Yes, nothing says Christmas like a series of gruesome Santa murders carried out in dark allies, peep show booths and other sordid locations. Don't Open Till Christmas definitely isn't for the kiddies -- unless, of course, your little angels hate Christmas and long to see a whole series of Santas (most of them drunks or perverts or both) slain in North Pole-cold blood.

The film has most of the ingredients of a decent B-movie horror flick -- blood, gore and nudity -- but it fails quite miserably. Don't go looking for a compelling plot because this film is a mess. With exploitation and skin-flick veterans scattered here and there among the crew, a virtual revolving door into the director's office, and two years of re-shoots and re-edits, one could argue that Don't Open Till Christmas was cursed from the very start. Those who sit through the whole film may also feel as if they've been cursed themselves -- by the god of bad movies.

Someone apparently got lumps of coal in their stockings every year of his childhood because no Santa in London is safe. A Santa can't even take in a private nudie show or answer the call of nature without getting slashed, strangled, speared through the head or even castrated. New Scotland Yard is baffled and held increasingly to the fire with each daily killing. The closest thing they have to a suspect early on is the weird, lazy boyfriend of Kate, one rich victim's daughter (Belinda Mayne). This is the kind of guy who tries to trick his girl into doing a little spur-of-the-moment "modeling" with a tramp being photographed by one of his lecherous friends. The killer has more respect for women than this troll. Inspector Harris (Edmund Purdom) is on the case, but his underling Sgt. Powell (Mark Jones) gets a few ideas of his own during the investigation -- thanks largely to an exceedingly strange "journalist" who turns up several times out of the blue.

The film does succeed at raising a tad of suspicion among several characters as to who the killer really is, but that's pretty much all it succeeds at doing. I seriously hope no one actually wants to hear Carolina Munro perform a terrible disco number.

Don't Open Till Christmas has only two things going for it. One is the actual acting ability of Edmund Purdom. This guy's sort of the quintessentially unknown yet familiar British actor who brings decades of acting experience and a serious air to everything he does. The other is Kelly Baker, who plays the "Experience Girl" who witnesses one Santa slaying and finds herself in quite a sticky wicket with the killer toward the end. I'm just realizing that her stripper character never actually shed any of her clothes, but I really liked this actress for some reason.

His long career of acting experience notwithstanding, Purdom was no great shakes as a director. He apparently realized this himself, turning over the director's chair to script writer Derek Ford, a veteran director of sleazy sexploitation films, who raised the seedy factor of the whole movie but quickly bowed out as well, leaving editor (and former sex cinema owner) Ray Selfe to try and pick up the pieces and -- with a number of re-shoots -- actually cobble something resembling a movie out of the whole mess. That's why you have a seemingly important character like Dr. Bridle being mentioned in the script but never actually appearing in the movie.

Don't Open Till Christmas? My advice is to wait until Christmas, and then keep on waiting -- forever. Some things are better left unopened and forgotten.