We’re nearing the end of the holiday theme week of horror movies for the year so it’s time to go to the old standby of Christmas horror. This one also follows the trend of recent movies like Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey or Mousetrap where people are taking anything that goes into the public domain and turning it into a horror movie. Unlike those ones, however, How the Grinch Stole Christmas isn’t public domain so they have to skate by on parody protection and not actually saying the word Grinch.

In this version of the story, little Cindy comes downstairs on Christmas to find a green guy stealing all their decorations and before she can make his heart grow three sizes, her mom attacks him ends up falling on a spike and dying. When Cindy returns to the town 20 years later, she finds that the city of Newville doesn’t really celebrate Christmas anymore. When her father tries to create some holiday cheer, he has a run in with The Mean One and the killings kick off. Now it’s up to Cindy to try to hunt down and end the reign of terror that this green menace has inflicted on the town since she was a little girl. Also, there’s a guy named Dr. Zeus. Haha! Jokes.

The issue with most of the cash grab horror movies about public domain stuff is that they are rushed out with little concern for plot and even less concern for budget. This one, thankfully, feels a bit more fleshed out and interesting than its brethren but there’s still only so much you can do with the premise. By the time you get an hour into the film, you’ve basically seen everything it has to offer but it still needs to wrap up for another half hour which just feels a bit tired at that point. The make-up and physical acting for the Mean One is meant to evoke Jim Carrey’s version of the Grinch and it does a pretty good job for not having a particularly large budget. However, once you’ve gotten the references and seen him in action, there’s not a whole lot more to it.

The acting in this is better than I had hoped for but that might just be because I am coming off of having seen Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter CottonHell. There are actual relationships between characters that get developed. We get a backstory for the town and what happened after the initial killing of Cindy’s mom. I’m willing to extend a lot of forgiveness to a cheap film like this if it’s willing to at least attempt to be real movie. The kills aren’t particularly amazing except for the scene where a group of tourists from SantaCon roll into a diner and get taken out. That has not only the most interesting kills so it isn’t just “Grinch slices a guy with his claws” but it also feels like the movie really hitting on all cylinders. The physical acting and slapstick reminiscent of Jim Carrey getting mixed with actual inventive kills is a delight but makes the otherwise bland kills feel all the more disappointing since you know they could be doing better.

This would be better served as a much shorter film but at least it doesn’t make you hate it by the end. The rhyming narrator doing a Seuss pastiche is a fun inclusion and if you have nostalgia for the Carrey Grinch, you could watch worse things.

Score: 3 out of 5