It’s officially a thing now to turn children’s fare into B-movie horror fare, whether it’s “The Banana Splits Movie” (2019) which featured Fleegle and Bingo et al. as robotic crazed killers, the upcoming “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey,” “Peter Pan: Neverland Nightmare” and “Bambi: The Reckoning” — and this week’s “The Mean One,” a gruesome, cheerfully violent and unauthorized splatter-film take on “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” that features a few dark laughs and an energetically demented performance by David Howard Thornton as the titular green creature, but ultimately becomes redundant and dull.
With director Steven LaMorte and writers Finn Kobler and Flip Kobler sidestepping any direct Dr. Seuss quotes or references, “The Mean One” opens with narrator Christopher Sanders sounding more like Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter than Boris Karloff, intoning, “Remember that story about Cindy you-know-who … they loved their Christmas, those folks down in town, but what if I said, that’s not how it went down,” as we see a prologue in which an intruder dressed as Santa Claus kills little Cindy’s mother right in front of little Cindy, yikes!
