Christmas Bloody Christmas

It’s Terminator: Christmas Edition, with tongue planted so far in cheek, it’s punching through. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but not by much. Terminator is a slasher movie, but gore and ridiculousness are never the goal. This movie takes the premise, puts a Santa hat on a T-1000, and recognizes how dumb that is, so it steers into the skid. The blood and violence is way over the top. Once the carnage starts, it never relents. It’s self-aware and here to be dumb and noisy and silly and fun, and it knows that, and not in a winking, in on the joke way, but in that way that just embraces the concept and goes for it unapologetically. I appreciate it when a movie puts its cards on the table. It does have some flaws. The dialogue is ROUGH. Like, barbed wire-wrapped sandpaper rough. The first 30 minutes of this movie use the word fuck more times than a Rob Zombie movie does in two hours. There is some dumb leaps in logic, like the killer Santa robot being able to split someone in half from skull to waist with a single axe swing but needing a good half dozen swings to get through a front door. And there’s as many false endings as Return Of The King, and there did not need to be. But I still had fun with it. I got what I expected out of it; a crazy premise, mayhem, excellent gore effects, and a great Final Girl. It’s not a paragon of the genre, but it isn’t trying to be. It is exactly what it says on the tin, nothing more, nothing less.