User Reviews

A murderer is running loose through the streets of London, hunting down men dressed as Santa and killing them all in different, and extremely violent, fashions.

Inspector Harris has decided to take on the unenviable task of tracking down the psychopath, but he's going to have his work cut out for him.

Only the suspicious reporter, Giles, seems to offer the Inspector any promising leads......

Well this film is an oddity to come from the UK. A slasher movie that would sit at home comfortably with the more iconic slasher films of the eighties. And what makes it work, is the dingy feel that the film has, and makes London look bedraggled and worn throughout. A long way away from films like The Long Good Friday.

It's cheaply made, funny for all the wrong reasons, and the payoff at the end is pretty hilarious.

But this film is stuck in 1984, but it looks like it was filmed in the late seventies.

Characters are your atypical fare from the golden age of sexism, and the killers motives are over the top, but sound.

If you are into Christmas based horror films, this a fun entry to the genre.

Everyone else will hate it though.....

To say Don't Open Till Christmas is a classic is really stretching it. To say it is a bad film is unjust. The movie is much more entertaining than The Silent Night Deadly Night trilogy. Edmund Purdom stars as a police inspector on the lookout for a psycho who kills people who dress up as Santa. Seems when a young lad, the psycho saw his Daddy dressed as Santa doing the nasty with a party guest, and seeing Daddy accidentally killing Mommy when discovered. A few twists and turns, and not to mention a Godawful cameo of Caroline Munro performing a pop number and discovering a dead Santa makes this film one of a kind. I'm kind of curious why anybody with half a mind would dress up as Santa in public with all the murders occurring. Then again, if these victims didn't dress up as Santa, we wouldn't have a movie. To some, that might be a good thing. To me, this film is a suitable sleaze warm-up to my fave Xmas terror films, Night Train Murders, Silent Night, Bloody Night, Black Christmas and of course, Christmas Evil. To Hell with the Silent Night Deadly Night series.

The London streets are running red. . . with blood and velvet! A masked psychopath is roaming the city violently slaughtering every Santa-dressed person he can find. As the death toll rises, it's up to a Scotland Yard detective to solve the crimes and put a stop the murderous maniac.

Yikes. When I saw this referred to as 'sleasy, Z-grade slasher fare,' I was imagining something along the lines of Pieces in quality and enjoyment, as they're both brought by some of the same people. . . unfortunately, by quality, it was far, far below Pieces. Luckily, however, it was almost as fun and sleazy. While it is low quality, that fault can be forgiven a little bit due to the ridiculous production it went through (including at least three or four directors and multiple in-production rewrites). After two years of a disastrous filming, however, Don't Open 'Til Christmas was completed and released in all its nonsensical glory. As far as typical slasher stuff goes, it's all there: Good & violent deaths, sex, sleaze, blood (though horribly done), etc. It's a fine specimen in the art of trash film-making. Unfortunately, its entertainment value doesn't COMPLETELY make up for its horrible direction, brainless script, and awkward acting. Well, maybe it does. But, the faults still need to be addressed. The style obviously varies throughout the film since much of it was filmed by various directors at different times. The story, if there even is one beyond 'crazy man killing Santas,' tries for nothing new at all. The dialogue is horrible and unrealistic, made worse by a cast of seeming amateurs (though some veterans do shine a bit). In the end, however, it's not a film that needs to be or should be over-analyzed. It is what it is: A cheap, poorly made, sleazy B-slasher that was made simply to offend, shock, or titillate (depending on what kind of fan you are). If Pieces was up your alley and you're looking for some holiday cheer, give Don't Open 'Til Christmas a look. Just don't expect much and you'll do fine.

Obligatory Christmas-Horror Elements:

• Subgenre: Slasher

• Christmas Carols: There was a disappointing lack of Christmas music, surprisingly.

• Snow: Christmas in London? Yeah, bit of snow.

• Person in a Santa suit: If you're wearing one: RUN AWAY!

• Violence/Gore: There are some brutal deaths including stabbings, boiling flesh, and one that will make the boys squirm. *shudder* There's plenty of blood & gore, but it's not done well at all.

• Sex/Nudity: Dig British women? Well, this one's for you. Many a fair young lass bear it all here.

• Scares/Suspense: Suspense? None. But, there were a couple good jump scares here and there. All typical stuff, though.

