ADULT SWIM YULE LOG (2022)

Studio:     Cartoon Network
Director:    Casper Kelly
Writer:     Casper Kelly
Producer:  Danya Levine, Matt Foster, Alan Steadman, John Brestan
Stars:     Andrea Laing, Justin Miles, Hannah Alline, Sean Hankinson, Danielia Maximillian, Skye Passmore, Tordy Clark, Brendan Patrick Connor

Review Score:

---

Summary:

A typical yule log video unexpectedly becomes an increasingly insane horror story involving a cursed tree, a serial killer, aliens, and time travel.

---

Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

While being unknowingly recorded by a camera left behind by a renter named Alex to film a burning fireplace for a yule log video, a cleaning lady tidies a rental cabin on the reportedly haunted Booth Mountain. Masked serial killer Pleatherface suddenly bursts into the cabin with his hillbilly ‘Mother’ and then murders the woman.

Pleatherface and Mother are forced to hide when Alex returns to the cabin with his girlfriend Zoe. Alex unexpectedly proposes to Zoe in front of the fireplace.

Zoe’s response, as well as Pleatherface’s attempt to quietly kill the couple, is interrupted when a supposed sheriff and his deputy arrive at the door as part of a purported investigation into a recent murder. Upon seeing the burning fireplace, the sheriff asks about the log. Alex confirms he took the wood from a notable tree. The sheriff warns that the tree is a sacred landmark where slaves used to be hanged, and has since become cursed by feeding on fear and spilled blood. The sheriff extinguishes the fire and advises against relighting it.

After the sheriff and his deputy leave, Zoe expresses great fear over the murder and the cursed tree. She and Alex also have a heated argument over her hesitancy to get married.

True crime podcaster Ben, Ben’s girlfriend Beth, stoner Henry, and Henry’s girlfriend Holly arrive at the cabin. Realizing their quartet was double-booked with Alex and Zoe, Ben and Alex both call the landlord. Zoe is distressed to discover the owner’s dropped phone ringing underneath the couch.

Ben cuts himself on the log while trying to relight the fire, which Zoe warns him not to do because of the cursed tree. Having previously researched urban legends about the area, Ben produces a photo of the hanging tree that supposedly depicts a man from the future as part of a lynch mob. In addition to slave hangings, Ben and his friends also mention how Booth Mountain has had a series of alien abductions, the most famous of which involved a woman named Esther Dickens in the 1950s.

Alex calls the sheriff about the missing landlord, but is told to call back the next day. Zoe becomes more stressed over the woman’s unexplained disappearance.

The fire spontaneously reignites after everyone exits the room. Possessed by the vengeful spirit of a murdered slave named Rosa, a sentient log flies upstairs and beats Ben to death in the shower. The log then returns to the fireplace.

Upset to see the fire relit, Zoe storms off to bed while Alex, Beth, and Holly discuss the mountain’s mysteries. Alex confides in everyone that Zoe has been suicidal ever since she had a coworker take her place on a bank run that ended with that coworker being robbed and murdered.

Meanwhile, a little man beckons Henry, who remains high on edibles, to crawl into his otherworldly lair behind the fire. The little man escorts Henry into a horizontal elevator that can look into numerous fireplaces across the world as well as across time. The little man shows Henry his mother while he was in her womb. The little man convinces Henry to perform a task that will supposedly result in him having a more productive life, but it is actually a ruse that results in Henry unknowingly murdering his pregnant mother. Henry fades from existence. Back in the present, a man named Hunter replaces Henry.

Alex, Zoe, Beth, Holly, and Hunter discover Ben’s body. Beth immediately calls 911, but is suddenly killed by the flaming log flying across the room. Hunter tries smothering the log with a blanket only to die after the log throws him around the cabin.

Alex, Zoe, and Holly barricade themselves in a bedroom where Zoe calls 911. Zoe asks for the sheriff, but the 911 operator tells her the town doesn’t have one.

The flying, flaming log chases Alex and Zoe to a closet where they hear Holly screaming elsewhere. Zoe remembers seeing the sheriff sprinkling something strange onto the log. Alex fantasizes that if they can survive, they will have an incredible story to sell to Hollywood.

The log chases Alex and Zoe back downstairs. Before they can get outside the front door, however, Pleatherface captures the couple. Mother subsequently keeps Alex captive in the laundry room while Pleatherface terrorizes Holly and Zoe, who get tied up by the fireplace.

A flashback reveals that original cabin owner Isaac Booth was killed by his slave Rosa when she discovered he sold her son William, who was secretly fathered by Isaac, into slavery to an abusive farmer. In her rage, Rosa also killed Isaac’s wife. Additional flashbacks from various decades reveal more traumas that occurred in front of the fireplace. Rosa’s vengeful spirit ultimately possessed the tree where locals hanged her for murdering the Booths.

Back in the present, the flaming log launches Pleatherface through a window. Shortly thereafter, a UFO lands outside.

An alien enters the laundry room. Mother becomes a sack of flesh after the alien uses its weapon to drain her bodily fluids through her face. The alien then uses its weapon on Alex.

The alien approaches Zoe next. Zoe recovers a knife from the fireplace that had been hidden there by two kids in the 1950s. Zoe prepares to stab the alien, but she is unexpectedly rescued by Pleatherface, who decapitates the alien. Pleatherface tries to excitedly embrace Zoe as his new mate, but she stabs him in his groin before felling him with another stab to his eye.

