Taking place on Christmas Eve, the film is set in Bailey Downs, a seemingly bucolic town that is still reeling from the horrific tragedy exactly one year earlier when two teenagers were found brutally slaughtered in the basement of the local high school, a building that previously housed a convent with its own set of unsavory secrets. Because the crime remains unsolved, ambitious teen Molly (the wonderfully-named Zoe De Grand Maison) convinces fellow classmates Dylan (Shannon Kook), Ben (Alex Ozerov) and Caprice (Amy Forsyth) to sneak into the building with a video camera as part of a class assignment. At the last second, Caprice cannot go because she is forced to go on a trip with her loathsome family to pay a surprise visit to a rich great-aunt and their general misbehavior attracts the attentions of Krampus, the legendary anti-Santa who comes out on Christmas Eve to punish the wicked in brutal fashion.
Meanwhile, the cop who found himself in the middle of the investigation of the previous year's slaughter (Adrian Holmes) goes out with his wife (Olunike Adeliyi) and young son to an area clearly marked "No Trespassing" to cut down a Christmas tree for their apartment. Alas, the kid disappears for a few minutes and when he does return, he begins acting very strange. While all of this is going on, Santa Claus (George Buza) is at the North Pole preparing for his annual ride when his elves become infected with something that turns them into violent undead psychopaths that he must dispatch in gory fashion. Presiding over the various narratives is Dangerous Dan (William Shatner), an increasingly inebriated DJ pulling a double holiday shift who rants about the true meaning of Christmas while supplying increasingly dire tidbits about some strangeness down at the local mall where the station's put-upon weatherman is taking part in a food drive.
Unlike most horror anthologies, which offer up one complete story after another (a la "Creepshow"), "A Christmas Horror Story" tells its tales by inter-cutting its various narratives along the lines of what Robert Altman did in bringing the stories of Raymond Carver to the screen in "Short Cuts." Considering that the film is the product of three separate directors and four screenwriters, this is a fairly ambitious approach to take and the end result is surprisingly coherent in the way that it brings the various stories together. The problem is that by doing it this way, the film is constantly undercutting its own ability to generate any real suspense because whenever one of the stories begins to generate any real head of steam, viewers are jerked into another one and the whole process starts over again. After a while, the whole thing just becomes an exercise in frustration and by the end, the only real suspense comes from the question of how the film is going to ultimately reconcile the seemingly out-of-place tale of Santa fighting off hordes of zombie elves with the others. (It does, amazingly, but while the solution might have seemed like a nifty bit of outrageous dark humor on the page, it just doesn't quite play that way on its feet.)
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