Looking for a Christmas Robot Slasher Movie?
Tired of Elf and Polar Express? Feeling Grinch-y? Maybe it’s time for Christmas Bloody Christmas- a Christmas slasher robot horror movie with a sly touch of realism.
Drugs, sex, language, violence- pretty much everything you don’t want the kids or grandparents to see-but it is combined with some good special effects and a couple of swipes at Blumhouse studios and Tinder.
It’s Christmas Eve and the foul mouthed, party girl owner of a hip record store is looking to get drunk and get laid. She is hanging out with her friends, a young couple who own a toy store replete with a robot Santa, and her wannabe boy toy employee, who secretly holds the deepest love and respect (and lust) for her. The toy store owners are so busy with their shop (and each other) that they miss the announcement that the robot Santas manufactured by a big military contractor have been recalled because they are buggy.
Buggy as in reverting to the default setting of hunting and killing everyone in sight. You know the rest of the story, though there are lots of nice twists and shout-outs to other movies- especially the Terminator with the lead named Sarah and eventually blasting the Santa into a shiny metal skeleton crawling toward her.
A nicety of the plot is the bits of realism. Once the robot Santa starts running amok, no one is that surprised- not because of bad acting but because the characters share the same cynicism we do about robot safety. After all, who trusts large defense contractors to do anything besides making a profit? (By the way, the novel Zed humorously imagines the frightening consequences of military security robots being repurposed for civilian police work.) Or large corporations to thoroughly debug their code, with Boeing and the autonomous car developers as recent examples of the “oopsie, sorry!” approach to programming safety-critical code.
It is feasible to have robots take out everything moving in a specified kill zone, the South Korean border has used robots for years. The robot Santa seems a bit suspicious because it just starts killing without a specific command (would be nice to get far away from it first) and without boundaries. But, hey, it is a slasher movie.
Check out more books and movies- and science- especially:
And my books:
Commentaires