A mentally disturbed woman lives alone with her daughter who might turn into a {spoiler redacted} - yes you heard right - if she gets riled or overheated. So guess what happens, and on Christmas to make it worse.

Firstly this is yet another Xmas horror movie that has nowt to do with holiday trauma. It's just a regular (well weird) horror movie with lights and decorations in the background. Nothing wrong with that per se but I'm telling you in case you're evaluating motion pictures for a Xmas horror marathon to maximise your bizarro holiday cheer. The movie might make you feel bad, but not specifically about Christmas.

It's also more prone to spoilage than shellfish in the sun, relying on a massive twist ending for effect. Read no further if you want to experience maximum "ohh...okay" at the reveal.

What we have here is the incredibly unreliable narrator, so it's basically two movies - a long one that isn't real and a very short one that is. Remember how in The Sixth Sense the premise slowly dawned on you and the scenes made more sense when you thought back on them? This movie isn't like that. The reveal is very on the nose and the only clue that the story is being unreliably narrated is that it's absurd. There's a porcupine monster. Porcupine monsters aren't real even in movies, but having seen movies in which a talking turkey and Jesus were real I had no way to know that and was totally fooled. My point is I think it's better when you're only about 87% fooled - you need to be fooled but feel like you should have known.

In my country the unreliable narrator is a wonderful premise when done properly. In fact it's my ultimate wish to become an unreliable narrator myself. Who needs boring old "real" events if you can make up better ones? The problem here is that the delusional part of the movie - which is almost the whole thing - isn't effective horror. It's mostly people talking about drug abuse, religious nuttery, mother/daughter issues, that sort of thing, with occasional shots of a porcupine monster. Only one guy gets injured.

Of course the dark ending makes all of that more palatable in retrospect, but that didn't help me during the 80 minutes I spent watching it. It is a very dark end though with a nice closing shot, and I appreciate that. I also liked when the crazy lady was trying to remove a screw from a guy's leg but accidentally drove it deeper 'cause the drill was set the wrong way. Happy holidays everyone.