Movie Review
Christmas at the Kringles
1/10
TLDR
Christmas at the Kringles strands a talented comedy cast in a cheap holiday horror comedy that’s neither funny nor scary. It looks like it was made with $5 and some rubber cement, it’s one of the worst films of 2026, and the naughty list is too good for it.
Where to watch: In theaters October 30
The Facts
Synopsis: The Seversons are starting fresh in a quiet suburban neighborhood next door to the Kringles, a family that celebrates Christmas year-round. When Mark discovers the Kringles plan to hypnotize and indoctrinate his family, he teams up with a rogue Santa on a life-or-death rescue mission.
Director: Kevin Lewis
Stars: Ron Livingston, Rachel Bilson, Rob Riggle, Arden Myrin, Beverly D’Angelo, David Wain, Thomas Lennon, Donald Faison
Rated: R for some strong bloody violence, language, and some sexual material
Running Length: 98 minutes
The Thoughts
A Christmas horror movie landing in theaters the day before Halloween sounded like a present with my name on the tag, a chance to co-mingle two of my favorite holidays in one bloody stocking. It doesn’t take long to recognize that Christmas at the Kringles was made with about $5 and some expired rubber cement, and that it’s asking an otherwise talented cast to hold the whole monstrosity together with their bare, callused hands. I mean, wow, this is real true-blue garbage, and a lump of coal in your stocking would be a step up.
The more movies I watch, the more I appreciate just how hard it is to get any of them made. Hundreds of people have to show up, solve problems, hit deadlines and somehow turn a script into something that can actually play in a theater. That makes a movie like this almost fascinating. There’s real talent all over Christmas at the Kringles, yet somehow nobody managed to stop it from becoming this sloppy, cheap and painfully unfunny. It’s one of the worst films I’ve seen in 2026, a bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping wonder of woe that keeps finding new ways to get worse.
Christmas at the Kringles Moves In Next Door
Mark Severson (Ron Livingston, The Conjuring) is a cynical, work-obsessed stock trader who reluctantly moves from the city to a sleepy Los Angeles suburb with his wife Julie (Rachel Bilson, The O.C.) and their young son Bobby (Jack Jewkes). The marriage is already on shaky ground, and arriving just a week before Christmas doesn’t help. Mark barely manages a holiday for his family before their next-door neighbors swoop in to show him how it’s done.
Those neighbors would be Nick and Carol Kringle, played by Reno 911!’s Thomas Lennon (Transformers: Age of Extinction) and Arden Myrin (Satanic Panic). They celebrate Christmas 365 days a year, with a house buried in lights, decorations, presents and relentless good cheer. Julie and Bobby are quickly won over, and even Mark lets his guard down long enough for the family to spend Christmas Eve with them.
Then the movie jumps ahead two months to Valentine’s Day, which is actually one of its more interesting ideas. Mark has gone right back to putting work ahead of his family, while Julie and Bobby have grown increasingly close to the Kringles, who are still carrying on like December 25 never ended. That’s when divorced neighbor Daryl (Donald Faison, Scrubs) warns Mark that families who get too close to the Kringles have a funny habit of disappearing.
Sure enough, there’s something much nastier hiding underneath all those candy canes. The Kringles’ endless Christmas cheer is really the front for a cult built around hypnosis, indoctrination and forced merriment, and before long Mark is trying to get his family back with help from Daryl and a boozy, thoroughly burned-out mall Santa (Rob Riggle, 21 Jump Street). The extended Kringle clan gives the movie an absurdly deep comedy pool to draw from. Beverly D’Angelo (National Lampoon’s Vacation), a Christmas movie mom for life ever since Christmas Vacation, plays Mama K, while David Wain, who directed Wanderlust, also turns up. That’s an awful lot of comedy talent for one cul-de-sac.
Kevin Lewis directs from a script by Zack Imbrogno (Slayers). Lewis is the guy behind Willy’s Wonderland, the Nicolas Cage movie about killer animatronics, and he was looking to make another genre film as far out and weird as his Cage collaboration. That movie was so zonkers that it almost makes sense the same director made both. This one looks considerably worse, though, and it doesn’t have an actor like Cage, who can bring a movie to life with his oddball energy like the Dr. Frankenstein he is. Zany and bonkers would have been a big step up from what actually ended up on screen.
Made With Five Bucks and Rubber Cement
Your first warning arrives before a single ornament gets hung, with a title card that looks like something somebody made on the family computer in 1996. Things don’t improve from there. The Kringle house should be a horror-comedy playground, packed wall to wall with red, green, lights, tinsel and aggressively cheerful Christmas junk. Instead, everything looks flat, plastic and weirdly lifeless, like the seasonal aisle at a discount store after the good stuff has been picked over.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a low-budget horror movie looking cheap if it knows how to turn that into part of the fun. Plenty of great genre films have stretched five bucks into twenty through clever lighting, inventive camerawork or simply having a strong visual idea. Christmas at the Kringles never figures out that trick. It looks cheap because it is cheap, and the movie keeps putting that fact right in the center of the frame.
