Robert Livings and Randy Nundlall Jr’s Yuletide anthology film owes something to the V/H/S series, a found footage film that also stirs in a dash of the ever popular home invasion genre for good measure. It suffers the usual problems of found footage films, chiefly the need to pad out dull scenes where nothing much is happening to keep up the running time, but as such things go, it’s nothing special but it has its moments, enough to keep you hooked even when it’s at its most predictable.

The wraparound story, referred to as The Christmas Manual in the end credits, introduces us to a family – Bill (Todd Lubitsch), his wife Lisa (Janice Angela Burt) and their children Eli (Joshua Rose) and Rachel (Ruby Setnik) who are settling in for their traditional Christmas Eve festivities. Rachel has opened a present early and it, handily for the film, turns out to be a video camera. She’s still experimenting with it when a stranger, Geoff (Greg Sestero, whose production company bankrolled the film and was one of the stars and the line producer of Tommy Wiseau’s infamously awful The Room (2003)) turns up at their door carrying a box and claiming that his car has broken down. Full of the Christmas spirit the family invite him in and at first he seems affable enough. But we’ve seen enough of these things to know that he’s anything but and, after pulling a gun on the family, he forces them to watch four video tapes that he’s carrying in his box, each showing footage of macabre deaths.

The first story is Travel Buggies, the title referring to a travel vlog run by young couple Dave (Caleb Lush) and Jess (Louise Harding) who have had to abandon plans to shoot their latest episode in Europe and have instead gone camping in the woods. Before you can say The Blair Witch Project (1999), they’ve accidentally summoned the German folklore character Hans Trapp who takes the form of a killer scarecrow (Romulo Reyes) with entirely predictable results.

The directors also wrote the script for the film and make no bones about their influences, quoting endlessly from earlier films, sometimes, as here, to the detriment of the stories themselves. Travel Buggies is so on thrall of The Blair Witch Project and Bobcat Goldthwaite’s Willow Creek (2013) that at times it feels like it’s made up of outtakes from Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s and Goldthwaite’s film. There are a couple of decent shocks but the sluggish pacing and the derivative nature of the story count against it, most hardened found footage watchers having seen this sort of thing far too many times already. And as is so often the way, it includes at least one scene where you find yourself wondering why they didn’t just put the camera down and get out of there.

Story two, The Christmas Gift is a black comedy about a man, Dean (Jason Kuykendall) whose children are so obsessed with watching unboxing videos on YouTube that he decides to have himself delivered to them in a large box. He hires a couple to help with the delivery only for them to turn out to be a deranged Santa (Vernon Wells) and Mrs Claus (Lori Richardson) who abduct Dean, strap him to a chair and in a scene reminiscent of the torturing of the cop in Reservoir Dogs (1991), start to torment and assault him, but in a very Christmassy sort of way.

We’ve seen killer Santas many times already but Vernon Wells (Wez from Mad Max 2 (1981)) is a particularly nasty and effective addition to the menagerie. The story skates perilously close to “torture porn,” albeit with less explicit gore than one usually associates with that genre, and what little there is, is let down by some sub-standard CGI. But it’s a huge step up from Travel Buggies, thanks in no small part to Well’s unhinged performance.

The third section, Untitled, is more of a vignette than an actual story, infuriatingly so as it’s a quite an  intriguing idea. Taking cues from Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s hyperactive Crank (2006) and Ilya Naishuller’s Hardcore Henry (2015), it’s the shortest of the four stories, just a couple of minutes or so, and features Dominic Laurente as a man recording a dating site video who suddenly wakes to find himself miles from home with an instruction to delver a mysterious package or the microchip that’s been implanted in his head will explode. The chip also has the unfortunate side effect of causing hallucinations and he’s constantly being thwarted in his mission by a mysterious figure who may, or may not, be real. It’s all shot from the point of view of the terrified and bewildered protagonist but it’s all over and done before it really gets going. It’s such an intriguing idea that one wishes that the flabby Travel Buggies had been pared down and the running time allotted to Untitled instead.

The final story is more substantial and, like The Christmas Gift, has a bleak comic edge to it. The Christmas Spirit is the best of the bunch, a haunted house tale with a difference. Ian (Ian Hopps) and Devin (Devin Valdez) move into their new home just before Christmas and have to make do without their belongings as nothing can be delivered until after the holiday. But a lack of furniture is soon the least of their worries after they realise that the house is haunted and the only hope they have of clearing out their unwanted guests lies in the eccentric and not at all effective internet “ghostbuster” Paranormal Perry (Dave Sheridan). It’s a fun way to end the film, Sheridan giving the best performance in it.

The Christmas Tapes is a bit of a mixed bag, as so many anthology are really, but when it gets things right, it’s very entertaining. It would have been nice to have seen more of Untitled and to have spent a little less time in the company of the screaming vloggers of Travel Buggies, but overall, the good outweighs the bad here. It’s not the best horror anthology you’ll ever see, nor is it the best Christmas horror film, but it’s very far from the worst, an entertaining, rarely dull but never quite outstanding addition to the already crowded Christmas horror market.