The Mean One: A Bad Banana with a Greasy Black Peel!

One Christmas Eve, a young Cindy (Krystle Martin) wakes up and finds a green furry thing dressed as Santa, removing their presents and Christmas decorations, Cindy then gives him her Santa necklace, but before this could melt the monster’s frozen heart, Cindy’s mother awakens and in the ensuing fight, her mother is accidentally killed.  Twenty years later, Cindy returns to Newville with her father to sell the family home and for closure.  The town no longer celebrates Christmas and any attempt to do so, is met with a swift and gruesome death at the claws of “The Mean One”.  When tragedy strikes Cindy’s family again, the Mayor (Amy Schumacher) and Sheriff Hooper (Erik Baker) attempt to quiet Cindy up as they fear the town panicking over the Christmas Killer returning after 20 years.  The only people who seem to believe Cindy and are willing to help are Deputy Burke (Chase Mullins) and Doc Zeus (John Bigham). Can the trio save the town and themselves from the murderous rampage of The Mean One?  Watch and find out!

“Why Santa? Why?” I ask, “did they make this movie?”.  The premise is actually interesting, basically asking, what if in the Dr. Suess story, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Grinch did not get saved by the love and kindness of Cindyloo Who, but instead became a murderous monster terrorizing the small town?  The concept works quite well, unfortunately the execution was abysmal on so many levels but if I had to sum it up in one word, “inconsistent” would be it.  Every aspect of this film had bright shining moments that are brought down by terrible moments.  The script, for example, has some wonderful witty dialogue.  The narrator’s rhyming dark version of Dr. Suess’s story was fun and the clever way they got around calling the creature, “the Grinch” due to copyright infringement, was entertaining.  I did chuckle and out right laugh at some of the dialogue, but the storyline was a mishmash of scenes strung together by a loose thread with little to no transitions.  It is hard to tell if this was due to the authors or the editors, but either way, it ruined the rhythm of the movie and made the film feel much, much, muuuuch longer than it actually was. The lighting and visual effects were also less than exemplary, with many of the murder scenes happening in full daylight, which just felt odd and much of the gore looked fake.

The acting is possibly the worse aspect of the film, Krystle Martin’s Cindy was sort of annoying and did not feel genuine.  Where she is not the worse actress, by far, that I have seen in a horror film, and had some good scenes especially with Chase Mullins, but her overall acting was uneven with her good scenes really highlighting how bad she was in her other scenes.  I did like Chase as Detective Burke and Eric Baker’s Sheriff Hooper they both brought a sense of realness to their characters.  Detective Burke is a good, kind, and tender man who is handsome, but a bit clumsy around women he is attracted to, and it is easy for the audience to relate to his character.  David Howard Thornton plays the “Grinch”, even though they cannot call him that in the movie.  He plays the character as a murderous Jim Carey styled creature, and that could have worked in a more stylized version of the same film, but here it just stood out as kind of over the top comparatively.  I wasn’t really expecting much from this film, and I didn’t get much, which is kind of a shame, because it had a lot of potential.