With Adult Swim Yule Log, Kelly delivers a new dimension in seasonal insanity, and won’t the kids just love it? Just slide your arm into the crazy stocking until you hear a click.
You'll not find a more bodacious bonanza of sheer WTFery than the last twenty minutes, which crosscut realities and timelines while doing truly disgusting things with pimento cheese.
Kelly tries a bit too much, favoring shock and absurdity over consistency and coherence. But the attempt alone is exciting; and it offers a refreshing alternative for those who prefer their holiday entertainment to be spooky, not sentimental.
Casper Kelly psychotically spoofs the strangest of strange horror titles that turn anything into a murderous entity while unraveling deadly severe social commentaries. It’s abstract art, theater camp, found footage foolishness, hunt-and-stalk depravity — Adult Swim Yule Log is a whole lot of things but, even with a full 90 minutes, few angles feel fully fleshed out.
It's a disjointed, ridiculous mess, but it's a *fun*, disjointed, ridiculous mess. As you watch the first 35 minutes which keeps the camera stationary and focused on the yule log, the title makes sense, and you might think the whole movie will be one long, uninterrupted shot. But the director eventually decides to go with the more traditional multi-camera approach, and things actually get weirder once the camera stops focusing on the fireplace. The 2nd-rate actors distracted me from the proceedings at first, but the ridiculousness of it all made me eventually stop caring about acting chops. Without giving away details, suffice it to say we get a hodgepodge of twisted, apparently unrelated events and villains who appear to have separate agendas and serve no purpose other than to make the hapless renters of the cabin suffer. I kept wondering what would happen next -- the proceedings are not predictable. Unfortunately, their unpredictability is a function of their pointlessness, but if you just sit back and let the insanity happen without trying too hard to make sense of it, you can have some fun. Just pop some corn and watch the craziness unfold.