The cute and lovable woodland creatures from Happy Tree Friends are back, this time in a holiday themed DVD that has all the blood and mayhem that we've come to expect from the show.  Running a reasonable $9.99 retail, this disc has roughly half an hour's worth of content, most of which has appreared before on DVD.
 
The Happy Tree Friends, for those of you who haven't heard of the series, is a web based Flash cartoon that has a tremendous following.  The 1½-minute shorts show the misadventures of a group of group of adorable animals who always manage to get into very bloody accidents.  Like Itchy and Scratchy, these shorts are very gruesome and hilariously funny.
 
The main feature of the disc is the Winter Break Special, A collection of six Happy Tree Friends shorts with Holiday Kringles linking them together.  Two of these are new to DVD, and the other four have appeared on previous compilations.  The episodes included are:

Stealing the Spotlight - (New to DVD) Pop and Cub try to decorate their home for the holidays, while on the other side of town, Lumpy tries to do the same.

Tongue Twister Trouble - Sniffles the Ant-eater gets his tounge stuck to the ice and some vengeful ants take advantage of the situation.

Out on a Limb - Lumpy is out in the woods when a tree falls on his leg. How can he possibly get out?

Snow What?  That's What - a frozen cave-creature manages to cause a lot of carnage without even thawing out.

Ski Ya, Wouldn't Want to Be Ya - (New to DVD) Flacky goes on a ski trip with disastrous results

A Class Act - the school Christmas play goes horribly wrong.

These are very funny, if you have a twisted sense of humor.  Not something you want to show your grandmother or young kids, these are very gory, but also very creative in the ways they come up with to torture the poor animals.  Great fun.

Audio:

This disc comes equipped with a 5.1 audio track.  The surround effects worked very well, discs had clear and crisp sound, but the 5.1 discs were especially entertaining.  They had a lot of screams and sound effects coming from the rear, and this worked nicely.

Video:

The fullframe video looks better than the shows web-based origins would lead you to believe.  The lines are tight and the colors bright.  There aren't any digital defects either.  A very nice looking set of shows.

Extras:

There are several bonus items on this disc, all assessable from the main menu.

Ski Patrol: an irregular episode that runs five minutes.  Lumpy learns to protect the slopes in this instructional video.

Christmas Carols: five tradiational Christmas songs sung by some of the characters from the show in the unintelligible voices.  No jokes or anything.  This was pretty stupid.

Happy Tree Vee: These are animated screen savers for your TV.  There's a fire place, a TV test pattern, and a screen of white noise.  Be sure to watch these sometime because there's a little joke thrown in four or five minutes in (and no, you can't FF to see the ending, you just have to let it play.)

Final Thoughts:

This show is outrageously funny, but only if you have a sick and twisted sense of humor.  The Winter Break Special itself runs about 20 minutes, and this is the perfect length.  Anything more and the show starts getting repetitive, anything less and your left wanting more.  Full of a lot of laughs, this disc gets a high Recommendation.