RG
Roberto Giacomelli
•A serial killer is terrorizing London during the Christmas period, but the mad assassin has very specific victims: individuals dressed as Santa Claus!
Inspector Harris of Scotland Yard is investigating with Detective Powell, and they are particularly following the trail related to the death of Mr. Briosky, since his daughter and her fiancé witnessed the murder. Meanwhile, the Inspector receives a package at home with the inscription "Do Not Open Until Christmas."
The same year as the much more famous (and successful) "Silent Night, Deadly Night – Christmas of Blood," another Christmas-themed horror film hits theaters featuring blood-stained Santas: "Do Not Open Until Christmas." This time, however, the Santa Clauses are not perpetrators but victims, although the genre of the work still belongs to the subgenre of slasher movies, which this time adopts a heavy contamination with the police procedural.
Why 1984 was the year of the assault on the usually benevolent gift-bringer is not given to us to know, but "Do Not Open Until Christmas" strikes more for the oddity of the subject and for a certain "cult" aura rather than for the real artistic quality, which, let's be clear, tends to be lacking.
"Do Not Open Until Christmas" is the directorial debut of Edmund Purdom, an actor quite active in the 1950s and 1960s in a multitude of costume films, and later created a certain fame in genre cinema in Italy with titles such as "Giornata nera per l’ariete," "L’amante del demonio," "Il medaglione insanguinato," "I padroni della città," "Rosso sangue," and "Fracchia contro Dracula." How Purdom came to direct a slasher with murdered Santas is another piece of information we have not been able to clarify, but it seems rather evident that for the actor/director it was not a good experience, and not only because "Do Not Open Until Christmas" was the first and last film he directed, but also because in the direction of this work participated two other names, Ray Selfe and the screenwriter Derek Ford, for "additional shots," although the chronicles of the time say that Purdom gave up directing, stressed. And this approximation and lack of personality in this film is certainly noticeable, whose producers are Steve Minasian and Dick Randall, creators of other B-movie slashers like "Pieces" and "Jolly Killer." First of all, there is a general air of sloppiness that affects practically every artistic and technical component of the film, from the actors who are not very capable and minimally involved, to the photography and the squalid sets of a TV movie from the era. If "Do Not Open Until Christmas" does not satisfy in terms of acting and visually, a series of murder scenes as bizarre as they are tasty come to balance it. The victims are always drunks dressed as Santa Claus who are stabbed, electrocuted, prodded, slit throats, sometimes quickly, other times in elaborate sequences involving a torture museum and a rock concert, where the scream queen Caroline Munro appears in a cameo. The obligatory dose of nudity is not missing, provided by the erotic star Pat Astley, here in her last film.
In short, "Do Not Open Until Christmas" is certainly not a must-see film, but the bizarre subject that combines slasher and police procedural with an also original story intrigues, but it is too approximate in almost everything, not least a screenplay that has many holes and offers us a predictable and poorly constructed ending.
For Christmas horror fans!
Distributed in Italian DVD by Pulp Video and CG Home Video.
Rating rounded up.