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The Gratuitous B-Movie Column Christmas Special: Treevenge, And All Through the House
Image Credit: Yer Dead Productions
The Gratuitous B-Movie Column Special Christmas Edition: Treevenge and And All Through the House
Hello, everyone, and welcome to a very special Christmas edition of the internets movie review column that has no idea what it would do if it received a partridge in a pear tree, The Gratuitous B-Movie Column, and I am your host Bryan Kristopowitz. In this very special Christmas edition I’m rerunning two short films that I reviewed several years ago, the Jason Eisner directed killer Christmas tree short film Treevenge, which was released back in 2008, and the classic season 1 Tales from the Crypt episode And All Through the House, which first aired on HBO in early June, 1989.
Now, I had contemplated doing this as the latest From the B-Movie Vault, but I decided to instead just do it as a The Gratuitous B-Movie Column Special Christmas Edition. It just made more sense to do it again with the “The Gratuitous B-Movie Column” designation. It just did. The original version appeared in 2017, and is now long gone from the internets,
And so, without any further what have you, check out my reviews of Treevenge and And All Through the House. Enjoy.
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Treevenge
Treevenge, directed by Jason Eisener, starts off with a forest of Christmas trees out in the middle of nowhere minding their own business, as you’d expect Christmas trees in a forest to do. Then a man with an axe shows up and starts chopping down the trees. Now, in any other world, this would be a standard practice for some Christmas tree selling business. If you want to sell Christmas trees, you have to either grow them yourself or cut them down. But the Christmas trees in the world presented in Treevenge are not “just trees.” They’re living, breathing, thinking creatures that feel things. Being chopped down by some human with an axe? That’s an outrage. Dragged out of your home so you can then be sold? Another outrage.
So we see the trees attacked, abused, moved around in the back of trucks, and then sold via tree lots to happy human families looking to have a great Christmas. The trees, though, don’t want to do any of that shit. They don’t want their own families split up. They just want to be left alone. But what can they do if they’ve already been chopped down and removed from their homes? The trees basically have two choices: they can either accept their fates as decorations in human homes or they can fight back. Fight back? How the hell can Christmas trees fight back?
Treevenge shows you exactly how Christmas trees pushed to the edge can fight back and it ain’t pretty. These Christmas trees don’t fuck around. When they decide to revolt they take absolutely no prisoners. If you’re a human being unfortunate enough to be in their way they will take you the fuck out. And it doesn’t matter how old those human beings are. Absolutely no one is safe from their wrath. No one.
The Christmas tree massacre that ends the move is truly a thing of bloody beauty. When these trees decide to get back at humans they goddamn get back at humans. And when the revolt happens it gets bloody and nasty quickly. There are moments that will make horror, horror-comedy, and gore nerds laugh out loud and, maybe, gasp. How you respond to the last human victim of the trees will likely determine how much you enjoy the movie. If you don’t have any problems with it you will love Treevenge. If you end up disturbed by what you see at the end, well, you’re probably not going to recommend Treevenge to anyone. I don’t have any problems with it (the short is so over the top and ridiculous I don’t know how anyone can take anything they see in the movie’s 15 minute runtime seriously) so I can definitely recommend Treevenge.
Now, Treevenge isn’t perfect. It’s too long for the story it’s telling (a ten minute runtime would have likely worked better) and some of the sound is iffy, especially when it comes to the crazy humans, especially the lumberjacks. It also seems like the special effects in the ending, while awesome in their own way, don’t match the effects we see earlier in the movie. It’s almost like the production filmed the ending last and ran out of money and had to figure out how to get what it needed done with much less money than expected. Of course, that could also be a symptom of the fact that the Christmas trees don’t necessarily look like Christmas trees at the end of the movie. They look like special effects. Like men in tree suits. That’s cool, but it’s also kind of jarring when you look at the movie as a whole.
The human performances are generally good. Jonathan Torrens and Sarah Dunsworth do a good job as the main Macmichael family, and Maris Morgan should be given special props for being the little girl that gets shredded by the Macmichael family Christmas tree on Christmas morning. That scene looks like it hurt. The score is excellent. And the gore is wonderfully disgusting. What would a Treevenge sequel look like? I’d love to see what other carnage the trees could inflict on other humans they run into. What would happen if the trees decided to enter a mall or storm a major highway somewhere?
That needs to be part of a feature length Treevenge. Perhaps we’ll get that one day.
The Treevenge we have now is good enough. Damn good enough. Check it out. It’s free on YouTube.
