Okay, so, imagine you’re Patrick Bergin. One day, you’re playing Robin Hood. The next day, you’re co-starring with Julia Roberts, the biggest movie star in the world, in Sleeping with the Enemy. Life is good. Then, in the blink of an eye, thirty years goes by and you’re starring in a movie about a six-foot-tall sentient homicidal nutcracker. I guess there are worse ways to pay the rent.
Bergin plays a Russian toy shop owner who literally twirls his mustache, so the audience knows he’s evil. He also ominously hums “The Nutcracker Suite” while rubbing his hands together like a villain in a silent film. That is to say, he’s pretty great in this.
Bergin tells a long, confusing origin story of the Nutcracker before selling one to a babe who just broke up with her boyfriend. She buys it as a Christmas present for her auntie, whom she’s spending Christmas with. It doesn’t take long before auntie’s prized six-foot-tall nutcracker comes to life and begins knocking off her relatives.
The deaths, it must be said, are solid. One person is murdered by an ice skate, and another is strangled with Christmas garland. We also get a great scene where the nutcracker not only cracks a guy’s nuts but rips them off too. Admittedly, the rest of the movie is kind of ho-hum, but this scene is badass enough to boost it an extra Half Star.
I guess I should’ve known this was going to be better than expected because it was produced by Mark L. Lester. Yeah, THAT Mark L. Lester, the man that gave the world Commando and Showdown in Little Tokyo. It was also directed by Rebecca Matthews, the director of the greatest fake Amityville movie ever made, Amityville Witches. With a pedigree like that (not to mention Bergin’s fun performance), Nutcracker Massacre should make for breezy fun for seasonal horror film fanatics.
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