Carnage for Christmas is one of three Alice Maio Mackay low budget horror flicks to hit Shudder this December. This is her fifth (rather short) full length movie… and she’s 19. So even if the budget is vanishingly small and the whole production feel amateur, that’s still five more movies than I’ve never even tried to make.

The film is about a trans woman true-crime podcaster who returns to the small town where she grew up and gets mixed up in a local murder mystery. It seems someone has been on a murder spree… but the cops aren’t particularly encouraged to investigate.

The killer dresses like Santa and is named The Toymaker so you’d be forgiven if you thought this was a Christmas slasher film… but it’s not. Don’t be fooled by the marketing… the movie is a murder mystery well before its any kind of slasher. And don’t think it’s actually a Christmas movie either… it is set around Christmas and the killer is a Santy Claus, but that’s wildly incidental to the rest of the film.

The movie is very visually low budget and the acting is a mixed bag (happily, the lead is fine). I didn’t like Mackay’s one other film I’ve seen (So Vam) but this one was reasonably solid as both a straight up murder investigation and an LGBTQ film in terms of theme and representation. I can’t say I was fully engaged by the whodunit, but in that it dedicates itself to the murder is interesting.

I’m not gonna say I was amazed by the flick but it makes its theme matter and the fact it buckles down into an actual detective story was a plus. Much different than I expected… though I could be forgiven for expecting what was advertised.

Score: 70