See Treevenge. See it, see it, see it.
So what do we have here?
Dead bodies: Lots.
Explosions: None.
Nudity?: None.
Doobage: A bunch of Christmas trees out in the forest just minding their own business. Axe attack. A terrified small tree. Trees getting cut down. Tree burning. Trees talking to one another via subtitles. A tree conveyer belt. Trees stuck inside the back of a truck. Hedge clipper attack. Christmas tree buying. A tree stand that hurts. Tree decorating. Vaseline on a tree. Couch sex. A public tree lighting. A full on tree attack. Child eating. Christmas tree using a tree topper star like a ninja star. Off screen cat eating. Bloody entrails removal. A Zombie eye gouge homage. Bloody leg removal. Shotgun hooey. A Christmas tree riot. Tree sodomy. Baby head smashing.
Kim Richards?: Big time.
Gratuitous: Christmas trees that can think and feel things. Evil humans. Rock Around the Christmas Tree on the soundtrack. Attempted tree sex.
Best lines: “Come on you pieces of meat! We’ve got work to do!” “Piece of fucking cock licking asswipes!” “Ah! Goddamn trees! Fuck!” “They are killing us all!” “Stop yelling! You’re scaring the saplings!” “Daddy, that one is ugly.” “Get your limbs off me!” “Please, no more cutting!” “Hey! Who said trees are just for firewood?” “No! It’s Christmas! I just want to fuck!”
Rating: 7.5/10.0
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And All Through the House
Directed by Back to the Future (1985) and Forrest Gump (1994) helmer Robert Zemeckis, And All Through the House is a classic episode of the HBO anthology series Tales from the Crypt. It’s inspired by the story that appeared in the comic book Vault of Horror and was adapted once before in the British Tales from the Crypt movie that came out in 1972. It’s one of those episodes that people still talk about and tend to reference when they discuss the Tales from the Crypt show as it appeared in the show’s first season (it was the second episode aired). I remember watching it back when it first aired and not being that scared by it. I mean, yeah, the idea of a killer dressed as Santa is messed up and Larry Drake kicks ass in the role and looks freaky as hell, but, for whatever reason, it just didn’t hit me as that scary. Now, watching it again thirty plus years later, I’m still not scared by it, but I am freaked out by the decisions made by the lead character. What the hell was she thinking?
The episode stars the now late but always great Mary Ellen Trainor as a woman who kills her husband on Christmas Eve so she can then run off with her unseen boyfriend and, presumably, a boat load of money that she intends to collect from her dead husband’s will and insurance policy. Trainor’s husband in this episode, played by the great Marshall Bell, is a bit of a jerk (when isn’t Marshall Bell a jerk?), so you don’t mind it all that much when Trainor’s character rams a fireplace poker into the top of his head. With her husband now dead, all Trainor has to do is stage the scene and make it look like the poor bastard died accidentally.
The first part of her plan works brilliantly. The second part, though, gets messed up quickly. Trainor forgot to make sure that her daughter Carrie Ann (Lindsey Whitney Barry) wasn’t around when she killed Bell. The little girl didn’t see her mother do the deed, but the little girl did want to talk to her stepfather right after his head was bashed in. Trainor also didn’t factor in her now dead husband’s weight when dragging his body outside in order to drop it down a well (that would be the “staged” accident). The dead dude is now heavy as hell. And, above all else, Trainer didn’t know that there’s an escaped mental patient dressed in a Santa suit running around killing women and that he’s in the area.
Now, the first two problems are all on Trainer. She could have planned better for both of those instances. The third one, though, catches her completely off guard. She doesn’t know about it before doing anything. In the middle of dragging Bell’s body out the front door she just misses hearing a news update about the escaped killer on the radio. And, ha, the cops call to tell her about the escaped killer right in the middle of dealing with him on her property.
So the killer Santa (Drake) shows up while Trainer is outside and tries to kill her. She manages to get away and back into her house before Santa can get her. So now what? Should she call the cops? What about her dead husband in the front yard? How is she going to explain that to the cops when they show up?
Trainer decides to try to handle the killer Santa on her own. She can call the cops after taking him out and say she had to defend herself and Carrie Ann after the killer Santa bashed her husband’s head in and jammed an axe into his chest. She’s already killed one person tonight. What’s one more? It’s almost a great plan. Almost. Trainer just has to have everything work out going forward. That could happen, right?
