Robert Conway’s second attempt at a Krampus film isn’t a sequel to Krampus: The Reckoning (2015) (though there are thematic similarities – in both films Conway equates Krampus with fire) but instead tries to do a whole different story. Two different stories in fact. The first is set in 1898 when the painfully named Eric Klaus, a stereotypical Wild West outlaw, buries something as the forces of law and order finally close in on him. He curses the buried “treasure” – it actually turns out to be a lump of coal… – and some while later a group of prospectors are its first victims. Most of this we learn from a budget-saving set of on-screen captions which is a shame as this is potentially the more interesting story. Again, as with The Reckoning, it’s not clear why we needed to invoke the name of Krampus when Bigfoot would have done just as well but there you go…
Cut to the present and the present day and the Henderson family are gathering for Christmas – give him his due, at least this time Conway makes more of an effort with the Christmas aspects of the story than he did in The Reckoning. Uncle Dave (Daniel Link) takes some of the men and boys of the family panning for gold in a nearby creek (as you do at Christmas time…) and inevitably the dig up the lump of coal which turns out to be a summoning stone that summons up Krampus for a spot of low-key slaughter. And as is so often the case with these things, poor old Krampus ends up very much a supporting part in his own film. In fact he really does look more like Bigfoot this time, so much so that one can’t help but feel that a Sasquatch movie will be next on Conway’s to-do list.
Unleashed is every bit as technically troubled as its predecessor, never escaping its crude, ultra-cheap shot-on-video look. It sounds rough too, like no-one on the production team could afford a copy of Pro Tools to sweeten the sound in post. Sound effects are all over the place, too loud in one shot, too quiet in the next and the dialogue is often incomprehensible, a problem not confined to Krampus Unleashed but endemic in modern low-budget film-making. One small plus point – the end titles (painfully slow as these things usually are to pump up the running time a bit) run behind a rather lovely “Krampus Theme“, a haunting variation on God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen sung by Amelia Haberman.
Like so many of the films featuring Krampus, it pays only lip service to the original legend which is creepy enough in its own right to warrant a straight adaptation. But film-makers insist on shoe-horning him into films that could have worked just as well without him, reducing him to a rather run-of-the-mill monster instead of the anti-Santa of central European mythology. A good Krampus movie still waits to be made. On the evidence of Unleashed and The Reckoning it’s unlikely that we’ll see it from Robert Conway.
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