Movie review: Holiday horror flick ‘Christmas at the Kringles’ should come with gift receipt

“Christmas at the Kringles” ― 1.5 stars

“Christmas at the Kringles” is a Christmas-themed horror flick, being released on Halloween, but largely set on Valentine’s Day, if that gives any indication of the sort of identity crisis this confused movie is going through. Written by Zack Imbrogno, directed by Kevin Lewis, “Christmas at the Kringles” is an action-horror-comedy that should only be a comedy — the action and horror elements are unnecessary, forced and mean-spirited, even for spooky season.

Christmas horror has been around since the advent of cinema. Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” is a ghost story after all, and the earliest slasher films, “Silent Night, Bloody Night,” in 1972, and “Black Christmas” in 1974, utilize the holiday setting for both aesthetic and thematic tension. The ironic juxtaposition between Christmas cheer and bloody terror heightens the stakes for the characters — often people are traveling or alone for the holidays, poignant emotions much higher thanks to the meaning of the day or the dark winter weather.

But in “Christmas at the Kringles,” the Christmas theme is the lowest common denominator, present only as gaudy decoration, creepy song cues and vulgarly reappropriated sayings. In an opening sequence, we witness a woman impaled by a Christmas tree, her severed head plopped atop in lieu of a star. Do we know her? No. Will we? Also no. She serves merely as a cautionary tale imparted halfway through, when it’s already too late for our protagonists. Her grisly demise also lets us, the audience, know that this is a horror movie, because it’s mostly a comedy for the first act.

It really should have stayed a comedy too, especially when the filmmakers have Thomas Lennon and Arden Myrin at their disposal, playing the big baddies. Lennon and Myrin play the Kringle parents, Nick and Carol (of course), who celebrate Christmas year-round and warmly welcome their new neighbors, Mark (Ron Livingston) and Julie (Rachel Bilson) Severson, and their son Bobby (Jake Jewkes). The Seversons are refugees from “The City,” who have decamped to the suburbs in hopes of getting their spark back as a family.

Livingston, playing a cold workaholic in Mark, seems generally perturbed to be there, while Bilson’s Julie, desperate to make her family whole again, also has an air of desperation in her performance. The Seversons are sucked into the Kringles’ orbit, despite warnings from a man-child neighbor, Daryl (Donald Faison), and a drunk mall Santa (Rob Riggle), who speak eerily of the previous inhabitants’ disappearance (presumably, the woman we saw with the tree).

Lennon, a founding member of comedy troupe The State and creator of cult comedy series “Reno 911!,” is a comedic weapon, a cruise missile of targeted timing and hilarious asides. Myrin mostly manages to match him beat for beat, and the pair are quite funny. So why couldn’t this just stay funny, in a kind of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” kind of way? In a nod to that film, Beverly D’Angelo even co-stars as the Kringle matriarch.

Instead, we’re (trick or) treated to a plot about a cult of “joy” into which the Kringles are trying to recruit the new family next door. David Wain appears in a recruitment/brainwashing video as cult leader Noel Tannenbaum. It all starts to feel like a veiled skewering of Scientology for this Hollywood-based bunch, which could be interesting, until they start throwing chain saws and Christmas gimps into the mix. It devolves into a noisy, chaotic and ultimately meaningless bloodbath, simply a means to an end where Bilson gets to kill someone with milk and cookies.

Often, the winter holidays are about forced cheer, and the best Christmas horror movies mine that tension for thrills and chills. Ostensibly, Livingston’s Mark is supposed to be the Grinch, Lennon’s character the jolly old St. Nicholas, their eventual roles reversed as the chain saws accelerate. That’s the idea, at least, but “Christmas at the Kringles” is too disorganized and janky for any of the intended concepts to land, so the filmmakers rely on gore and hacky punch lines to wrap up this lump of coal and pretend it’s a shiny new toy. Alas, anyone would be disappointed to find this one under the tree.

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Rated: R for some strong bloody violence, language and some sexual material

Running time: 1:39

How to watch: In theaters Oct. 30

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