For Krampus origins, if you have Colonel Schneider with the amulet in the WWI bunker, you are correct. Although in all honesty, it is Krampus modern-day origin and not his real origin. The book used to conjure the Krampus ends up at a Catholic orphanage with a new teacher, student into the black arts, and a priest who drinks too much.

The story and acting were poor. The Krampus was more like Dark Lord Sauron than the Christmas Krampus we are used to seeing.

Guide: No swearing, sex, or nudity.

This is the third Krampus film written by Robert Conway. The first - Krampus: The Reckoning - was reasonably entertaining, but had a really bad CGI Krampus. The second - Krampus Unleashed - had a really dumb script, but at least gave us a practical make-up FX Krampus and lots of gore. For most of Origins, which has the worst script of them all, I was wondering whether the film even had a Krampus: it takes an age to get to the monster, and it really isn't worth the wait.

The first half an hour of the film tells how a magical book with the power to summon the Christmas Devil comes into the possession of schoolteacher Josephine (Katie Peabody),who has started working at a Catholic school for orphans in Arizona. This part of the film could have been wrapped up in less than ten minutes, but then the film would have been barely over an hour long (which would have been fine by me). The book gets into the hands of one of the school kids, who translates the ancient German text and summons Krampus, which manifests itself as a surly looking kid called Nicholas, who turns up on the school's doorstep at night and is taken in by the nuns.

There's not an ounce of the trashy fun of the second film, director Joseph Mbah aiming for either 'classy' or 'atmospheric', but missing both by a mile. He does, however, hit 'boring' and 'tedious' without difficulty, making the first two films seem like masterpieces in comparison. After an hour of forgettable, uneventful drama, we finally get to see Krampus, and a more crappy creature it would be hard to imagine: a man painted black wearing a horned helmet and with cheap-looking After Effects glowing eyes, Krampus just stands there, talking in a stupid demonic voice, ending each sentence with an extended, deep, guttural sound that is more laughable than terrifying.

After threatening to devour their souls and destroy the world, or some such nonsense, the pathetic monster is defeated by Josephine, who is protected by a handy amulet and who has conveniently been learning ancient Germanic languages as a hobby, thereby enabling her to read from the book and banish Krampus back to hell.

1.5/10, rounded down to 1 for using the font Helvetica on the school blackboard, a typeface that wasn't designed until several decades after the film is set.

This movie definitely deserves one star! As a fan of horror including terrible B movies, this film had no redeeming qualities. It seems to have been made by the same studio that made Krampus: Unleashed, which was only slightly better with 2 stars.

These two films tie into the same universe because of the backstory involving Arizona, which probably was just written in because that's where the people who filmed it lived so they decided to place it there, even though Krampus is a Germanic folklore demon, from Germany.

So, how does Krampus end up in the desert? Well, this movie will tell you, but in a very slow, boring uninteresting and uncreative way. They couldn't even write in an interesting way to get the German demon to the USA. The introduction opens somewhere in Germany during world war, where it shows some crazy German dude with a fancy necklace and a book screaming random stuff, he and everyone else gets shot, and the bodies of the US soldiers are sent back to the states. One soldier's wife, a teacher in Arizona, is sent her husbands belongings, which just happen to include the German book and necklace.

The first hour of the film is less like a horror movie and more like a very boring biopic of 1900's Arizona as we learn about their beliefs of the time, and how the orphanage they work at operates. It isn't until you get near the end that the story even has literally anything to do with Krampus. It's almost as if they started filming a story about an orpahange in early Arizona days, realized at the end that it would literally make people's eyes bleed from boredom, and decided to throw in Krampus in the last few scenes to write it off as a horror story instead. Then, when he finally appears, it is really just flashy colors or a still shot that depict the Krampus. No murder or anything even takes place, just scenes of people running, falling, screaming, and then the assumption that Krampus killed them, it's really absolutely terrible. I mean, I truly believe a B movie can be totally redeemed from its crappy graphics and usually bad acting and soundtrack with originality and gore, but this movie offers neither. Krampus himself looks like a guy in a black paper mache' mask with some flames edited in his eye sockets, and you don't actually see Krampus move around or anything, all you see is a scene of his face he kinda rocks back and forth, and the rest of the time, he is in the form of an evil looking little boy, or the screen flashes color (you know, because flashing colors means murders are going on!! you just can't see them).

At the end Krampus basically disappears* everyone except the teacher, because she had the German necklace the first guy was waving around and screaming about and for some reason Krampus can't kill whoever has the necklace. But then she manages to banish Krampus somehow despite only having just learned about him and the amulet 2 minutes beforehand and everyone pops out of thin air so Krampus really didn't do any damage at all and the whole thing was pretty pointless since they all lived happily ever after anyway.

The drunk priest wins award for best actor, everyone else was terrible. This was like a bad boring episode of little house on the prairie.