Murder Under the Christmas Tree

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MOVIE REVIEW
How to Kill Your Family on Christmas
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Genre: Horror, Comedy, Holiday
Year Released: 2025, 2026
Runtime: 82 minutes
Director: Robbie Dias
Writer: Marc Gottlieb
Cast: Daniel Roebuck, Lisa Wilcox, Sadie Katz, Galen Howard, Bill Dawes, Stephen Wu, Lauren Francesca, Jennylyn Caterina, Eden Shea Beck, Ken Davitian
Where to Watch: TBD

RAVING REVIEW: Most family Christmases are already horror stories; if you put people in the same room long enough, there will always be a breaking point. HOW TO KILL YOUR FAMILY ON CHRISTMAS knows that. Robbie Dias’ low-budget holiday horror comedy doesn’t rush straight to the bloodshed. It starts with awkward family behavior, uncomfortable conversations, old resentments, forced cheer, and the kind of gathering where tension and anxiety are around every corner.

The structure is deranged in a way that immediately makes it sound more aggressive than it is. Howard and Helen, played by Daniel Roebuck and Lisa Wilcox, have decided that the perfect Christmas gift for their daughter’s family is a kidnapping. That’s the kind of story that sounds impossible to underplay, yet the film spends a surprising amount of time moving like a family comedy before it remembers just how dark that idea is. The result is a movie caught between two instincts. One wants to sit in the discomfort of a badly damaged family trying to act normal. The other wants bodies dropping near the tree.

There’s something undeniably amusing about how casually awful everyone can be, and the film gets a fair amount of mileage out of watching these people bicker, deflect, panic, and rationalize behavior that no sane family would survive. It’s not a refined comedy, and the jokes don’t always land, but the weirdness has personality. The movie feels like it was built around the question of how far a holiday gathering can go before politeness finally collapses.

HOW TO KILL YOUR FAMILY ON CHRISTMAS is at its best once the danger becomes less theoretical and the movie starts cashing in on its darker notes. The final stretch brings more blood, more panic, and a clearer sense of identity than the earlier sections. Roebuck and Wilcox understand the assignment. They bring enough experience to make Howard and Helen feel ridiculous without reducing them to empty caricatures. Roebuck has a natural ease that helps ground the absurdity, while Wilcox gives Helen a holiday warmth that feels one bad comment away from cracking. Their dynamic helps sell the idea that this family’s madness didn’t come from out of nowhere. These are people who’ve had years to normalize the unacceptable.

Sadie Katz brings the right kind of instability to Brenda, and Galen Howard lends the film some of the funniest moments as Wilbur Farnsworth. Bill Dawes also makes an impression as Peter, especially because he gives the movie someone who feels a little more human inside a room full of exaggerated personalities. That matters in a film like this. When everyone is at an 11 all at once, anyone who can make a character feel grounded becomes an anchor.

Some of the dialogue and line readings are something else, some reactions feel delayed, and a few scenes feel like everyone is reaching for a different version of the movie. That doesn’t kill the experience, because this type of scrappy horror comedy can survive some roughness. When the performances click, the movie has a wonderful little holiday-horror-comedy spark.

Dias gets the Christmas texture right, which helps more than it should. The decorations, music, clothing, and seasonal clutter give the movie a stronger holiday presence than productions that barely bother to dress the set. That matters because the contrast is the point. The cheerier the environment looks, the more ridiculous the violence feels once it finally arrives. A film with this title needs to feel like Christmas, not just claim the date on a calendar, and this one puts in that effort.

The screenplay by Marc Gottlieb has a fun central idea, but it doesn’t always know where to focus. It piles family secrets, arguments, manipulation, kidnapping, murder, and dark comedy into its runtime, and the balance gets messy. Some of that mess fits the mood. A controlled version of this story might lose the off-center quality that makes it watchable. At the same time, too many threads compete for attention before the movie has made the situation as disturbing or suspenseful as it should be.

HOW TO KILL YOUR FAMILY ON CHRISTMAS lands as a curiosity more than a new holiday staple. It has a killer title, a warped premise, some committed performances, and enough chaos to justify the watch. It also has a slower middle act, inconsistency in some of the roles, and a tonal sway that keeps it from becoming the mean, funny, blood-soaked holiday nightmare it’s clearly trying to be. As a Christmas horror comedy, it’s too strange to dismiss. The film works best as a seasonal oddity pulled from the back of the digital shelf, watched with forgiving expectations and a taste for low-budget weirdness.

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[photo courtesy of 3 KEYS MEDIA, EGGY PRODUCTION, FILM REGIONS INTERNATIONAL (FRI)]

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