FBI Agent Harper Winslow (Denyce Lawton) and Detective Carly Lopez (Teresa Castillo) are working together over the holidays to catch an art thief who dresses like Santa, giving this movie its name. Harper has also felt sparks with a man named Chris North (Donnell Turner) who — surprise, it’s a Tubi Original — is also the thief. How does this all work out?

Harper and Carly have to get over their initial distrust of one another and find the art, which leads them to Quinn Carlyle (Kate Watson) and Alex Sykes (Brian Ames). Now, the weird thing is that our FBI protagonist so quickly doesn’t care at all that she’s dating the very same man that she’s been tracking for a year. I guess North is so good looking that you end up forgiving, I guess. Maybe because it’s Christmas?

Director Kristin Fairweather and writers Kathryn Dow and John Forgetta have made a movie that honestly won’t offend anyone and has a little bit of detective procedural mixed with romance and some holiday spirit. They also used plenty of soap opera actors who are quite adept and getting into their roles and being likeable.

You can watch this on Tubi.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I’m trying to put these movies in order before I get into this. The Bigfoot and Illuminati universe would be in this order:

• Bigfoot vs. The Illuminati
• Trump vs. The Illuminati
• Bigfoot vs. Megalodon
• Tickles the Clown
• Bigfoot vs. Krampus
• Van Helsing
• Xterminator and the AI Apocalypse
• Bigfoot Goes to Hell
• Bigfoot vs. Krampus 2

If you’ve been watching these movies, you know that the clone of Van Helsing lives in space with Bigfoot, Dr. Jekyll and Princess Kali. After Bigfoot vs. Megalodon, the Illuminati has been destroyed. Now, another race of aliens, the Atlantians, has called for help as they are being destroyed by a single fighter who ends up being Krampus.

Haven’t seen any of these movies? They’re directed and written by BC Fourteen and look a lot like cut scenes from video games, yet have a very interesting sense of humor and enough dirty words to keep this from being something for young children. They’re around an hour each and the story continues in each movie.

The attack of Krampus brings Aleister Crawley, General Stalin and the Illuminati out of wherever they’ve been hiding and attacking the allied forces. For some reason, Krampus looks like Immortan Joe and you know, the look is an improvement.

I also kind of adore that this movie randomly uses stock footage because you know Bruno Mattei had 5G, he’d have done the same thing.

And then Jack Pumpkinhead — yes, pretty much Jack Skellington — shows up. A Terminator, too. This movie just keeps adding characters and you know, I’m in the mood for all of it and more. This feels like the kind of movie kids really good at editing wrestlers on WWE 2k24 would make. Hell soon has an entire army of monsters and by the end, Krampus and Lucifer have united to destroy what’s left of humanity with only Bigfoot left.

I am left with so many metaphysical questions that I can only hope are answered by the next movie in this series.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This was originally a web series, edited together and uploaded to Tubi, where you will find it and expect to have a real movie but instead be given this.

Directed and written by Stephan George, this is the story of a series of seasonal suicides set up and set into motion by Santa. You can get it from the title, right?

There are a bunch of gorgeous young people in this — Adam (Daniel Francis-Swaby), Lee (Brian Law), Sarah (Khaleila Hisham), Tom (Ciaran Lonsdale) — and some long-held reasons for hunting down people, feeding them snake venom and then killing them while they’re still alive but can’t move and feel it all. That part reminds me of Paolo Cavara’s Black Belly of the Tarantula except that unlike a giallo, this gives away the killer as soon as the story starts.

I don’t think they had much of a budget for special effects because people get their wrists sliced open and blood should been literally spraying like that geyser of a kill in Tenebrae and instead, nothing at all.

It’s unfair for me to judge this digital video serial killer movie against giallo but that’s kind of what I do. You may enjoy this more than I did, as it seemed herky jerky — that can be explained by how they edited together shorts into one longer film, the same issue that Scorpion with Two Tails, a late entry from Sergio Martino that was put together from five 50-minute TV shows — but this just didn’t work for me.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This is my holiday tradition. Watching David DeCoteau-directed movies starring Vivica A. Fox.

There’s A Christmas Intern (with Michael Paré and Jackée, no less, and I wonder if they discuss how no one puts the accent on the e in their last names), A Christmas for Mary, Christmas Matchmakers, My Christmas Grandpa and A Christmas Cruise, A Husband for Christmas. They also made The Wrong… series together, which includes movies about an incorrect life coach, high school sweetheart, blind date, cheer captain, Valentine, Prince Charming, Mr. Right, fiancé, real estate agent, cheerleader coach, stepfather, wedding planner, house sitter, cheerleader, tutor, mommy, stepmother, boy next door, teacher, friend, cruise, man, crush, student, child and roommate.

