A Very Flattened Christmas (2024)

There is a man in a reindeer mask murdering the employees of a roadkill collection company in Wichita, Kansas. He wears camouflage pants. He is not subtle. This is A Very Flattened Christmas, the 2024 micro-budget comedy horror from director Shane Wallace, and the only question worth asking about it is: does that sentence make you want to watch it? If yes, you will have a fine time. If not, nothing else about this review will change your mind.

What A Very Flattened Christmas Actually Is

The film is a feature-length extension of Flattened, a YouTube series that ran from 2016 to 2017, uploading new episodes at 4:20 PM every other fortnight. That scheduling detail tells you everything about the intended audience. The series followed Max (Key Tawn Toothman, who also co-wrote this film and produced it) and his best friend Dan (Trevor Vincent Farney) working for Dale (Mark Mannette) at Furry Friends, a roadkill collection outfit in Wichita. Fans of that series apparently spent years asking for more, and Wallace and Toothman eventually decided a holiday slasher was the right vehicle for a reunion.

The film opens with a murder in the snow, which pulls Max back to town for a funeral. From there the ensemble reassembles, and someone in a reindeer costume begins systematically eliminating them. Detective Bradley (Mark D. Anderson) suspects Max. Max suspects Dan, who has been predicting the deaths with the unnerving accuracy of a man who either has inside information or is simply very conspiracy-minded. There is also a post-credits scene that strongly implies a sequel.

The plot follows the slasher formula without deviation. That is not a criticism, exactly. The formula exists because it works. Wallace does not pretend the killer is anything other than a person in a poorly-made reindeer mask, and the film is better for that honesty. The horror is not the point. The comedy is the point, and the comedy lives in the gap between the mundane setting and the melodramatic carnage.

Where It Works

The performances are consistently committed to the bit. Toothman plays Max as a man navigating genuine grief inside an increasingly absurd situation, and he has the comic timing to make that tension land. Farney's Dan is the film's secret weapon: a conspiracy theorist whose predictions keep coming true, which is a genuinely funny structural joke. The dynamic between them reads as lived-in, likely because they have been playing these characters since 2016.

The description of the cast as "if the gang from Scooby-Doo were all grown-up stoners" is not inaccurate and is meant as a compliment. There is a warmth between the ensemble members that micro-budget horror rarely manages. These people seem like they actually know each other, which is probably because they do. Shooting entirely on location in Wichita, with local filmmakers and a locally-sourced cast, the film has an authenticity that $40 million studio holiday comedies routinely fail to achieve.

The kills happen mostly off-screen, with aftermath shown rather than action. On a limited budget this is the right call. What gore is shown is practically done and functional. Film Threat gave it 7 out of 10, noting that "all the actors have solid comedic timing, while the reveal of the killer makes sense." That is accurate. The killer reveal is the best thing in the film: it earns its twist without cheating, and it recontextualizes some earlier scenes in ways that reward a second watch.

Where It Doesn't

The comedy is relentless in a way that eventually works against it. Wallace and Toothman throw jokes at a pace that leaves no room for any single gag to breathe. A slower edit would improve the film substantially. Some of the humor is genuinely inspired; more of it is the kind of silliness that needs silence around it to register. When everything is played at the same comedic volume, the good jokes get buried alongside the ones that don't land.

At 95 minutes the film runs long for what it is. A tight 80 minutes would sharpen it considerably. The middle section, once the ensemble is established but before the kills start accelerating, loses momentum. This is a structural problem rather than a performance one. The actors are doing the work; the editing does not always help them.

The IMDB score of 5.2 and the Rotten Tomatoes Popcornmeter of 95% tell you something useful: general audiences who find this film by accident are lukewarm, but the people who sought it out specifically had exactly the time they were looking for. This is a movie that knows its audience and serves it.

The Case for Watching It

Wichita, Kansas has produced almost no nationally recognized film productions. The fact that A Very Flattened Christmas exists at all, was filmed entirely in Wichita, attracted a physical Blu-ray release from SRS Cinema and MVD Entertainment, and earned a Rotten Tomatoes listing is genuinely impressive. The film premiered on September 21, 2024, at the Hyde Out venue at 452 N. Hydraulic Avenue in Wichita at 11 PM, then screened every Saturday in October. That is a grassroots distribution strategy that works, and it did work.

The film is available free on Tubi. At that price, with its 95-minute runtime and its specific brand of cheerful absurdity, it earns a recommendation for anyone with patience for DIY horror comedy and affection for the genre's lower tier. It is not a great film. It is a competent, occasionally inspired, locally produced slasher with a premise that should not work as well as it does.

The Blu-ray bonus features include the pilot episode of the original Flattened series, which is the most useful thing you can watch before the film. It will orient you to the characters and the tone in ways that make the movie approximately 30% funnier.