• Mystery: Well, a mess of a script certainly can make for a great mystery. . . as it's really unclear what the hell is going on and for what reason most of the time.

• - -

Final verdict: Averaging the entertainment with the low quality. . . 3.5/10. But, a high one.

-AP3-

All right. So the plot's something like this. There's some guy who goes around in random masks and he kills a bunch of people who dress up as Santa Claus. Scotland Yard tries to find him, but they really suck. The daughter of one of the Santa's he kills tries to find him and succeeds, but her deductions don't make any sense. Then everybody dies except for the serial killer. Merry Christmas. I knew this wasn't going to be pretty when they misspelled the name of the film in the opening credits. It's almost entirely made up of scenes that are so short and so all over the place that you really can't make any connection with what's going on. The movie would be really predictable (there's a sinister innocuous secondary character, like in Scooby Doo), except that it's impossible to keep track of everything that's happening, as it's completely random. None of the characters are particularly likable, and the scenes really could be arranged in any order. Nonetheless, some of the Santa deaths were fun. The castration was impressive, as was the guy who apparently soaks himself in gasoline before coming to work every day. Amusing, in a sort of god-awful way.

A guy in a Santa suit has sex with a woman in a filthy alley before they're both killed by a man in a grinning see-through mask. Another Santa ha shis head impaled by a spear while his daughter watches. And yet another has his face grilled while roasted chestnuts on an open fire.

Scotland Yard inspector Ian Harris (Edmund Purdom, who wrote and directed this film as well as appearing in 2019: After the Fall of New York and Pieces) and detective Powell are perplexed. Plus, Harris just got a gift that says "Don't Open Till Christmas." They question Kate, whose father was a killed Santa, and her boyfriend, Cliff.

The next day, Cliff tricks Kate into coming to a porn studio. She storms off and he takes photos of a model dressed as Santa. A pair of police officers spot them shooting nudes in public, so he runs and the killer finds her, but lets her go. Oh yeah - and there's a reporter named Giles digging around, too.

Things get worse. A strip club attending Santa gets knifed. The police think Cliff is the killer and the paper Giles says he works for has no idea who he is. And another Santa runs into the London Dungeon (yes, the place The Misfits sang about) and gets killed.

Even after undercover officers go after the Santa killer, they can't find him and are killed themselves. The killer has a stripper who was there on the night he killed the Santa in her club and says that she will be the supreme sacrifice to Christmas evil. And Caroline Munro (!) is on stage in a nightclub when a Santa is chased on stage and stabbed in the face with a machete. Another Santa is castrated soon after.

It turns out that inspector Harris has no birth certificate and has gone on leave, disappearing to a mental asylum where Kate follows.

It turns out that Giles is Harris' insane brother. Kate finds out first, bit she is strangled and stabbed while detective Powell listens. Then, Giles lures him to his doom, as he electrocutes him in a junkyard.

Sherry escapes and Giles chases after her. She knocks him over a railing and he has a flashback of when he went insane: he caught his father, dressed as Santa, having sex with another woman. When his mother found out, Santa shoved her over a railing. But it's too late for Sherry, as Giles has survived.

Finally, Harris wakes from a bad dream and unwraps his gift, complete with a card from his loving brother. It explodes, killing him and ending the film.

What I have just done is written about this film in a way that will probably make you want to watch it. It's a slasher that even references Halloween in its opening credits. But it's no Halloween.

According to tvtropes.com, "this utter sleazefest of a film is quite a jumbled and confused mess, and for good reason. While production began in 1982, the film remained in Development Hell for two years, due to the title of director continually changing hands; first up was Edmund Purdom (who also portrayed Inspector Harris) who walked off the set, prompting at least three or four others to fill in for him, with one only holding Purdom's former position for a mere two days before being fired."

Whew. You got better things to do this Christmas. Trust me.