Mariah Carey only thinks she’s the queen of Christmas. Has she been in Sworn Justice: Taken Before Christmas, A New Diva’s Christmas Carol (directed by Rusty Cundieff!), Dognapped: Hound for the Holidays (directed by Fred Olen Ray, as well as A Wedding for Christmas), Holiday Hideaway, A Cozy Christmas Inn, The Christmas Thief, 2nd Chance for Christmas (with Tara Reid and Brittany Underwood), Christmas With a View, Royal Family Christmas, A Royal Family Holiday, A Christmas Wedding, So This Is Christmas, Annie Claus Is Coming to Town, A Holiday Heist and Farewell Mr. Kringle or has she just put out an album? When it comes to basic cable holiday movies, Vivica A. Fox is the holiday diva.

Writer Jay Cipriani also wrote A Christmas for Mary, Carole’s Christmas, A Winter Wonderland, A Christmas Cruise, Sharing Christmas, Sleigh Bells Ring, A Husband for Christmas, Christmas Land, 3 Holiday Tails, A Golden Christmas and A Golden Christmas 3.

Ava (Anna Marie Dobbins) has pretty much been dumped by her boyfriend Dean (Anthony Carro) for his career. She decides that she’s going to spend the holidays in Tinsel, the most Christmas place ever, a small town that reminds her of her days as a little girl. She’s lured in by an ad that Mia (Rylie Coe) has placed in the hopes of finding a new wife for her widowed dad Mason (Marc Herrmann).

Vivica plays the next door neighbor Viv who encourages the love match in this.

Mason has no lens in his glasses but Ava does have a cute dog, which seems to work into the plan Mia has to get a dog of her own. Everything works out, as you knew it would, and we’re off to another holiday movie for DeCoteau and Fox.

You can watch this on Tubi.

School of the Holy Beast is a sacrilegious blast of exploitation that combines pinky violence, nunsploitation, Bava-esque colors and some of the wildest moments you’ve ever seen in a movie maybe ever. Japan is not Christian or even Catholic, yet somehow they love to make nunsploitation films. This movie proves that they come close and may even go further than their Italian moviemaking competition.

Maya Takigawa (Yumi Takigawa, Karate Bearfighter) has become one of the sisters of the Sacred Heart Convent to learn why her mother was whipped and hung herself before in death giving birth to Maya. I’m sure you can figure out that the Abbess Sadako Matsumara (Yoko Mihara) was the one who was always jealous of Maya’s mother Michiko and that the man who was her father is the blind Father Kakinuma (Fumio Watanabe). Yet this movie embraces style — and excess — and delivers everything you come to these movies for and more, include self-flagellation, sinful nuns, a nun forced to drink salt water and be held over a portrait of Jesus to see if she’s possessed and will urinate all over it, evil nuns falling through trap doors and getting launched out windows and being impaled on a fence and a scene where the nuns all whip another with roses after she’s tied up with rose thorns and small motion petals dance in front of the camera and blood slowly makes its way, as red as any fake hemoglobin that Mario Bava committed to screen against the lush green of the vines. Has blasphemy ever looked so gorgeous?

It all ends on Christmas night, as the priest makes love to his daughter — he didn’t know until its too late — before being stabbed with a crucifix by the ghost of Maya’s mother and then the camera spins and sails into the ceiling to show him dead in the shape of an upside-down cross

Norifumi Suzuki is definitely going to Hell but at least he left this behind to corrupt more souls who will join him in eternal torment. He made fifty more movies, including the incredible Hoero Tekken,and Karei-naru tsuiseki as well as another movie filled with sleaze, Sex and Fury.  Suzuki also directed the ten-movie Torakku Yarō series in which Momojiro Hoshi and Kinya Aikawa race around Japan in dekotora or highly decorated trucks. I need to watch everything he made. He often worked with his co-writer on this movie, Masahiro Kakefuda.

Imagine if an Italian Gothic horror film, a giallo and a nun film all got together, got high and talked about the issues behind everything man has endured. That gives you a clue of just how wild this movie gets, except it may even defile — not a typo for defy — your expectations so much further.

You have to love a heroine who literally destroys an entire convent and then just walks the street of the city, away from this secret world and back in the world of the living, no one knowing the things that she’s seen or what she’s done.