chainsaw

“Christmas at the Kringles” is a Christmas-themed horror movie getting released on Halloween weekend but largely set on Valentine’s Day, if that gives you any indication of the identity crisis this confused project is going through. Scripted by Zack Imbrogno and directed by Kevin Lewis, it should just be content to be a comedy — the horror elements are unnecessary, forced and mean-spirited, even for the spooky season.

Christmas horror has been around for a while. Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” is a ghost story at root, and some of the earliest slasher films, 1972’s “Silent Night, Bloody Night” and 1974’s “Black Christmas,” utilize the holiday setting for both aesthetic and thematic tension. The ironic juxtaposition between Christmas cheer and bloody terror heightens the stakes. Usually.

But in “Christmas at the Kringles,” the Christmas theme is the lowest common denominator, present only as gaudy decoration, creepy song cues and vulgarly re-appropriated sayings. In an opening sequence, we witness a woman impaled by a Christmas tree, her severed head plopped atop it in lieu of a star. Do we know her? No. Will we ever? Also no. She serves merely as a cautionary tale, when it’s already too late for our protagonists. Her grisly demise also lets us know that this is a horror movie, because it’s mostly a comedy for the first act.

It really should have stayed that way, especially when the filmmakers have Thomas Lennon and Arden Myrin at their disposal, playing the baddies: Kringle parents Nick and Carol, who celebrate Christmas year-round and warmly welcome their new neighbors the Seversons, Mark (Ron Livingston) and Julie (Rachel Bilson) and their son Bobby (Jake Jewkes). The Seversons are refugees from “the city” who have decamped to the suburbs in hopes of getting their spark back as a family.

Livingston, playing a cold workaholic, seems generally perturbed to be there, while Bilson’s Julie, desperate to make her family whole again, also has an air of desperation. The Seversons are sucked into the Kringles’ orbit, despite warnings from a man-child neighbor, Daryl (Donald Faison), and a drunk mall Santa (Rob Riggle), who speak eerily of the home’s previous inhabitants (presumably the woman we saw with the tree).

Lennon, a founding member of comedy troupe the State and creator of the cult comedy series “Reno 911!,” is a secret weapon, a cruise missile of targeted timing and hilarious asides. Myrin mostly manages to match him beat for beat and the pair are quite funny together. So why couldn’t this just ride with that, in a “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” kind of way? In a nod to that film, Beverly D’Angelo co-stars as the Kringle family matriarch.

Instead, we’re treated (more like tricked) to a plot about a cult of “joy” into which the Kringles are trying to recruit the new family next door. David Wain appears in a recruitment video as leader Noel Tannenbaum. It all starts to feel like a veiled skewering of Scientology, which could be interesting until they start throwing chainsaws and Christmas gimps into the mix. It devolves into a noisy, chaotic and ultimately meaningless bloodbath, simply a means to an end in which Bilson gets to kill someone with milk and cookies.

Ostensibly, Livingston’s Mark is supposed to be the Grinch, Lennon’s character jolly old St. Nicholas, their eventual roles reversed as the chainsaws rev up. That’s the idea at least, but “Christmas at the Kringles” is too disorganized and janky for any of its concepts to land, so the filmmakers rely on gore and hacky punchlines to wrap up this lump of coal and pretend it’s a shiny new toy. It should come with a gift receipt.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.