The Sacrifice Game is a Shudder original Christmas horror home invasion/slasher type thing. It’s about a couple of girls and a teacher at a boarding school over Christmas… you might even call them Holdovers. On Christmas Eve, a gang of Satanists show up at the door planning a bloody sacrifice.

I was rooting for this flick over and over and over again while watching it continuously self-sabotaged. It’s well-produced, fairly well acted, and it has a fun twist on a formula. But it suffers from major pacing issues and a reveal that comes too early… and keeps coming over and over again.

Every scene in the flick is moody and oppressive (and often bloody) but they also run too long and repeat information over and over again. We, the audience, are pleasantly surprised by the twist and every character in the flick has to, in turn, be surprised too.

They took a familiar home invasion/crazy cultist premise, added a cool idea, and then just kept spinning their wheels in order to make it to ninety minutes. This is just another case of a movie dragging out its premise instead of settling on a crisp forty-five minute short.

The acting is a mixed bag too. Newcomer Georgia Acken pulls off a cool, interesting performance… she’d make a great Wednesday Addams. Other actors (including Mena Massoud) overact their mania… sometimes making the movie feel more B grade horror than it looks or feels.

Sacrifice Game tries very hard, very earnestly to be an effective, moody, bloody Christmas horror but kept running itself into the ground. I wanted to love it, then I wanted to like it, then I was just hoping it could hang on by its fingertips. There’s more tedium in the film than good, but there is good.

Score: 71