SPOILERS Despite being shot in a decade when dodos and British horror films were becoming synonymous Don't Open Till Christmas must have initially seemed like an idea that couldn't fail. The late movie mogul Dick Randall was a character right out of Eskimo Nell. Chubby, with a thin Gilbert Roland moustache and of shortish stature he was the consummate low budget producer cum film broker. In the Eighties Randall owned a flat in the West End where he oversaw his production/distribution outlet Spectacular-Trading and also had dealings in the music biz. Don't Open Till Christmas seems to have been envisioned as a British version of Randall's chainsaw horror hit ‘Pieces'. Applying an ‘if it ain't broke don't fix it' logic Don't shares that films co-producer, its ultra-violent set pieces, and one of its stars in good old Edmund Purdom, but by all accounts the result was lucky to see the light of day. Brooding Purdom and bald former sex actor Mark Jones play baffled detectives on the trail of a psychopath (bad boy actor Alan Lake) who has made quite a habit of going round the West End bumping off anyone dressed as Santa Claus. The main plot evokes around a couple (Belinda Mayne and Gerry Sundquist) drawn into the yuletide slayings when a Santa-impersonating relative gets a spear through the head. Plot-diversions include a peep-show floosie witnessing a pervy client being butchered by Lake and later being the object of a kidnapping attempt and an anti-peep show rant. While Blackpool's own Pat Astley-plays topless model Sharon who also has an unpleasant encounter with the Santa-hating madman. None too pleased as to how she's dressed (as Santa) the masked man touches her up with a cut throat razor before disappearing into the night. ‘His eyes, they seem to smile' she tells the police who arrest her for indecent exposure anyway.

Don't Open till Christmas is an uneven patchwork of a film, although not without good reason. The production was a deeply troubled one that took nearly two years and three men behind the camera to make. Edmund Purdom quickly exited the directors chair, and replacement director Derek Ford (also the film's writer) didn't last long either. It was in fact editor Ray Selfe, who finished directing the film and had the unenviable task of making his efforts and the aborted work of his two predecessors resemble a movie. Despite the best attempts of one time sex cinema owner Selfe, the released version of Don't bears all the scars of a film re-shot, re-cut and reinvented numerous times. Many scenes and one seemingly crucial character (Dr Bridle played by Nicholas Donnelly) are eluded to but appear to have been lost to the cutting room floor. The narrative is severely mangled with various protagonists randomly popping in and out of the action. By the end most of the cast are either forgotten about or mean-spiritedly bumped off as this rag-bag tumbles towards an abrupt excuse for a finale.

Derek Ford was a dab hand at writing horror films (viz;1967's Corruption) but was principally known for directing sexploitation movies like The Wife Swappers(1969) and The Sexplorer(1975). Ford could never quite shake off the sex film director tag, on or off screen, so its no surprise that Don't Open Till Christmas retains the atmosphere of a Ford sex film, both in the seedy Piccadilly Circus area locations and the seaside postcard caricature characters like the ‘ducking and weaving' dirty photographer and the gormless glamour model. The casting of Mark Jones, Alan Lake and the always fun to watch Pat ‘Blackpool Patricia' Astley only adds to the blurring of British sex and horror film. ‘Additional scenes by Al McGoohan' seemly tagged on as an afterthought, amount to little more than a typical Dick Randall crash course in opportunistic filmmaking. Novelty value is provided by a scene set in the famed wax museum ‘The London Dungeon', while Dusty Bin era Caroline Munro appears as herself and sings a disco song (George Dugdale aka-‘Mr Munro' also worked on the film). Increasing the gore quota are ‘slasher-movie' sequences in which actors dressed as Santas suspenselessly meet their maker at the hands of Lake's psychopath. Faces instead of chestnuts are roasted on an open fire, machetes embedded in heads and brains blown out. Don't Open Till Christmas' vomitous highlight finds an obese Santa Claus relieving himself in a urinal only to be caught short when Lake creeps out of a toilet and castrates him. Such scenes caused the film multiple problems upon its British release in the closing months of 1985. After all the tail end of the ‘Video Nasty' furore was not perhaps the greatest of time to present the sight of Santa being castrated in a urinal as entertainment.

Hands on heart, Don't Open Till Christmas is unlikely to feature on anyone's list of favourite British horror films in the near future. The film aims to be as colourful a B-movie as anything else with Dick Randall's name on it does, but the overall feel is one of desperation, from the repetitious score to the tacky gore effects and the casting of neglected, forgotten or never made it actors. But despite (or perhaps because) of these reasons the film still intrigues in an end of the pier pantomime way simultaneously being sad, distinctly British and all very low end of the showbiz ladder. Derek Ford worked with Randall one more time on Attack of the Killer Computer(1990), a gore film with a mostly porno cast shot in Randall's West End flat- it was never released. Don't Open Till Christmas may not have been the end of Dick Randall's career, but it was the last interesting chapter in his story. The final Randall productions that saw release (Slaughter High(1986) and Living Doll(1989)) are well made yet utterly routine 80's horrors. But that these business as usual productions appear to have passed without the headaches of Don't Open Till Christmas is perhaps all Randall could have wished for.

