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Krampus: The Return starts off with an over-extracted voice duel at some warzone that somewhat resembles an unrealistic fantasy period of some German history. For instance, a voiceover is used to exaggerate the purportedly awful scenario where one gets the feeling of fae magic gone wrong. It is reminiscent of a war happening between the people of Germany’s Black Forest and thousands of Krampus. Fast forward four hundred years later, the fracas appropriation resting in a weird treaty allows for the death of Harold (Osian Dixon, Dinosaur Hotel 2, Curse of Humpty Dumpty 2) an English man with lowered mental faculties. There have also been crude intonations laid onto Harold while giving a narration on his, more tragic than anything else, virtuous story.
Some of the final tasks to which the young lady Lisa had assigned him before his passing was blowing the dude off. Given that a suicide is a sensitive subject, Lisa going off on him is indeed troubling. Now, she is in fact grieving for the act of blowing him off. To come to terms with her grieving, along with her boyfriend Ross (Dan Robins, Amityville Scarecrow 2, Conjuring the Genie 2) and some others named Paula (Charlie Esquér, Shockwaves, Dragon Fury 2), Nikki (Amber Doig-Thorne, Demons at Dawn, Heropanti 2) and Jane (Irina Gubacheva) go towards the family in order to help the estate with all the funeral matters.
This looks familiar,’ does this capture the attention of Krishna Jeet. Indeed, Writer Ben Daly (Toothfairy: Queen of Pain, Toothfairy 5) and director David Gregory (Curse of Bloody Mary, Vampire Flies) have taken some of the standard templates that Scott Jeffrey, the producer has (Nutcracker Massacre, Firenado) and shifted the setting of the story to an isolated estate rather than a mainstream city to have the characters killed off. I do want to add, even with Jeffrey’s participation and the title of the movie, Krampus: The Return is a stand-alone movie, not a continuation of Mother Krampus.
In keeping with the formula, there’s also a great deal of time between the opening kill and other action happening. In this instance, it’s the death of a prostitute who is paired with a client whose only purpose for being in the film absorbs to increase the body count. Not that she is the only ho in the movie, in the next scene Nikki is attempting to seduce a very willing Ross.
Krampus: The Return starts off rather peculiarly; the beast has problems with Lisa’s family, but she is largely left to her own devices apart from a fleeting glimpse of a graveyard. He even manages to find the time to kill some random local who happens to stumble across the dead hooker. To make things worse, our leads are just gabbing away and enjoying soap opera antics like they’re in a different movie altogether.
The Return of Krampus has the elements for a reasonably scary holiday horror film. It’s one of the few movies I’ve seen that features a talkative Krampus. However, everything that comes out from him is utter nonsense. By the time he decided to go after somebody other than random locals, I was already beyond caring. Almost always, it’s only in the last 15 or 20 minutes that it manages to locate itself at the estate, and from there, what follows is predictable and poorly choreographed.
If you thought there is a silver lining in this movie, then it’s the fact that Krampus isn’t CGI and played by Stephen Staley. Seems like the creators were out of budget for prop-making as the rubber suit was very poorly put together. If style and aesthetic are anything to go by, then these shows are set in broad daylight for some very odd reasons. As far as the rest of the effects go, you are actually correct in noting the lack of them. The film has a nasty habit of fading out to black before the murders happen which leads to very little blood and a couple sound effects afterwards.
Once again Scott Jeffrey was provided the opportunity to produce a decent movie again, and, thanks to self-inflicted indifference, the chance was lost once again. It seems like putting effort into correcting ‘the infamous Christman demon’ was not worth the work. At this point, I would inform myself. So I indeed tried to with his movies and the percentage of genre releases making my choice difficult, I was left with no option. So you don’t put yourself through this torture wondering how it even managed to reach production.
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