Following the death of her brother, a woman and her friends return to her childhood home to check into the situation and see what's going on, eventually finding the cause of everything to be Krampus returning to exact revenge for an earlier transgression and must get away alive.
This was a genuinely solid and watchable genre effort. One of the better elements here is the rather strong setup that provides this with a workable means of getting to the action. This is mostly accomplished with the backstory about the parents' murder anniversary supposedly causing the murder of the brother that gets them to the house that the audience knows the truth about. This provides the kind of storyline connection to the creatures' appearance as the folklore motivation offers a fine connection with everything. That manages to provide this one with some rather nice attack scenes involving the creature sneaking up on people and knocking them off. The opening is suspenseful enough with the victim of the belief it's there leading to a decent cat-and-mouse sequence to start this off, while a series of quick ambushes elsewhere in the woods provides the setup to the finale where it crashes the group at the house. This is where it hits its stride offering some solid action around the house in a more urgent matter, providing some likable features here. There are some issues to be had with this one. The biggest drawback to the film is the completely unnecessary and overdone sideplot involving the cheating boyfriend on one of the group members. Not only is this exceptionally lazy as a means of making him far less sympathetic so his outcome doesn't mean anything, but it's so cliched and doesn't do anything to help advance any storyline within here as it follows through so many expected points. Dealing with all of this also causes the pace to stumble as the dull play out of these scenes is hard to get through. The other small factor to this one comes from the rather obvious low-budget limitations that crop up throughout the film. Not only is the static pace and lack of action here dead giveaways, but the single-location setup that requires everything to take place without anything fancy to take place is an obvious one as well. Also, the stiff and immobile mask for the creature which has an effective look and design but never fails to remind what it really is, which all combine together with the other factors to bring this one down.
Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Violence.