This cruel film has pretty much everything you could want from a cheesy slasher flick: ample gobs of gratuitous Kensington Gore, plenty of gratuitous nudity, and some poor acting to round it all off. This British variant on a well-worn theme goes for the all-out sleaze aspect of the genre, focusing entirely on some grimy, bloody and explicit death scenes and mixing them in with peep shows and seedy, lecherous drunkards. Taking in the darker, grimier side of London, the actual setting is very good for a horror film, and setting some stalking scenes in dungeons and weird exhibitions works successfully; these scenes actually turn out to be quite frightening.

The particularly vicious edge to the killings in this film elevates it to a higher horror status than the other contemporary American offerings. Knives are shoved through heads, people are garroted, strangled, stabbed in the stomach, and in the film's piece de resistance, a gentleman relieving himself in the toilets has his member hacked off by a straight razor! Another gruesome highlight has a kindly old Santa roasting chestnuts over a grill, only to have his face shoved into the flames and scorched before being set alight! The acting here is below average: only a couple of the cast members convince in their roles, and everybody else is just wooden. Edmund Purdom and Mark Jones are quite good as Inspector Harris and Sergeant Powell respectively, and the killer's bug-eyed insanity fits the role nicely. But the female cast members seem only to have been picked for their glamour, take for example Caroline Munro who pops up to perform a musical interlude in one dire moment.

Thankfully, while we're mired in the poor editing and exceedingly slow police investigation, you can be sure that another brutal murder will soon pop up. This film has a very high body count, with just about everybody being bumped off by the time the credits roll. The eventual confrontation with the unmasked killer is rushed, too, unfortunately, and marred by an unconvincing is-he-dead final shock which appears to have been tacked on. Being a mid '80s film, you can expect some lousy fashions and hairdos, with the men looking like women and the women all having huge blonde hair. An embarrassing disco scene pops up and the killer lurks around in a "shrunken head" costume - it's pretty funny. Another scene guaranteed to evoke a few chuckles occurs when a drunken Santa is attacked by a gang of punks who then proceed to nick his bike! A cold detachment hangs over the film, meaning that we never really care what happens to any of the characters. The deaths impress only due to their creativity, and as we never get to know any of the victims, there's no emotional involvement, and therefore, no real scares. Still, the extreme gore is there, along with the extremely sleazy atmosphere to appeal to most genre fans. Worth a look, if this is your sort of thing. Oh, and one final thing: check out the 'surprise' ending, as it's a real gobsmacker!

A vicious psycho brutally bumps off various unlucky guys dressed up as Santa Claus around Christmastime. It's up to the dour Inspector Ian Harris (a very sour and indifferent Edmund Purdom, who also fumbled the direction) to catch the maniac. While this movie totally fails to provide any true chills or tension, it certainly succeeds in delivering a steady succession of grisly and ghastly murder set pieces that are randomly injected throughout the narrative with an appealingly appalling lack of finesse and cohesion: one poor tubby dude gets castrated while using a public lavatory, another has a spear shot into the back of his head, a third's face is fried on a grill, and so on. Moreover, Purdom does manage to effectively create and sustain a thoroughly nasty and seedy tone, there's a hefty corpse tally of 14, the foul script blithely breaks the usual established slice'n'dice rules (for example, the final girl is a cheery harlot instead of the customary virginal innocent), and the St. Nick victims are mostly despicable jerks (one Kris Kringle is offed while visiting a sex shop on his lunch break!). The cast do their best with the tawdry material: Alan Lake as creepy low-rent tabloid newspaper reporter Giles, the fetching Belinda Mayne as the distraught Kate Briosky, Gerry Sundquist as Kate's insensitive boyfriend Cliff Boyd, Kelly Baker as bubbly peepshow booth worker Sherry Graham, and Mark Jones as Harris' partner Sergeant Powell. Caroline Munro makes a cameo appearance as herself singing a cruddy disco song in a nightclub. As a tasty added plus, buxom blonde Pat Astley bares her fine shapely body several times as brash nude model Sharon. Alan Pudney's cinematography makes neat occasional use of a prowling hand-held camera. Des Dolan's quivery synthesizer score does the generic ooga-booga hum'n'shiver trick. Worth a watch for fans of sleazy holiday horror fare.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas,I met up with family friend Guy Morgan (who sadly passed away in March 2019) and asked if there was any film he would like to get hold of before the holiday season. Already having Christmas Evil (1980) waiting to be viewed,I was intrigued when this friend told me about a British X-Mas Slasher,which led to me opening the viewing after Christmas.

