Christmas Presence (2018)

Had an extra day off before Christmas.

Thought I'd check out the new festive releases on Shudder. This is definitely the highlight.

Great Pace, Funny, Creepy Atmosphere, Not what I was expecting but in a good way.

Strongly recommended viewing for any horror film fans! 11/10

Fmovies: "Why Hide?" or "Christmas Presence" is nothing more than your garden variety schlock horror film. The only original thing they did was make the characters all LGBT, but did absolutely nothing with it. The first act had a decent build, where it established the characters in a base line sense. The jokes are cringey and I think they may have implied the main character was a TERF, but nothing ever comes of it. Everything that followed got progressively worse. The antagonistic force in this is each characters worst fear. The group figures this out after a few incidents, but whenever they are targeted, they become oblivious again. The ending is a bad, confused twist, possibly to set up a sequel. Don't waste your time.

I honestly don't know what to say, it's pointless, it has no story, even the end is predictable, that's it, it's garbage.

Christmas Presence fmovies. If you are a horror flick aficionado, then this will provide a good story, good action and really good production value. This is a horror film, has a lot of humor and good character development. I am writing this review because the 1 through 5 ratings are undeserved and seem to be given in response to sexual orientation even though there is no sex seen on screen. This movie has a fresh story to tell that keeps you guessing. A solid six, but I gave it seven because it kept me fully engaged from start to finish.

All horror films are terrible once the plot gets going because everything's so forced for the shock or fore. I thought this was no exception, but at least the bit before that is interesting. It's an unlikely group of characters as friends but it's nice to see people over 25 being treated like sexual, and sexually attractive, beings. All the cast do a good job, even if the leading men ham it up a little. Whatever they did with the colour balance is a nice touch, it's both coldly atmospheric and festive simultaneously. The camera angles aren't boldly innovative but they're effective. Same goes for the soundtrack.

Only, after the predictably interesting start, it didn't get less interesting. I was expecting this to be predictable but it kept me guessing. I'm not going to rave about it but I was pleasantly surprised. It's not Tarkovsky but it's enjoyably spooky.

This is a mighty thin sliver of a holiday horror movie. It's set at Christmas, but its Christmasy part amounts to a group of friends getting drunk and modeling newly gifted underwear. And this is the movie's best sequence!

The rest is a sketchy, by-the-numbers mishmash of paganism, mean ghosts, and supernatural mind games, the confluence of which seems to have bored the writer, the director, and the cast. It didn't do much for me either.

I did like the chubby, cheese-making, shotgun-toting lesbian character. This role was well-written and the actress who played it seemed present when she came on screen. Everyone else seemed absent, as if their minds were elsewhere. Given this movie's uninspired plot, I can't much blame them.

All in all, despite having come all the way from the UK, this movie leaves little in its wake. It's as if it never fully arrived in the first place