Carnage for Christmas review: sleigh queens and bloody screams

Do you remember when you were a little tyke, maybe around two or three years old, and being forced to sit on Santa’s lap at the local shopping complex? Here’s this old bearded stranger in a red suit, and your loving parents are just handing you over without a second thought.

What the hell? you might’ve thought (perhaps in less complex words), am I going to die now? Queue screaming, crying, and maybe even pooing yourself (I guarantee mall Santas have seen – and smelled – it all). All for a bloody photo that’s probably fading away in a forgotten scrapbook.

At its core, Alice Maio Mackay’s latest film Carnage for Christmas taps into these universal childhood fears around the old man in the red suit, and the overall inherent strangeness of Santa Claus.

In the film, true crime podcaster and amateur sleuth Lola is visiting her hometown for the first time since transitioning. After hearing tell of the return of a vengeful killer called The Toymaker, which she has her own personal connection with, she begrudgingly returns to fictional suburb Purdan.

Not a day after she arrives, the murders start piling up, and now all signs point to her being suspect number one. Armed with a podcast mic and a gang of ragtag queer friends, Lola’s gotta solve this mystery before ending up a victim herself. Queue screaming, crying, and maybe even pooing yourself!

Though it’s already out on streaming (Prime Video), attendees of the Mardi Gras Film Fest will have a chance to see Alice Maio Mackay’s Carnage for Christmas on the big screen this February in Sydney, which they should do – regardless of it being two months after Christmas. It’s already bizarre to celebrate the wintery holiday in summer, so who says we can’t have festive gore flicks all year round?

Watch the trailer for Carnage for Christmas

Carnage for Christmas opens on Lola recording an episode of her murder mystery podcast, which sounds so good I wish it were a real thing I could subscribe to. I mean that literally – the sound production on this film, lead by Shanna Polley and Pat Hornby, is beautiful, and perfectly compliments the expectedly sharp, witty script penned by Mackay and frequent collaborator Ben Pahl Robinson.

No time is wasted getting into the exposition, which leads to the film’s standout moment for me: a gorgeously animated sequence, rendered only in black, white and red, that recounts Lola’s childhood trauma of entering a ‘haunted house’, believed by townsfolk to belong to local horror legend The Toymaker, with her friends – and discovering a real dead body in there.

The Toymaker comes with a robust mythos: a man dressed in Santa’s classic red velvet and fur-lined suit, wearing a makeshift mask and carrying a knife to slice and dice his victims as he pleases. There’s even a creepy children’s rhyme: ‘Toy Maker, Toy Maker, crawl up from hell, show me where you buried Nell, I promise I won’t tell!’ It’s a winner of a setup, but as the film goes on, too many ideas start to spoil the fun.

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As is typical of Mackay’s body of work, Carnage deals boldly with themes of trans coming-of-age, transphobia, and trans eroticisation – the latter of which includes ‘chasers’, i.e. people who fetishise trans folk and ‘chase’ them for sexual fulfilment.

The frank way these topics are discussed in her films is certainly refreshing, and I particularly loved the way Lola sassed back to the transphobic cops. There are times, though, when the heavy-handedness of these lessons can detract from the film’s other strengths, like the incredible production design and visual effects work.

Keen-eyed viewers may notice similarities in the 90s TV serial-style editing + manic fluoro VFX to Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker. It’s no coincidence: Drew is a good friend of Mackay’s, and she came on to edit this film remotely from the US, as well as lend her voice talents to a brief news segment. When a director and an editor vibe well together it naturally produces a good result, and we can see the evidence of this here.

Like Joker, which was an obvious homage to flamboyant DC villains, Carnage also wears its influences proudly on its sleeve, immediately evoking IT with its band of children facing something horrific dressed as a friendly, recognisable figure. There’s also more than a touch of David Lynch in there, and a generous helping of Buffy, which becomes super apparent once Lola is researching The Toymaker in the old library.

While unfocused and questionably-acted at times (Mackay employs here the same familiar faces we have seen in her other films), Carnage for Christmas is still a hell of a lot of fun, and a worthy watch at any time of the year. A final-girl moment with a drag queen and her oversized features had me howling.

Carnage for Christmas is young trans filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay’s fifth feature, and its blood-splattering, neon-flashing, hyper-stylised and overtly campy ways mean that it fits in nicely with her previously filmography (see: T-Blockers, Satranic Panic).

On the surface, it’s a rather shallow trash-fest that turns Christmas into a nightmare in the same way that Terrifier and Krampus do – but etched just below that, much like Lola’s secret discovery in Act One, is a film that goes deep on trauma and (literal) skeletons in the closet.

Carnage for Christmas screens at the Mardi Gras Film Festival on 22 February – check out the details here.