Christmas can offer us the perfect time to relax and unwind away from the normal day-to-day stresses, but sometimes the deeply traditional festive media offerings can get a little repetitive – after all, there’s only so many times that you can watch It’s A Wonderful Life or Home Alone.
Thankfully, the world’s oddballs are always on hand to deliver us something eye-opening, and there’s surely few Christmas films as baffling and wonderful as the 1981 New Zealand movie The Monster’s Christmas.
This avant-garde treat has been a hidden gem of the nation’s fledgling film industry since its inception and shows that Christmas can give us the ability to be confused and entertained in equal measures.
The story follows the exploits of a young girl as she’s transported into the world of a monster in one of her storybooks. In the following 47 minutes we’re treated to a deeply surreal spectacle as pre-CGI foam monsters inhabit the almost Dali-esque summery New Zealand landscape.
The film’s director Yvonne Mackay has revealed how the movie’s monsters were inspired by the mud and mountains of the nation’s countryside, and the use of monsters has remained integral in many aspects of modern media.
From the weird and wonderful creations of scary 1980s kids’ films such as The Dark Crystal, to even the online casino site Royal Vegas Casino’s So Many Monsters slots game, there’s something about monsters that offers the power endlessly amuse and scare the viewer.
The monsters on the Royal Vegas Casino game may be childishly cute and colourful, but the lucrative cash prizes that can be won via the mobile slots game are definitely more adult-orientated. The game features along side many other fantasy/horror slots games such as Dragon’s Myth, Halloweenies and Alaxe in Zombieland that shows just how entertaining gamers find such monstrous motifs.
The lo-fi charms found in the monsters of the New Zealand film and the slots game offer a particularly retro appeal in today’s CGI-saturated computer age. Much as the space-rock band The Flaming Lips delivered their own deeply-weird Christmas on Mars movie that benefited from its homegrown ethos, many of the joys of The Monster’s Christmas are simply watching how threadbare the production values are.
And with a strangely heartwarming storyline, imaginative plot development and wonderfully psychedelic cinematography, The Monster’s Christmas successfully illustrates the fact that whilst mainstream Christmases might be a little formulaic, it doesn’t mean that yours has to be too.