The Mean One review: unauthorized Grinch slasher makes a last-minute case for 2022’s worst film

In recent years, as his classic TV special and live-action film have become Christmas cable essentials and a new animated adventure has made the rounds among families, Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch has enjoyed a renewed presence on the holiday scene. You’ll find him in more light displays, at more Christmas parties, and even turning up for hire to drop by your house and wreck your Christmas, sometimes with disastrous and very meme-able results.

This resurgence, combined with the depth of the character’s pop culture footprint, means that a film like The Mean One (in theaters now) seems at least a little inevitable. Of course someone would eventually think to cast Christmas’ most kid-friendly villain as the monster at the center of a parody horror film, and of course we’d all be very curious to see how that twist on a classic played out, whether we wanted to admit it or not.

That sense of curiosity gives The Mean One an inherent watchability no matter how amateurish and thrown together the final product is. But while the film did right in casting the title role, and succeeds when it’s throwing the occasional knowing wink of Christmas violence at the audience, this unauthorized tale of a killer Grinch still stands out as a strikingly sloppy piece of work. For a film with such a promising premise, it turns out to be a plodding example of how to squander potential.

In a prologue sequence, we learn that this film’s version of events took a turn when little Cindy encountered “The Mean One” (played by Terrifier’s David Howard Thornton) on Christmas Eve in the midst of stealing her Christmas, and did her best to turn things around. It all fell apart when Cindy’s mother discovered The Mean One in the house and, fearing for her daughter’s safety, rushed him. Twenty years and one dead mother later, Cindy (Krystle Martin) is back in her hometown of “Newville,” where Christmas has been discouraged, if not outright banned, ever since she saw the Christmas Eve “monster” all those years ago.

Cindy has returned to town to ostensibly move on, but as soon as she and her father (Flip Kobler, who also co-wrote the film) show up and try to have a little normalcy in the form of some Christmas decorations and cheer, the old monster comes creeping back into their lives. The Mean One is still prowling Newville, still murdering anyone who dares put up a single Christmas decoration or sing a single carol, and this time Cindy’s not going down without a fight.

It really is an intriguing setup for a horror film, and it’s made more interesting by the presence of a local sheriff (Erik Baker) and his well-meaning deputy (Chase Mullins) who are determined to convince Cindy that what she encountered was a man in a green mask, and not a furry monster beyond human understanding. There’s potential for a lot of thrilling tension in that dynamic, and Cindy’s emergence as a would-be Final Girl adds to that feeling, seemingly setting the stage for a classic slasher showdown.

But while that’s what The Mean One is obviously angling for eventually, director Steven LaMorte and writers Flip and Finn Kobler take far too long delivering it, and stumble quite a bit along the way. Visually, it’s a muddy view of a supposed winter wonderland, full of shaky close-ups and pans that move too quickly to ever convey any sense of geography or detail that might make the horror more effective. Much of the film is also immersed in a bluish tint that may have been intended as day-for-night photography, but just looks like we’re viewing the film through a Christmas light bulb that’s lost all its glow. At one point, Cindy is meant to be seeing The Mean One stalking through a stand of trees, but the camera moves so fast and with such abandon that we as an audience don’t know that until a music cue tells us. The problem is never the low budget, but the sense that everything within those budgetary constraints was thrown together, like tinsel strewn wildly about the branches of a tree.

But we came to see a killer Grinch movie, and the film found the right actor to embody that demented spirit with Thornton, who brought such personality to Terrifier’s Art the Clown without saying a single world. His Grinch, when we can actually see him, brings the same terrifying, jubilantly violent energy to The Mean One, whether he’s clapping with glee because he just killed someone or using his fingertips to crawl across the floor like a spider. He’s the film’s greatest bright spot, and perhaps the greatest failing of The Mean One is making us wait far too long between showcase moments for its title character.

Yet even those moments have their drawbacks. Martin does a solid job playing the determined woman everyone in town has labeled as crazy, particularly when the film takes a Home Alone-esque turn toward battle stations in the final act, but The Mean One fails to make good on many of its most interesting visual setups. And when it does, they emerge as murky, choppy shadows of what could have been, drenched in painfully obvious CGI blood that never works, no matter where or how it’s deployed. It all feels diminished and half-cooked, even in its most outrageous moments.

So yes, The Mean One does have the benefit of novelty behind it, but despite Thornton and Martin’s valiant efforts, and a few interesting ideas, the film never becomes more than the brief amusement of its premise. It’s a pretty present with a neat bow on top, but when you open it up, there’s nothing inside.