View on the film:

Stuck in delays, (filmed in 1983,put out in 1985) which led to extra murder set-pieces to be filmed for a final high-end body count of 14, and the first two directors being sacked, the third, and final director Ray Selfe sows it all together with a grubby Grindhouse atmosphere.

Filmed round the crumbling outskirts of London, Swlfe sniffs up the seediness in panning shots round the dark, dank locations and swift first-person tracking shots of the psycho stalking (and then killing) sexy ladies, and down and outs dressed as Santa. Rid of the gloss of US Horror of the era, the Slasher slay bells ring on a ugliness of dry red smeared across the screen.

Chopping some of the US Slasher clichés off, ("The Final Girl" not being the pure and innocent type, the victims being largely rough round the edges) the screenplay by Alan Birkinshaw & Derek Ford follows the spreading of good cheer in the directing by giving the dialogue an unshakeable mean spitefulness, where even the cops treat survivors with a bullying contempt.

Pulling off the beard, the writers carve the motives of the nutter with a unrelenting wide-eyed psycho harshness which leaves the police with an open case till Christmas.

"Don't Open Till Christmas" is a pretty bad and often irritating 80's slasher, but on the other hand I honestly can't bring myself to write too many overly harsh things about it, because there were still several elements that I appreciated and thought showed a lot of potential. For example, this is probably the only holiday-themed slasher that reverses the characters. Usually in this sort of flicks, the maniacal killer dresses up as Santa Claus and goes on a murder spree. In this case the killer wears a 'normal' disguise but exclusively targets people who are dressed up in Santa Claus suits. You know, like drunks at parties or employees at the mall. You would assume that, after the third murder or so, the entire city is sufficiently alerted and the police advises people not to appear in public dressed as Santa, but no. Our deranged killer easily keeps finding victims throughout practically the entire movie. After nearly a dozen of Santa Claus kills in the same London area, people still go out dressed as Santa. "Don't Open Till Christmas" also isn't your average 80's slasher with stereotypical teenage characters and clichéd campus ground settings. The film takes place in the darkest alleys of London (either that or they just didn't have the budget for light bulbs) and introduces plausible lead characters, like a fatigue old Scotland Yard inspector and the shocked daughter of a recently slain victim. The inspector has an unreliable partner and the girl has a suspiciously behaving boyfriend. Together they hunt for the Santa slayer, but there really aren't any clues given, so we're just supposed to patiently sit through another handful of gross killings until the revelation of the utterly grotesque and stupid denouement at the end. Luckily enough the body count of "Don't Open Till Christmas" is quite high, because the film is incredibly boring when there aren't any murders occurring. Some of the kills are quick and delightfully mean- spirited, like the Santa guy who bluntly gets shot in the face, whereas other ones appear to be endlessly stretched. There's one Santa who flees throughout the half of London before finally getting stabbed in the stomach at a museum and another one has to endure an whole ugly disco song, sung by Caroline Munro, before a machete splices his face. The scenes in the peepshow-theater are undeniably the best ones, largely because I can't say for certain whether the humor is intentional or not. That sequence, along with the urinal castration of course, are the highlights of the film. There isn't the slightest bit of suspense or intelligence to be found in the scenario, so naturally you go look for hilarious incompetence example to list as the film's highlights. "Don't Open Till Christmas" stands as the sole directorial effort of Edward Purdom. This fine British gentleman appeared in tons of inferior horror productions, mostly Italian and Spanish ones like "Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks" and "Pieces", but this homeland film was his one shot at directing. According to the trivia section, he quit the job and it took another two years before the film got released.