And All Through the House moves quickly, as you’d expect it to (it’s 22 minutes long) and is expertly directed by Zemeckis. There’s plenty of suspense throughout the episode and is just gruesome enough to be sort of shocking. The poker to the head sequence is still nasty (it’s all in how Trainer can’t get the poker out of Bell’s head after smashing his head in). And Drake is great as the killer Santa. He looks scary. The episode could have and should have been longer, maybe by five minutes, so there’s more cat and mouse between Trainer and Santa in Trainer’s house. More chances for suspense means more potential scares later on.
Now, as I said in my intro, Trainer’s decisions are just mind boggling to me. I could understand her deciding not to call the cops because of Bell’s body in the front yard if she lived alone. With her daughter around, though, why not call the cops and let them handle the escaped maniac? She could always use the “the Santa guy killed my husband!” excuse if she needed to. So what if the poker was still in the house at the time? The cops probably wouldn’t make a big deal out of the fact that the poker wasn’t outside with Bell’s dead body. You know, stuff happens. I understand why she goes out to hit Bell’s body with the axe (the killer Santa uses an axe so if “he killed her husband” it makes sense to stage the scene so it looks like he did it) but it just seems too risky. And when you consider how Carrie Ann tends to just show up, out of the blue, why put her at risk? Just call the cops. You can come up with something plausible for everything else later on.
The ending isn’t as shocking as the episode would like us to believe it is. It should have ended with Santa smiling at the prospect of accumulating two more victims instead of Trainer screaming about her own stupidity. I mean, she can do that in the background, but that shouldn’t be the last thing we see. Santa’s nasty, gnarled, messed up face should be.
While I don’t think it’s all that scary, And All Through the House is still well done and fairly exciting and a good example of what the Tales from the Crypt show could do. Well worth tracking down and checking out either again or for the first time. I think you’ll dig it.
See And All Through the House. See it, see it, see it.
So what do we have here?
Dead bodies: 1
Explosions: None.
Nudity?: None.
Doobage: Fireplace poker to the head. An open window. Plastic bag over the head. A dead body that will just not cooperate. A radio news report. House key issues. Attempted choking. Axe attack. Icicle slice across the face. Axe to the wrist. A ringing phone. Tire swing through the window. Back of the axe to the face. Axe to the chest. Umbrella stand used to hold open the front door. Axe to the head. Dead body searching. Giant snow ball to the back of the head. A door handle that falls out. House climbing.
Kim Richards?: Almost.
Gratuitous: The Crypt Keeper dressed as Santa. Nat King Cole singing on the soundtrack while the camera pans over a series of sweet looking holiday decorations. Mary Ellen Trainor. Marshall Bell. An almost dead body. Larry Drake dressed up as a killer Santa. A major league freak out.
Best lines: “God bless us everyone. Yeah, right.” “Merry Christmas you sonofabitch!” “Honey, I don’t think even Santa can wake up your stepfather.” “And a very Happy New Year.” “Come on, Joseph.” “How about a nice, cold plunge, Joseph?” “Now you’re dead.” “You’re sending the police here?” “Oh, no, officer, I didn’t kill him. Santa did it. Didn’t you, Santa? Didn’t you?” “Santa!” “He’s got an axe! He’s got an axe!” “Watch out, Santa, don’t slip!” “Naughty or nice?”
Rating: 8.0/10.0
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Check out my previous Christmas B-Movie reviews!
From the B-Movie Vault: Silent Night, Deadly Night and Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2
The Gratuitous B-Movie Column Special Christmas Edition: Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out!
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Well, I think that’ll be about it for now. Don’t forget to sign up with disqus if you want to comment on this article and any other 411 article. You know you want to, so just go do it.
B-movies rule. Always remember that.
Merry Christmas!
Happy Holidays!
Treevenge
Jonathan Torrens– Jim Macmichael
Sarah Dunsworth– Cadence Macmichael
Maris Morgan– Krista Macmichael
Jayden Taylor– Jason Macmichael
Lex Gigeroff– Tree Lot Boss
Mike Cleven– Crew Boss
Tim Dunn– Wreathmaker
Directed by Jason Eisener
Screenplay by Rob Cotterill and Jason Eisener
Distributed by Yer Dead Productions and YouTube
Unrated
Runtime– 16 minutes
Watch it here
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And All Through the House
Mary Ellen Trainor– Wife
Larry Drake– Santa
Marshall Bell– Husband
Lindsey Whitney Barry- Carrie Ann
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Screenplay by Fred Dekker
Distributed by Home Box Office and HBO Video
Not Rated
Runtime– 22 minutes
Buy it here
