Salvage (2008) – Lawrence Gough.

Christmas Eve goes off with a bang as a sleepy, middle-class suburban cul-de-sac is suddenly quarantined by heavily armed special forces, and not long thereafter, the tense situation takes a grisly turn for the worse. You can definitively file Salvage as a Crimbo Chunk-blower, as once the turkey hits the bloody fan, it's gory giblets and gooey cranberry sauce all over the gaff!!!! Siege horror is a popular trope, beleaguered suburbanites, maniacal monsters, and a shadowy, gun-happy military are soothingly familiar horror archetypes, while Salvage wasn't especially novel in its approach, it provides familiar ground for bloody carnage and some robust final girl action. The main problem with much of noughties horror is the over reliance on shaky-cam, which I always found distracting, an irksome aesthetic Salvage failed to avoid. Weirdly, Salvage also recalled Euro-schlock oddity Bakterion aka Panic, which shared a similarly rampaging, melt-faced monstrosity, and manifestly remains much more of a goofily entertaining watch. UK indie horror Salvage is a mostly doable oner, but it kinda vibed like a feature-length, Halloween edition of Brookside, a sinking feeling reinforced by the prosaic dialogue. I didn't exactly dislike Salvage, but it needed additional blood-spurty monster-mashing, and a lot less stoic redemptive mummy shtick. Hey! I don't have anything personal against stoic redemptive mummy shtick, but less is more, guy!