Violent Night Review (2022) – It’s Christmas in July! This is a hilarious, festive thrill ride with the most BADASS Santa you or we have ever seen!!

Merry Christmas in July!! For our last post of the month, we’re going to be switching things up a little bit! If you’ve ever heard of the concept of “Christmas in July”, then you’ll feel right at home! Recently, we were browsing for some movies to watch when we stumbled upon a movie called “Violent Night”. We were skeptical at first but considering that we’re in the midst of our action movie theme for this month AND with the idea of Christmas in July in mind, we simply couldn’t pass on the opportunity to do a review of this hidden gem!

Some trigger warnings before we get into it, this movie is hilarious, but it is also exceptionally graphic and violent. There are instances of torture depicted as well. We potatoes really don’t do well with torture in film, and we found this particular scene to be a bit too much for us. It was telegraphed well in advance, so it was nothing that 10-20 seconds of fast forwarding couldn’t fix, but we still wanted you all to be aware.

We will do everything we can to not give too many spoilers in this review but there are likely to be some, so please take that into consideration and read cautiously. Let’s get started!

Violent Night starts us off with a man dressed as Santa Claus (David Harbor), sitting at the bar of an English pub on Christmas Eve drinking beer. While awaiting a refill, he looks around the room and sees a bunch of Christmas decorations before fixing his gaze on what appears to be a greeting card with a very jolly looking Santa Clause holding a small gift and smiling. He stares at it and attempts a classic “Ho, Ho, Ho!” laugh. He can’t even finish before visibly cringing and returning to his drink.

Santa gets his refill and another man who is also dressed as Santa across the bar notices him. The man across the bar asks, “You just get off?” Santa replies that he is taking a break between shifts. The bar maid who just served him asks him if he’s driving, to which he responds, “I steer a little, but the reindeer do most of the work”. They chuckle and play his response off as a joke.

The man across the bar seems very curious about our Santa. During the course of their conversation, they talk about doing the job for the money and doing it for the kids. Our Santa seems completely jaded to the whole thing at this point. He talks about how the world runs on greed, how the glint in kid’s eyes is so brief because they just want the next present, and how he thinks that this might be his last year working the job.

The man across the bar is sad to hear that our POV Santa, (David Harbor), is in distress about the holiday and offers to cover his tab. Our Santa is appreciative and prepares to leave. He pulls out a gift from his sack and hands it to the bar maid saying “For your grandson. Save me a trip.” The present is neatly wrapped and has her grandson’s name on it.

As he walks through the door, she asks herself out loud how he knows her grandson’s name or that she even had a grandson! She runs after him after having noticed that he went through the door that leads to the roof. She emerges out onto the roof shouting that he can’t be on the roof and that it’s a liability if anything were to happen to him. When she looks around the snowy rooftop, he seems to have vanished!

She looks up to the sky and sees the classic flying sleigh with the reindeer. Staring in awe up to the sky, she is amazed at what she sees and is about to say “it’s beautiful”…before she is abruptly cut off by Santa vomiting out the side of his sleigh right onto her head! It is super gross, but absolutely hilarious! We couldn’t help but laugh with equal parts revulsion and amusement!

From there, we cut to the film’s title and then to a man standing in the snow holding a bag with a present addressed to “mom” on it. His name is Jason Lightstone (Alex Hassell) and he is very quickly picked up by his wife, Linda Lightstone (Alexis Louder) and their elementary school aged daughter Trudy (Leah Brady).

Linda doesn’t seem incredibly pleased to see Jason, but Trudy is extremely excited! They exchange Merry Christmas wishes and Trudy quotes Home Alone saying, “Merry Christmas ya filthy animal!” She apparently stayed up late watching Home Alone and has been quoting it all morning! She even tries out the iconic Macaulay Culkin scream! We potatoes fully support this as we adore that film as well! It is a classic!

Jason thanks Linda for “doing this” with them, to which she replies, “I’m not doing it for you”. They seem to have a pretty strained relationship and we’re not entirely sure why just yet in the film. We then learn that they are on their way to spend Christmas with Jason’s mom and the rest of his family. Which as we potatoes know is always complicated.

They drive up to the gates and gatehouse of a large mansion where they are greeted by a very kind guardsman named Al (Ray Strachan). He wishes them all a Merry Christmas before opening the gates and letting them into the drive of Jason’s mom’s mansion.

