The idea of a Christmas themed anthology film has a certain appeal – short ghosts stories have long been a staple of the festive period and a few creepy tales of seasonal terror seems like a perfect format for the much-loved portmanteau film. Unfortunately, the German producers of Deathcember took the idea to insane lengths, ending up with an unwieldy collection of hit and mostly miss shorts that’s simply far too long to sustain interest. The format is appealing – it’s a cinematic advent calendar with one short film behind each window, though the musical theme that accompanies the interstitials is a little too reminiscent of the Harry Potter theme for its own good. Unfortunately, with 24 stories to cram in, the resulting film runs a wearying 2 hours and 24 minutes. There simply isn’t enough eggnog to see you through all of that.

There’s a plethora of talent both behind the camera (directors B.J. Colangelo, Ruggero Deodato, Pollyanna McIntosh, Lucky McKee, Sang-woo Lee, Milan Todorovic, Julian Richards et al – one has to applaud the fact that the net is cast wide and a good many cinematic cultures are represented) and familiar faces like Tiffany Sheppis, Barbara Crampton and Barbara Magnolfi on screen but it’s all just too much. Abandoning the advent calendar gimmick and splitting the collection int two more manageable films would have been a far better move.

It doesn’t help that the stories are so varied in style and approach that there’s no tonal consistency at all. Comic pieces rub shoulders with grimmer tales, science fiction alternates with horror and the end result has no distinctive feel of its own – it’s just a jumble of stories, some way better than others, many of which make litt5le use of their Christmas settings, They could just as easily have been set at any time of the year and the festivities often seem crowbarred in simply to earn a place here. Some are so short that they barely make any kind of impact at all, just gory one-liners with little build-up or context.

There are sone interesting vignettes along the way – Isaac Ezban’s one-take experiment Villancicos is a lot as silly macabre fun, The Hunchback of Burg Hayn by Bob Pipe is a loving pastiche of silent horror, McIntosh’s Getting Away from It All and John Cook Lynch’s Cracker are standouts and Vivienne Vaughn’s A Christmas Miracle, featuring Crampton, is an effectively atmospheric mood piece. Sadly other stories are rather shoddy and can do little to disguise their limited resources – even the wraparound material looks like it was created on the most basic of CGI freeware. And the less said about the graphic and grubby paedophile themed Claymation short Crappy Christmas: Operation Christmas Child the better.

It all gets a bit repetitive, the interstitials adding nothing to the proceedings but a sense of annoying déjà vu, and there are at least two too many scenes of psychotic Santa’s being gunned down. It’s the kind of film that makes you consider the unthinkable – not watching it all in one sitting. Indeed struggling through all 145 minutes of it in one sitting is almost guaranteed to turn us all into Scrooges and does nothing for the films that appear later in the running time, by when we’ve started to flag and can’t give them the attention they probably deserve.

Splitting the film into more manageable chunks might have given the producers a franchise akin to the V/H/S/ anthologies, allowing then to spread things out a bit over the course of two or even three Christmases. But as it stands, this one film just doesn’t work – it’s far too hit-and-miss, ridiculously long, lacking in any kind of cohesive identity and often just plain dull. A terrible waste of a potentially interesting concept.