Zoe frees Alex, who barely survived the alien’s attack. Zoe starts to free Holly too, but the little man compels her to crawl into his fireplace lair. Using his elevator, the little man takes Zoe back to the night when her parents conceived her. Exploiting the fact that she wishes she were a different person, the little man gives Zoe a baseball and instructs her to trip her father so it jostles a different sperm to impregnate her mother. Zoe refuses. As the little man grows irate, Alex pins him down with a poker so Zoe can crawl out of the fireplace.

Zoe, Alex, and Holly escape outside only to discover they don’t have the car keys. Holly flees into the woods on foot. Zoe and Alex return to the cabin to collect the keys and the video camera. After fending off the log once more, Zoe and Alex escape in the car.

Zoe and Alex drive down the mountain to find a cult assembled around the tree. Zoe runs over the cult’s leader, who turns out to be the man who claimed to be the sheriff.

Once they are able to stop, Zoe agrees to marry Alex. The log then appears hovering behind Zoe outside the driver’s window. A sudden fantasy shows Isaac and Rosa as married coworkers at a modern day ad agency, but the scene is revealed to be another vision tormenting Rosa’s spirit inside the log. The log bursts through the window to kill Zoe and Alex.

---

Review:

When it comes to the creature comforts of Christmas, what sort of Scrooge doesn’t enjoy the literal as well as metaphorical warmth that comes from colored lights, frosted cookies, merry music, spiced drinks, and nostalgic seasonal specials on TV?  Or maybe Hallmark holiday movies with mulled wine and buttered popcorn are more your thing?  My personal pick involves sipping a generous glass of Cleveland Christmas Whiskey while mellowing out to one of Pluto TV’s yuletide loops, usually one with montages of suburban house decorations, puppies pawing presents, or just a classic log burning in a fireplace.

But what if, oh, let’s say, four minutes into that static shot of flaming wood set to a Muzak version of ‘Good King Wenceslas,’ a masked serial killer and his hillbilly mother unexpectedly burst onto the scene to brutally murder a woman in front of the fire.  How fast would you spit out your eggnog?  Then how long would it be before you poured something stronger as your baffled brain raced to adjust to an insane spectacle that only escalates from there?

That’s the hopeful hook behind Adult Swim’s tongue-in-cheek take on the yule log video, which in this case is technically a holiday horror movie alternatively titled “The Fireplace.”  The brainchild of writer/director Casper Kelly, who previously pulled a comparable gag on unsuspecting Cartoon Network viewers with “Too Many Cooks,” “Adult Swim Yule Log” wasn’t advertised in advance.  It simply dropped into a late night lineup and waited for word of mouth to go, “What the?”  The flippant fright flick then moved to HBO Max where it remained a semi-secret, accessible only if you knew what title to type into the Search bar (though that seems to happen quite often with their platform’s awful UI).  One article outlining how to find the feature added an advisement to go in cold, perhaps even putting it on to shock holiday houseguests who have no idea what they’re in for.

What is an audience in for, exactly?  Giving too many spoilers would be giving too much away, but someone can get a solid sense of how the film becomes nuttier than a fruitcake by glancing at its cast of characters.  Some of the names identified by end credits include Pleatherface, 1950’s Kid 2, 1990’s Girl, 1960’s Husband, Little Man in Fire, Bartender/Alien, Sex Bots/Bloody Models, Kids Roasting Marshmallows, Man in the Future, Cult Members, 1800’s Mob, and Demon Goddess.  One look at that list inspires an almost instantaneous urge to press Play with an excited expectation of murderous mayhem, extraterrestrials, cult chaos, and time travel.

“Adult Swim Yule Log” does indeed dish out all of those things in variously sized servings.  What that list doesn’t reveal, however, is what lurks among the film’s less festive frights.

“Adult Swim Yule Log” also includes potentially problematic pieces like a pregnant woman murdered by stomach stabbings, references to one depressed person’s suicide attempt, and a mentally handicapped killer pulling out his penis for a rope-bound prisoner.  I wouldn’t say the movie handles such situations crassly, or even tastelessly, but it bears noting that it’s not all yuletide yuk-yuks here.  The film even starts with a (thankfully offscreen) sexual assault that ends in a violent death.  And with a plot centered on a cursed tree once used to hang slaves, we’re talking about too many triggering topics for the film to truly be considered holiday horror “fun” for broad audiences who want easygoing entertainment.

There’s a fine line to walk whenever possibly divisive balls are juggled like this, and “Adult Swim Yule Log” never quite finds a consistently enjoyable balance between its carnage and its comedy.  Sometimes it sits in seriousness too long while you wish for the film to be even sillier than it is.  There are a couple of unnecessarily chatty exchanges destined to weigh down weary eyelids too.  So like a highly desired gift that loses its luster after unwrapping, “Adult Swim Yule Log” can seem like a cool present whose novelty wears off rather fast.

With that warning out of the way, forgiving viewers will find that the movie stuffs more candy than coal in its stocking, as long as they have a taste for peculiar flavors.  Saving graces such as engaging leads, including a guy giving off one hell of a Christian Slater vibe, join forces with creative staging and editing meant to make the first 30 minutes look like one take in real time, and rescue “The Fireplace” from being too blackened by occasionally dark tones.  Thank Saint Nick for that, or maybe just Casper Kelly, because when “The Fireplace” burns a fully bonkers blaze with crazy kills and snicker-inducing surprises, there’s still a fair bit of humorous heat to be felt.

Review Score: 60

---