Don't Open Till Christmas

As people keep reminding me, we're now only a month away from Christmas.  So, to get us all in the right mood, today's random movie trailer is suitably themed, featuring the 'classic' British slasher movie Don't Open Till Christmas.  A film I know primarily by reputation, this is reportedly an utterly dismal production.  Which is a pity, as a festive-themed slasher movie featuring a crazed serial killer murdering people dressed as Santa Claus in bizarre seasonal ways, really should be a winner.  The problem, apparently, lies with the poor direction of Edmund Purdom (who also stars as a police detective), a British matinee idol of the fifties, who had starred in a few big Hollywood movies but, by the eighties, found his career on the skids.  To be brutally honest, beyond his youthful good looks in the fifties, there was little to distinguish his performances from the average tree during his heyday, so it comes as no surprise that he was equally untalented as a director.  I have read that, in reality, he directed very little of the film, with sexploitation veterans Ray Selfe and Derek Ford doing the lion's share.

Relentlessly sleazy - a porn photo session, a Soho peepshow and a stake out in a public toilet are all worked into the script - and made on a shoestring, Don't Open Till Christmas was also subjected to lengthy delays in shooting and extensive script rewrites whilst in production.  The delays resulted in some sequences having to be shot in Summer, with actors sweating away in Santa costumes during some very unseasonable weather.  Consequently, it should come as no surprise that the resulting film was a mess.  Despite all of that, I have every intention of trying to track a copy down on DVD in time for Christmas.  I mean, you just have to, don't you?  No matter how bad it is, a film involving a series of brutal Santa murders, interspersed with some sleaze, is surely the perfect antidote to all that saccharine Christmas bollocks we're subjected to at this time of year.  Besides, it is also that rarity - a British slasher movie.  More than that, it's a British horror film from the eighties, a decade from which the genre seemed to have vanished.

Finally, an obscure and utterly pointless fact is that two of the film's stars - Gerry Sunquist and Alan Lake - subsequently died by their own hands.  Not as a result of appearing in Don't Open Till Christmas, I hasten to add.  It wasn't that bad.