April (A Leslie Kies) is in charge of the secret Santa gift exchange at her family's Christmas Eve dinner. She brings her latest boyfriend Ty (Michael Rady) an attorney. Her family made its money off of Pharmaceuticals and are a bit dysfunctional, a little more than most families. They are all dysfunctional in fun way until things come to a boil and bloody.

I enjoyed this film as it was a fresh new horror in an overcrowded genre. Petra Areskoug made me laugh out loud about midway through the film with a line I can't repeat. A film for those who love comedy slashers.

Guide: F-word, sex, nudity (Michelle Renee Allaire)

Writer/director Adam Marcus probably doesn't realize half how accurate the title of his film, in fact, really is! In case you ever participated in a Secret Santa routine, in your family or among colleagues/friends, you just know that you never get what you really want, and that basically all presents are worthless. All I wanted for Christmas, was a fun and reasonably qualitative holiday-horror, but what I got was this lousy "Secret Santa".

Moreover, this is the worst type of bad movie. The type that thinks of itself as clever, tongue-in-cheek, and original. Hate to break it to you, Mr. Marcus, but your film isn't any of the above. It's a frustrating mix between vulgar humor and sickening gore, with exclusively loathsome characters. A rich and eccentric family, of which the father is a pharmaceutical tycoon, gathers at their cabin in a fancy skiing resort. It's the kind of family where everybody hates each other so badly, that it already is highly implausible they're celebrating Christmas together. Someone in the group spiced up the punch with a powerful truth-serum, which leads to even bigger arguments than usual. The serum apparently also has a bizarre side-effect, though, as they gradually also turn into mad-raving and drooling maniacs.

The gore is mean-spirited, but very poorly handled and not shocking at all, with a lot of CGI-stuff and hectic camerawork. The humor is frustrating because Adam Marcus makes use of "easy" stereotypes, like a boy who stutters, a pervert uncle, an uptight aunt, a Swedish girl, etc. The performances of the ensemble cast are lousy, but what do you expect with such a mediocre director in charge? Since it's Christmas, I'm generously giving two extra points, though. One for the opening credits in which the letters of the cast members' names turn into horror-terms, and one for the following quote that made me chuckle: "Your parents named you Penny because that's what they think you are worth!".

Members of a wealthy family gather for Christmas dinner, but with the punch spiked with a powerful truth serum, old family feuds come to the fore, leading to extreme violence.

Writer/director Adam Marcus's Secret Santa is not to be confused with Secret Santa (2015),which is bad, but not quite as bad as this. Marcus gives us a film in which the characters are such a vile waste of skin that watching is painful.

One might imagine that seeing these utterly despicable people being bumped off in a variety of revolting ways would be a lot of fun, but it's not, the level of obnoxiousness so high that no amount of suffering is enough to compensate. Even when they're being sliced and diced, they're utterly reprehensible. The film is intended to be a black comedy, but people this horrible aren't funny in any circumstance; I loathed every minute in their company, even when they were dead.

There's a high level of graphic gore - decapitation by shovel, impalement on Christmas tree decoration, vomiting of internal organs etc. - but the special effects are 'enhanced' by CGI blood: just one more thing guaranteed to rankle this particular horror fan.