Let me start this review by saying that I cannot recommend this to anyone. It's too bizarre, and I'm not sure how well it will play to the younger viewers it is aimed at. Having said that, however, doesn't mean that I don't appreciate it. This 47-minute slice of strangeness benefits from having a complete commitment to the central idea that ensures you will know from the very first moments whether or not you will want to watch it to the end.
A young girl (Lucy McGrath) is reading a storybook in bed about a monster. She then sees that monster in her room, which leads her on an adventure involving other monsters, and a witch (Lee Hatherly) trying to do general, but not too scary, witchy stuff.
This is a fever dream. It's a project put together with lots of imagination and very little budget, going by the way the onscreen monsters are depicted, but that imagination and feeling of proper childish curiosity, and relative fearlessness, help it to become something strangely captivating. The Monster's Christmas takes viewers on a journey, and part of that journey passes by childhood moments when you were poised precisely between being awake and being fully asleep. Considering how many films fail to capture this feeling, there's something to appreciate here.
Writer Burton Silver doesn't need to do too much, keeping things very simple and loose. There's no need to maintain any sense of reality or worry about logic here, and Silver throws in whatever is needed to maintain the strange atmosphere that lasts from start to finish. Director Yvonne Mackay works well with the script, and also does a good job of marshalling her young lead through a world of goofy monsters and the mildest hints of danger.
Although overdoing things slightly, McGrath works well in her role because she feels exactly like the character she is portraying, a child at play. There's the moments of her speaking to herself in a way that explains part of her journey, moments of her exaggerating her behaviour to enhance her verbal communication with non-verbal cues, and a general sense of her being happy in a world of oddities she has been acclimatised to in storybook form. Hatherly is good fun as the witch, very much the non-threatening children's TV show version of such a character, and it's also worth applauding all of the performers who portray a few of the main monsters, hidden away under the weird and whacky costumes and make up.
I doubt I'll ever rewatch this, but I'll also never forget it. On the one hand, it's one of the most bizarre Christmas tales I've ever watched (and, believe me, I've watched many). On the other hand, it's absolutely on point when it comes to consistently nailing down the tone and atmosphere of a childish fantasy.
6/10
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