The mansion could not be more garish in our opinion, but we personally do not feel that anyone truly NEEDS a mansion. But we digress!

Once they make it inside, we see that there is a huge staff as well as a catering company there to help with setting up the festivities and prepping food. A good portion of the staff look highly suspect with lots of sideways glances and shifty behavior.

Jason, Linda, and Trudy get settled in and make their way to a large room with the Christmas tree. They set their presents under the tree and head to one of the caterers to grab drinks. Here we meet Jason’s sister, Alva (Edi Patterson) who opens with some rude comments toward Linda. “You’ve gained weight…but it looks good on you.”

Alva and Jason obviously have some sibling rivalry going on and Alva indicates that she thinks their mother may be leaving her business empire to one of them in the near future. She tells Jason, “I’m gunning for your ass.”

Jason’s response is "What would a Lightstone family Christmas be without groveling and infighting?" – It seems that there is always quite a bit of drama during the holidays…as it is for many families.

We then meet Alva’s son, Bert (Alexander Elliot), and Alva’s boyfriend, Morgan (Cam Gigandet). Bert is a goofy teen who is obsessed with social media and makes short little videos or livestreams during the movie – “Hashtag Blessed ☝️”. Morgan is a small-time actor who is trying to make it big and is super goofy himself.

Jason and Alva’s mom, Gertrude (Beverly D'Angelo), is a prominent, rich, businesswoman who doesn’t take shit from anyone. In fact, one of her opening lines while talking on her cell phone is "That's the best you can do? Listen you cocksucker, its Christmas, so why don't you take your best offer, gift wrap it, and ram it up your fucking box!"

She’s clearly not a great mother or grandmother. She is an abusive parent. She pits her kids against each other thereby causing them to not have the kind of sibling relationship that they could have had. Their sibling relationship is built off of competition, rivalry, resentment and toxic roles within a toxic family system.

Gertrude also seems to feel entitled to her children and expects them to cater to her and suck up to her at all times. Jason and Alva share a lot of anger and resentment towards her for extremely understandable reasons!

The movie does a great job of showing how this kind of family system can wreak havoc on the children. Although it’s portrayed in a humorous way, they show us that both Jason and Alva have dealt with a lot of manipulation and narcissistic abuse growing up. It is clear that they always had to fight for their parent’s attention and love. They’re both fairly obnoxious characters that make dubious choices, but it is somewhat understandable.

We then cut to a hilarious montage of Santa making his Christmas deliveries. At every house he visits, there’s something frustrating or annoying for him! – Curdled milk and cookies, wish lists with only “cash and video games” on them, unwrapped amazon boxes under the tree, drunk sleeping parents, etc. – Along the way, Santa snags beers from some of the houses and drinks while “driving” the sleigh!

Please do not take this as an example, we don’t condone drinking and driving and we highly recommend drinking at home (preferably with one of our drinking games!). But it was truly hilarious to see a Santa Clause acting like a belligerent drunk while flying through the night sky on Christmas Eve! But we digress!

Santa is obviously NOT having a good time and is just trying to get through his night while delivering all the presents he needs to.

Cut back to the mansion and we see Trudy and her parents setting out cookies and milk for Santa. “Daddy never took me to see Santa at the mall this year”, Trudy says. She’s worried that Santa won’t know what she wants for Christmas this year without having told him at the mall! - Jason looks ashamed, apologizes and tells Trudy to get ready for bed while he takes care of something.

He rushes downstairs to the rumpus room, finds a walkie talkie, wraps it, and meets Trudy and Linda back in Trudy’s bedroom. He gives her the gift, she opens it, and Jason tells her that the walkie talkie is a magical direct line to Santa Clause himself! However, Santa is so busy tonight that he might not be able to answer Trudy’s messages, but he’ll certainly hear them! “It’s just like writing him a letter, but better!” Jason and Linda step out of the room but listen in at the door to hear what Trudy wants for Christmas.

We got to hand it to Jason, it was a pretty clever move to get his kiddo to say what they want out loud! Well played, Jason!

