Crew
Director – Edmund Purdom, Screenplay – Derek Ford, Additional Scenes Directed/Written by Al McGoohan [Alan Birkinshaw], Producers – Steve Minasian & Dick Randall, Photography – Alan Pudney, Music – Des Dolan, Special Effects – Coast to Coast (Supervisor – Peter Litton). Production Company – Spectacular International Films.
Cast
Edmund Purdom (Inspector Ian Harris), Belinda Mayne (Kate Briosky), Mark Jones (Detective Sergeant Powell), Alan Lake (Giles Harrison), Gerry Sundquist (Cliff Boyd), Kelly Baker (Sherry Graham), Pat Astley (Sharon), Kevin Lloyd (Jerry), Wilfred Corlett (‘Experience’ Santa Claus), Caroline Munro (Herself), Wendy Danvers (Mrs Sherry)
Plot
As it nears Christmas around London, a killer is attacking and killing people that are dressed as Santa. New Scotland Yard inspector Ian Harris investigates.
Every Christmas season sees a mountain of Christmas-themed films. It used to be the occasional theatrical film but now consists of a mass of treacly made-for-tv movies. Since the 1980s, there has been a growing sub-genre of Christmas-themed horror films. The first of these was the All Through the House segment of Tales from the Crypt (1972) continuing through Black Christmas/Silent Night, Evil Night (1974). The genre took off in the 1980s with a cluster of Christmas slasher films like Christmas Evil (1980), To All a Good Night (1980) and the notorious Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) and sequels. Since then we have seen other psycho Santa films with Santa Claws (1996), Satan Claus (1996), Psycho Santa (2003), Black Christmas (2006), Deadly Little Christmas (2009), Silent Night (2012), All Through the House (2015), Good Tidings (2016) and Slayed (2020), among others. (See Christmas Films).
Edmund Purdom (1926-2009) was a British actor who started on the stage and had a brief career in Hollywood in the 1950s that failed to quite take off. By the late 1960s, Purdom was reduced to appearing in Italian swashbucklers and Euro exploitation films like Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks (1973), Ator the Fighting Eagle (1982), Pieces (1983), 2019: After the Fall of New York (1983) and The Rift (1990). Don’t Open Till Christmas was a British-made Slasher Film where Purdom managed to parlay his starring to also taking the director’s seat – it is the one and only film he would ever direct.
Unlike Silent Night, Deadly Night, which featured a murderous Santa on a rampage, Don’t Open Till Christmas flips the script and has a psycho targeting people dressed as Santa. Thus we get a series of slasher styled sequences where all the victims are Santas. And quite nasty some of these get – a Santa stabbed in the head; one having their face shoved down onto a barbecue hotplate; another shot in the face, and so on. In the most outrageous scene, a Santa gets their dick chopped off while they stand at a urinal. In one of the more entertaining scenes, a Santa gets a machete in the head and their body is placed on a platform that is sent up onto the stage where Hammer actress and Bond girl Caroline Munro, the film’s best-known name, is performing a song.
Furthermore, Purdom sets the locale of the film around London’s Soho area – which had the equivalent reputation in the 1960s/70s as New York’s 42nd Street did ie. the part of the city where all the hookers, strip clubs and porn theatres were to be found. This is something that gives Don’t Open Till Christmas a much more sordid backdrop than any other slasher might have. We get casual visits to a nudie photographer at one point, while one of the Santas is also killed while visiting a girl in a peep show booth.
There is a fairly routine police investigation plot holding everything together. This is something you almost never had in one of the American slasher films of the era, which makes Don’t Open Till Christmas into a more story driven slasher. The US slashers were almost always cast with teenagers, whereas there is not a teenager in sight here. Purdom does double duty and casts himself as the dogged police inspector.
Don’t Open Till Christmas was a production from Dick Randall who had produced a number of films for low-budget Spanish director Juan Piquer Simon including Supersonic Man (1979), Pieces and The Rift, along with several adult films. Randall and co-producer Steve Minasian paired on a handful of British films during the 1980s, including the Caroline Munro-starring slasher Slaughter High (1987) and the documentary Don’t Scream! It’s Only a Movie (1985).
Trailer here