Now I have a killer Santa slasher on the list with “To All a Goodnight” (1980); a truly bad little horror film that I simply find truly enjoyable. It fits well within the genre I’ve been covering for the past two weeks of Cult-Christmas classics.
The ultimate Cult-Christmas flick belongs to a movie that’s simply titled “Black Christmas” (1974). A low-budget Canadian effort that didn’t receive much fanfare when initially released; it has gained near immortal status among horror buffs ever since and for many viewers, like myself, it’s required viewing every holiday season.
Continuing with my „Cult-Christmas“ countdown we come to a different kind of beast; „Christmas Evil“ (1980).
Like most film lovers I have a batch of Christmas movies I watch to get me in the mood. These include the classics like; „It‘s a Wonderful Life“ (1946), „A Christmas Story“ (1983), „Christmas Vacation“ (1989) and such. But November has evolved into the month where the dark side of Christmas is explored with a few Cult-Christmas flicks. They‘re not all good but they are pretty much unmissable this time of year in my household.
It was short and sweet; 4 films and 13 episodes and the Man from Atlantis vanished. Patrick Duffy hit it big in „Dallas“ but his interest with the character persisted and the actor published a novel in 2016 where he covered his origins. Duffy explained that if the novel would sell in large numbers he would be interested in doing a trilogy about this aquatic man who‘s possibly from Atlantis.
The episode is fast paced, quite funny on occasion and, as said, features real villains who are quite menacing. Duffy is once again terrific.
This next-to-last episode is pretty good. Nothing new here but it’s fast paced, somewhat imaginative and those villains are a bit less cartoonish than previous ones.
“Imp” isn’t a painful chore to sit through. It’s fairly entertaining and everyone involved gets to act a little silly and it’s somewhat funny.
It’s quite clear (and has been for a number of episodes) that the series had a huge identity crisis and didn’t know what it was aiming for. Also here is the late, hulking Ted Cassidy who gives this material more actual quality acting than it deserves.
