Review: With 'Christmas at the Kringles,' your lump of coal arrives two months early

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Set us as preferred “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.

Movies From a new “Resident Evil” reboot from the director of “Weapons” to Oscar contenders starring Mikey Madison and Tom Cruise, here are the movies we’ll be at this fall.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 Seve...