saw that was when we were in prison. They’ll show movies on holidays just to take the tension out of the air a little bit — and that was the movie we got to see on Christmas. On Christmas they showed us Halloween. And when it was over — it was Christmas night, about 9 o’clock — as soon as it went off I went into such a deep state of mourning, because it was like my favorite time of year was gone. From the Equinox to Christmas morning, that is like the richest, most velvety, delicious time of year. People always ask me, you know, they would say, “How would you describe heaven — in this perfect atmosphere where everything is exactly how you wanted it, how would it be?” And I say, “It would always be December.” So I realized that time of year was over, it was gone, and I was going to have to wait all the way around the will of the year to get back to Autumn and Halloween again. And seeing it in that movie, I just sat down and started crying when it was over, because I realized I was gonna have to make it through another long, hot, brutal summer, you know — prison guards torturing you, there’s nothing to look forward to. It was a horrible feeling. It feels like there’s a hole in you or something. But I can watch that movie now, and automatically feel that time of year again."

Source
  
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis | 2009 | Children
8
8.2 (60 Ratings)
Book Rating
Going by publication date the first of CS Lewis's 'Chronicles of Narnia' series; this is the second by the authors own reading-order guide and the most famous of the entire series.

It is, of course, very easy to see the Christian allegory throughout the course of the story, which tells of how Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy first came to the magical land of Narnia (through the wardrobe): a land which is under perpetual snow and ice due to the White Witch - always Winter; never Christmas - before being freed by the children under the guidance and with the help of Aslan the Lion.
  
The Greatest Showman (2017)
The Greatest Showman (2017)
2017 | Drama, Musical
I was very much behind the times with this one and only watched it last Christmas. I'd heard many times over how brilliant it was that I was almost scared to watch it as usually films fail to live up to the hype. I can't say I was completely bowled over by it but I did thoroughly enjoy it. The songs were amazing, the "Never Enough" scene actually gave me goosebumps and I kept rewinding it to watch again. That was the stand out moment for me. Not sure whether I would watch it again but I have bought the soundtrack and listen to it regularly.
  
Bad Santa 2 (2016)
Bad Santa 2 (2016)
2016 | Comedy
Meh
The original movie was a real guilty pleasure. Dark, twisted, funny and something very different from the million other saccharine and sentimental Christmas movies out there. The sequel is unfortunately very disappointing, it seems to think just consistently swearing is an acceptable substitute for actual humour . The writing is very weak and none of the actors look like they want to be there. It feels like a contractual obligation and a waste of talented actors like Billy Bob Thornton and Kathy Bates. The delightfully weird sandwich obsessed Thurman Murman does provide a bit of amusement and a few callbacks to the superior original but overall this is a poor sequel.
  
    Amharic Bible

    Amharic Bible

    Book and Education

    (0 Ratings) Rate It

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    The perfect reference to the Amharic Bible. Now you can take your bible with you where ever you go. ...