In classic Christmas movie fashion, Trudy doesn’t ask for any physical presents. She wishes for Santa to help her parents make up so they can be a family again. Jason and Linda look a bit distraught at this, and Linda ends up storming off. As we mentioned before, we’ve had many hints that they have a strained relationship.

We’re going to speed things up from here! We then cut to Santa arriving at the Lightstone mansion to deliver presents. After magically wisping himself down the chimney, he is thoroughly pleased to see some freshly baked cookies, some very old, expensive brandy, and a massage chair. He makes himself a little too comfortable and ends up falling asleep in the chair!

In the meantime: remember those shady staff people around the mansion? Well, they happen to be a highly organized team of thieves! They’re there to hold Gertrude and the rest of the household hostage so they can steal the millions of dollars held in the mansion’s safe!

Santa finds himself in the middle of all of the brutal mayhem and has to fight his way through an army of thieves to save himself, the family, and Christmas itself! The remainder of the film is a ridiculous mish mosh of action movie and classic Christmas movie antics that honestly worked so surprisingly well!

We’re going to leave it here because you all need to see this film!

The movie drew heavy inspiration from movies like Die hard, the Santa Clause, and Home Alone. It does a fantastic job of being absolutely hilarious while still maintaining the genuine tension of a good action flick! There are so many parts throughout the film that had us potatoes laughing like crazy! There is a highly tolerable level of raunchiness to the humor that hit just right throughout the film. David Harbor was absolutely wonderful in the role of badass Santa!

The movie also gives this version of Santa a legitimate reason for being a badass. We won’t spoil it here, but it was a breath of fresh air to see this whole new take on Santa that truly has not been done in film before! - Is it silly? Sure! Was it a blast though? One hundred percent yes!

We were genuinely surprised at how much fun we had throughout the film. There are enough small twists and turns to keep you thoroughly engaged, but not so much that you can’t keep track of the story!

The film makers seem to be fully aware of how bizarre and silly this story is, and they fully embrace it throughout! Although there are serious parts, the majority of the film has a very healthy dose of comedy that makes it easy to overlook the sheer absurdity of it all!

One of the things that we appreciated was seeing how the film handled tough situations in relationships. We see Jason and Linda struggle with their relationship and also hear a bit about Santa and Mrs. Clause having their own issues after 1000 years of marriage. We also get some brief but appreciated commentary about the relationship between family members.

This is somewhat to be expected in most Christmas films as they almost always involve family in some sense, but we felt that it was an interesting take on it. We potatoes are extremely familiar with how stressful, complicated, and generally exhausting the holiday season truly is. We know a lot of you are more than aware of this as well.

We potatoes personally encourage all of you to let go of obligation and guilt and to take back the holiday season this year! We could all take a lesson from Santa in this film, and fight for a holiday season that we actually want to be a part of and truly enjoy!

Overall, we really didn’t think we would like the film half as much as we did! This was a delightful surprise for us. So, when trying to decide how to rate it, we couldn’t help but give this one a stellar review! We simply had way too much fun with it and we truly think you will too! In all honesty, it is completely ridiculous, but in the best possible way. We could not recommend this movie more and it is going to be added to our Christmas classic roster!

If you enjoy Die Hard style action flicks, some raunchy comedy, absurdity and a healthy dose of that good ol’ Christmas spirit, then this is the film for you! Merry Christmas in July to you, our awesome readers!! 😎🎄

We give Violent Night 5 Brandies out of 5!

The Violent Night Drinking Game

Take a sip anytime:

1.     Santa drinks anything

2.     Santa swears

3.     Santa laughs or chuckles - "Ho Ho Ho"

4.     Santa uses a hammer

5.     Gertrude is the worst (She really is awful)

6.     Anyone uses a walkie talkie

7.     Anyone says "Christmas Magic" or something magical is on screen

8.     Anyone talks about believing in Santa

9.     Anyone says "Santa"

10.  Anyone dies

11.  Anything on screen poking fun at Santa

12.  The family members are rude to each other

13.  There's an explosion

14.  Someone gets stabbed

15.  Christmas music plays

16.  There's a reference to another Christmas movie

17.  The thieves use their codenames

18.  There's a cheesy joke or one-liner

What did you think?? Did you like the movie? Did you hate it!? What movies should we watch?! Any and all thoughts are welcome! Let us know here in the comments and always remember to be safe and drink responsibly!