13 SLAYS TILL XMAS Is Santa Slashing Holiday Fun!

Sentient, killer Christmas trees, overzealous Santas, murderous reindeer, and a host of other Christmas themed baddies join forces to create the anthology, 13 Slays Till Xmas (2020). Written and directed by a bevy of talented filmmakers, 13 Slays Till Xmas is by far one of the best-structured anthologies I have seen from other recent anthologies, and further enjoys hosting often darkly comedic, diversely casted, and boldly violent and gory short movies. And violent is almost an understatement for this movie, the final scene nearly dropping my jaw to the floor and had me screaming fuck yeah.

13 Slays Till Xmas takes place over one Christmas Eve in a town plagued by an annual Christmas-time serial killer. A bar in town remains open, and this Christmas Eve, a group of locals decide to tell two scary stories each to pass the night indoors in seemingly safe numbers. As the night goes on, a priest (Jay Woolston), a guy in a Santa suit (Joshua Cornelius), a police officer (Christopher Bower), a teacher (Kevin Roach), another local (David E. McMahon), a bartender (Katie Stewart), and a mysterious stranger (Alyssa Rhoads) exchange increasingly violent tales that are as cheerfully f*cked up as the holiday itself.

It’s rare an anthology can pull off having a group of shorts that are both well-executed in their own right as well as make sense together. Like with most other anthologies, 13 Slays Till Xmas succeeds at one but not quite the other, successfully putting together a surprisingly coherent storyline, even crafting the filler arc of the main anthology story in a way where it securely ties each short together.

However, a few of the short movies chosen for 13 Slays Till Xmas are a bit on the mediocre side–these instances of a dip in production quality being shot-on-video looking shorts. Each of these shorts either suffered from woefully amateur acting or cliche premise. There are four in particular I personally would cut, either for particularly poor acting or because they barely meet the Christmas theme. I understand why these misplaced ones were included, though, because they’re actually some of the best of the bunch.

The shorts that stood out to me began around the midpoint and thankfully continued until the end, with one particularly dark, cute, and bitterly funny brother/sister one worth waiting for. Another standout for me layered with surprises while gleefully ghoulish in its gore revelry involved a killer reindeer–loved it. It’s unfortunate 13 Slays Till Xmas focuses on quantity and not quality in order to meet the 13 kill count, I can only assume, to be able to use the ominous-sounding “13” in the title. Some of the shorts aren’t completely Christmas themed save for holiday decorations in the background–I suspect it depends whether you consider Die Hard a Christmas Movie or not.

Though the first half of the film was a bit tiresome for me to get through, the second half of the film made the experience wholly enjoyable. The 13 Slays Till Xmas team plays a dangerous game stacking the best shorts in the second half, because who’s to know the best is yet to come after the first few questionable mini-movies. Furthermore, using a short as the cold opening of the movie affected the flow and coherency in initiating the story of 13 Slays Till Xmas for my viewing, and so it may have made more sense to include it within the body of the movie rather than the head, but at the very least 13 Slays Till Xmas certainly ends exponentially better than it begins, going out in an impressive blaze of vengeful violence and juicy gore.

Pre-order the Blu-ray here.