Everyone knows that Santa Claus is a jolly old elf who delivers toys to good girls and boys all around the world on Christmas Eve. What films in the vein of Violent Night and Christmas Bloody Christmas presuppose is: sometimes he isn’t?
But “isn’t” what? The “Bad Santa” movie comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, as befitting a character born into the public domain. He is an empty vessel into which we can pour not only our anxieties and our joys but also our high concepts and our genre beats. He can do comedy, horror, action: You name it, there’s a Santafied version of it. He’s the mythological manifestation of Die Hard, a concept so malleable—Speed 2 is Die Hard on a Boat; Under Siege 2 is Die Hard on a Train, etc.—that Rick and Morty posited Die Hard as a sort of...