Main cast: Kevin McHale (Barry), Nico Greetham (Zinn), Dyllon Burnside (James), Charles Melton (Wyatt), Taneka Johnson (Detective Gibbs), and Danny Trejo (Santa)
Director: Max Winkler
The Naughty List is another opportunity for Ryan Murphy to give mostly bit-part actors from his past shows one more chance to get a paycheck. I’m not sure what Danny Trejo is doing here, but considering that he doesn’t seem to care what role he takes on so long as the check clears, I don’t think his presence gives this episode any kind of credibility.
Once again, we have an episode that takes a tired trope and adds nothing interesting or distinctive to it: the live show with a stunt that goes horribly wrong, only the folks watching think everything is a stunt and can’t love it enough. This time around, we have four vapid Logan Paul-wannabes forming the Bro House, which see shirtless, well-plucked, mostly hairless blokes running around doing stupid stunts in the name of being hot influencers.
Well, echoing the stupidity of a certain Mr Paul, these guys film a guy committing suicide and upload the whole thing. Oops, the whole stunt backfires on them big time, and going all homoerotic on the feeds fail to gain them back the momentum they lost. They have to resort to disrupting a mall event during the Christmas shopping season next, and that backfires even worse because the Santa they annoy is actually a killer, who has likely watched Silent Night, Deadly Night one too many times, and he’s now after them. Killing time, people, live, so like and subscribe!
Now, as much as I appreciate this episode taking every opportunity to shove Nico Greetham’s chest pepperoni up close on the screen, the first 25 minutes of this 40-minute episode are devoted to these vapid, narcissistic idiots making colossal soiled diapers of themselves. Barry is the least loathsome one of the lot, mostly because he has at least some self awareness about the nonsense Bro House is getting into, but you know what they say about rolling in the mud with pigs.
When the killings do happen, they aren’t the most innovative or imaginative sort. While there is some satisfaction in seeing vapid wastes of carbon material getting eliminated from the gene pool, these idiots are so brutally stupid that it’s hard to take them seriously in the first place. As a result, the payoff of sitting through 25 minutes of excruciating banality is pretty poor.
This episode is better than the previous three, but just barely. It’s still a thinly-veiled young men sexual objectification hour masquerading as a horror show. What it takes is to sloppily take Evil Santa and Reality Show Gone Wrong tropes and frame these tropes as a chance to show off plastic Ken doll-types prancing around on screen. Folks that want genuine horror stuff with these tropes are better off watching the original Silent Night, Deadly Night or its more recent loose reboot, because this one is just a weak attempt to use those tropes, done by people that don’t seem to have any passion for the genre at all.
