I went into see Krampus with high hopes for a thrilling, scary movie against the background of a happy holiday. I came out utterly disappointed.

The movie starts out with a scene that’s supposed to remind the audience how corrupt Christmas has become. People are fighting for gifts amongst a plethora of holiday shoppers and the main protagonist of the film, a young boy named Max (Emjay Anthony), is getting beat up by a kid who looks like he had one too many Big Macs.

The beginning is set up so that the audience questions their disbelief in Santa Claus and we’re made to feel bad about how we’ve participated in a commercialized holiday. For the most part, it succeeds at this. It is pretty easy to understand where the movie is going and it makes you feel like the family deserves whatever is coming.

The characters were extremely relatable. We’ve got a normal suburban family being met by their trashy, backwoods extended family. The clashing ideologies makes for a lot of tension on the first night the family arrives.  Tom Engel (Adam Scott) is the patriarch of the family who is hosting. He’s your typical overworked suburban dad and throughout the movie is forced to be a bit more manly by Howard (David Koechner). Howard is the father of the visiting family and acts as an uncivilized macho man but does his best to protect his family throughout the turn of events. The children have their normal struggles, and the teen of the family, Beth Engel(Stefania LaVie Owen), brought a classic teen angst to the movie although it was at times a little annoying.

The main problem I have with this movie though is this: it was set up to be a horror movie and it was not executed as one. I wanted to be thrilled and I wasn’t. The monsters were actually adorable, and not in a way “I have a twisted mind” way. The gingerbread men that were incorporated to torment the family looked exactly like the gingerbread man from the movie Shrek. It was hard to be scared as they were making adorable noises and shooting nails into a guy’s leg.

The dolls and toys that came to life in the family’s attic had gyrations that were more humorous than scary and the doll that decided it was scary to stick her long tongue out reminded me more of Miley Cyrus in a Kiss revival band than it did of something threatening.

The main monster in the movie, Krampus, was obviously modeled after the beast from German legends. Unfortunately we only get to see him once and the rest of the times are his silhouette amongst the roofs of houses.

The movie really wasn’t great to begin with but the ending surely sealed it’s fate as something you’d never want to see again. They went with the most cliche ending they could think of and then they tried to surprise you with a plot twist for the last scene but even the people in the audience saw it coming.

At the showing I attended, one guy found it so disgraceful that he got up in the theater and said, “I hate this movie!” He then proceeded to walk out. Quite frankly, I didn’t blame him.