Photo from Briarcliff Entertainment
From Jeremy Kibler
Any promise in Christmas at the Kringles pretty much starts and stops with its skeletal outline of a premise involving relentlessly cheerful, Christmas-obsessed neighbors who are a few bulbs short of a full strand. Sloppy direction, a strenuously unfunny script, and one-note characters let down an enthusiastic, comedically gifted ensemble. If audiences thought Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man was one of the biggest horror-comedy duds of the year, they should have waited two months.
After a quick, grisly kill off the top in which a screaming woman’s decapitated head gets used like a Christmas tree ornament, Christmas at the Kringles actually goes downhill from there. To call it a “horror-comedy,” though, is kind of a stretch, as director Kevin Lewis (Willy’s Wonderland, that slightly better Five Nights at Freddy’s variation with Nicolas Cage) and writer Zack Imbrogno (Slayers) straddle the two extremes none too effectively. Ultimately, what’s happening on screen and how it’s all cut together feel like a fever dream (and not only because there are a few hallucinatory sequences) but because everything feels so flat and slapdash.
The week before Christmas, married couple Mark (Ron Livingston) and Julie Severson (Rachel Bilson) have left the city for the suburbs in hopes that it will be a better fit for all of them, especially their son Bobby (Jake Jewkes). Then they meet their next-door neighbors, the Kringle family. Nick (Thomas Lennon) and Carol Kringle (Arden Myrin) are…unique, beyond aggressively wacky and friendly with three creepy children named Rudolph, Merry, and Elf. It’s Christmas all the time in their household, even when it’s Valentine’s Day, but what exactly is up with these kooky neighbors who badly want to be the Severson family’s friends? By the time Mark has received more than one dire warning about his neighbors, their plan of merry mayhem has already begun.
Livingston is usually a reliable everyman with a deadpan, laconic delivery, but the actor (even when playing an emotionally distant workaholic) seems visibly checked out, while Bilson has to thanklessly play the nagging wife who at least gets one cathartic kill under her belt involving milk and cookies. As the spirited baddies, Lennon and Myrin are in improv heaven, going all the way over the tippy-top. Barely veiling their demented mania behind Christmas carols and toothy smiles, their carte-blanche energy might be the only element in the movie that manages to amuse, if only occasionally.
While it seems like favors were called in, the filmmakers have more supporting characters than they know what to do with, wasting even more talented people. There’s Donald Faison, as a stoner neighbor who still lives with his mama; Rob Riggle, as a drunk, cigar-chomping mall Santa who might be Mark’s only hope; Beverly D’Angelo, mostly here as a bit of stunt casting, is woefully underused, as the neighbors’ stroke-suffering, German-accented matriarch Mama Kringle; and David Wain, doing his best Jeffrey Combs impression in video recordings as Noel Tannebaum.
The year-round commercialization of a religious holiday and toxic positivity of suburbia are perfect bedfellows for a darkly comic Christmas horror movie, but Christmas at the Kringles misfires on almost every level. This is a tonal disaster, wildly lurching between extremes and straining for broad, darkly absurd laughs. Instead, it all comes across as grating when it should be creepy and subversive, exhausting its welcome well before the chainsaw war, the wrestling match with a Christmas gimp, or the end of its interminable 109-minute runtime."
There are plenty of better options for Christmas counter-programming, including Violent Night, 2022’s “Die Hard with Santa” that provided Beverly D’Angelo the rare opportunity to gamely play a foul-mouthed matriarch. This perfunctory genre hybrid plays like a fake movie trailer stretched thinner than the dignity of your drunk uncle after two too many eggnogs.
Rating: 1/5
Christmas at the Kringles is currently in theaters.
