The Killing Tree (2022)

directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield

UK

73 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I wasn't planning on reviewing this at all but it turned out to be such an insane movie that I have to get my thoughts about it out in some format other than just a couple of notes. This will probably be a shorter review, mostly because you absolutely cannot take this movie seriously and therefore I don't have much real analysis of it to do.

The crop of godawful Christmas horror movies is one of the things I look forward to the most every December. I've gone through most of the Christmas horror considered to be "classics" and so every season I get to watch whatever brand-new trash people came up with over the past year. The vast majority of these films can be put into one of two categories: Either they're just bad and nobody tried to make them good; they're low-effort, low-rent affairs that look bad and feel bad to watch. Or they're bad, but the idea behind them is so bonkers that the end product is something like The Killing Tree. Before going into it, all I knew was that this movie was about a guy who gets reincarnated as a Christmas tree with a grudge, and as it turns out that's literally all it's about. At 73 minutes it's mercifully short and gets everything done that it needs to do. Basically: A man, years prior to the film, committed several spree killings along with his wife in the name of somehow bringing attention to "the true meaning of Christmas" in a society that they see as corrupt and full of sin. He is executed for this, and in the present day, his wife, grief-stricken and bitter, performs a ritual to bring him back to life and get revenge on the living relatives of those they both murdered, who are, to her, responsible for his death. For this ritual she apparently needs an object of "similar mass" to her late husband, and for whatever reason this ends up being a plastic Christmas tree. The ritual goes haywire somewhere along the line, and her husband ends up in the body of an animate, murderous Christmas tree. (I'd like to note that the first Christmas tree I found online at Walmart says it weighs seventeen pounds. Similar mass?)

The tree is far and away the best thing about this movie. I feel a deep sympathy for whoever was stuffed inside the tree suit because it looks like the most uncomfortable thing ever invented. As far as I can tell it looks like they took a morph suit and wrapped it in fake fir garland and lights until it resembled, very authentically, a Christmas tree that is shuffling around and complaining at people. You can't see a face hole or anything of the human inside the suit - the density of the foliage is quite impressive (certainly more than most artificial trees in real life). For more strenuous scenes, a CGI model is used, and it's not even worth mentioning how obvious it is that this is CGI; the pattern of the lights is completely different, they're not fooling anyone at all, I'm not even sure they were trying. We'll move on from that, it's not a big deal. The tree also has tentacles, for some reason, that I guess are extensions of its bark; it/he uses these to ambulate sometimes but mostly just to rip people in half. If nothing else, this movie is worth a watch for how whole-hog it goes with the concept of a sentient and hateful Christmas tree.

Other than that, it's... really not good. Surprisingly the acting is not entirely terrible, but the script leaves much to be desired, and you can't actually hear half of what anyone is saying in this movie. It sounds like they clipped everyone's mic to their socks. The main character is the daughter of two of the treeman's victims, still troubled by the murder of her parents in the house that she's living (and partying) in. The peripheral cast consists of her friends, all of whom get a decent amount of backstory for literally having nothing at all to do with the plot. I do commend this, because I think it would probably have been worse if the main character had felt like she existed in a vacuum with no other people around her, but I wonder if there might have been a slightly more subtle way to go about it. Each character is introduced along with their Designated Character Trait: One of them is a sex worker! Two of them are a couple! One of them is really weirdly insistent that one half of said couple is cheating! Despite all being friends, the main character really has a vibe of just wanting to be left alone, so the characters don't interact in much of a meaningful way. They just kind of all exist with their own problems.

This is a poorly made film in almost every respect, mostly in the pacing, which feels awkward due to the jumps back and forth between the present day and the past that don't feel necessary. Like I said, everything that doesn't take place in the past takes place entirely at a holiday party in what seems like an absolutely huge and labyrinthine house. There's serious issues with the audio, and the color grading changes so much from scene to scene that it feels like they had two different cinematographers who were feuding with each other about how the movie should look. The script is a meandering mess, and the villain falls victim to that thing where he spends so much time vocally relishing being evil and explaining all his evil plans that it leaves him open to attack while he's pontificating. His and his wife's motive for killing a bunch of people is never elaborated upon besides sort of a generic loathing for modern society. That's not the only thing about this movie that's disjointed and badly put together. But there's something I still really like about it. I can't quite pin down its vibe. I don't know if it's trying to play itself seriously and is just so bad that it looks goofy or if it was meant to be a little silly, but I liked it, or at least I think I did. I'm just grateful to see a new Christmas-themed horror movie that isn't somebody dressed as Santa killing people.