Zooey Deschanel, when she was blonde and kind of snarly! Will Ferrell in barely controlled hyper-idiotic hilarity. Bob Newhart! Christmas in New York City. An inexplicable subplot involving an independent publishing house specializing in children's board books. This movie has everything good about the holidays. A little entertainment enhancement goes a long way, too.

When the first announcements surfaced on the Internet in the late summer of 2009, it sounded like a low-budget, energetic, insane Japanese special-effects flick, a la Yoshihiro Nishimura, of Mutant Girls Squad and Tokyo Gore Police semi-fame. A couple festivals in midnight or horror series and it could head to DVD, where it'd get passed around by Takashi Miike fans and brought up on forum threads by gorehounds playing that game where they try to out-cite each other as to who's seen the most outré flick.

It's on DVD now, but the path wasn't what anyone expected a year ago. Some months down the road from those first [...]