The R rating eventually brings plenty of blood and Christmas-themed bodily harm, but even the nastier stuff lands with a thud. Compare that with It’s a Wonderful Knife, which understood how much fun there could be in giving small-town Christmas cheer a slasher makeover. Here, the gore isn’t inventive enough to compensate for the jokes that don’t land, while the Cult of Joy never becomes unsettling enough to carry the horror on its own. Cheap, tacky and bloody could have been exactly the right recipe. Somehow Christmas at the Kringles makes all three feel boring.
So Much Talent, So Little to Do
What makes all of this even more frustrating is the cast. There are funny people everywhere you look, but the script rarely gives any of them something genuinely funny to play. Livingston has spent most of his career being the most relatable guy in the room, going all the way back to Office Space, but here he’s mostly asked to look baffled while increasingly ridiculous things happen around him. Bilson gets even less. The setup at least gives Julie a believable reason to gravitate toward the Kringles, especially when Mark keeps choosing work over his family, but once the movie shifts into horror mode, she more or less gets pushed aside.
Lennon, Myrin and D’Angelo should be ideal casting for neighbors whose sugary Christmas cheer gradually turns sinister. Instead, the script gives them a terrific premise and very little to build on. Lennon pushes hardest, sometimes so hard you can practically see him spelunking for laughs that aren’t on the page. Myrin and D’Angelo barely get the chance. Riggle fares better because a boozy, burned-out mall Santa already fits neatly into his comic wheelhouse, but even that joke can only carry so much weight.
The whole thing has the loose, flailing quality of a movie where everyone seems to be trying to invent something funnier than what was written for them. Maybe some of it was improvised, maybe it wasn’t, but it often feels that way. That’s especially maddening because the premise should do half the work for them. Cheerful suburban neighbors secretly running a Christmas cult? A washed-up mall Santa riding to the rescue? Beverly D’Angelo presiding over a deranged holiday clan? There are jokes sitting right there under the tree. Christmas at the Kringles just never unwraps them.
Holiday Horror Deserves a Better Gift
The timing makes this sting a little more because holiday horror has become such fertile ground. For every misfire like Christmas Bloody Christmas, there’s a Krampus that can make you laugh and squirm in the same scene, or a Black Christmas (2019) willing to take a familiar title somewhere new. Camille Griffin’s Silent Night (2021) found a completely different kind of nightmare hiding inside a family Christmas. That’s what makes Christmas at the Kringles so frustrating. There’s a better movie buried right under the wrapping paper.
The setup practically begs for satire about suburban conformity, marital resentment and the pressure to perform happiness for everyone around you. Mark sees the Kringles as lunatics, but Julie and Bobby see neighbors giving them the attention he isn’t. The fact that Christmas literally never ends next door could have been a great joke about forced cheer congealing into something sinister. It’s hard not to think of The ’Burbs, Christmas with the Kranks or Deck the Halls, all movies that understand how quickly neighborly competition can become ridiculous. Kringles has the ingredients for a nastier version of that same idea, but it keeps abandoning them whenever another broad gag or splash of fake blood comes along. There’s a sharp little Christmas horror-comedy somewhere inside this thing. Unfortunately, nobody remembered to unwrap it.
The Naughty List Is Too Good for This One
It manages to make you loathe Christmas and Halloween at the same time: Christmas because that’s when it’s set, and Halloween because that’s when it’s coming out. Who knows, you may even walk away cursing Valentine’s Day too!
Christmas at the Kringles is a ghastly mess and one of the worst movies I’ve seen all year. A cast this stacked, a premise this easy to have fun with, and two holidays this naturally suited to horror comedy should have produced something better than this cheap, unfunny slog. The nicest thing I can say is that everyone involved will move on to better things. Leave this one under the tree, unopened. Put on one of those holiday horror favorites instead, or hold out until David Harbour’s Santa comes crashing back in Violent Night 2 on December 4. The naughty list is too good for this one.
The Final
A Christmas horror movie opening at Halloween should have been a two-for-one treat. Instead, Christmas at the Kringles is cheap, tacky and busted, a lump of coal that somehow makes both holidays worse.
1/10
Where to watch: In theaters October 30
Reviewed by Joe Botten
Joe Botten is The MN Movie Man, a Twin Cities film critic writing spoiler-free reviews since 2012. He also writes for Loud and Clear Reviews, a Rotten Tomatoes approved site. Find him on Instagram and Letterboxd.
Looking for something?
Search by actor, movie, director, genre or keyword.
Leave a Reply