The film is an energetic, candy-colored romp through genre tropes that manages to take its subject matter seriously while poking fun at itself at the same time.

Anderson's comic slasher doesn't quite earn its wings as a potential future classic, nevertheless it's very funny and another welcome indicator that antipodean genre cinema is where it's at right now.

Mostly, it’s a tightly constructed, unapologetically nasty little thriller, given depth and weight by Wallace’s interpretation of a sweet woman suffering for her past.

Red Christmas rarely deals in gore for gore’s sake in its early going. By the end, however, it becomes such an exercise in sensibility-testing brutality that any message about the fragility of the family unit is as murky as the cinematography.

Self-consciously button-pushing pictures like this one usually leaven their transgressions with at least a bit of winking irony, but no humor is to be found here, from the opening frames (slo-mo shots of pro-life and pro-choice factions shouting at each other) to the last.