The legendary K. Gordon Murray brought this weird Mexican holiday film to America and would release it theatrically for many years right around Christmas throughout the 60's and 70's. I have vague, half-remembered memories of actually being taken to see this in a theater by my mom but I was so young at the time that it possibly could have been some other holiday travesty that I saw. This is the story of Santa who lives in the clouds with a bunch of little kids that he uses as slave-labor, a giant telescope to peep on children and his sidekick Merlin The Magician. He also has some creepy wind-up reindeer. Pretty much everything in this movie is creepy including Santa's nemesis Pitch who's a rather effeminate demonic character in a devil costume who encourages kids to do naughty stuff like vandalize storefronts and shoplift. This is such a strange, surreal(African kids wearing bones in their hair and a computer with big Rolling Stones-lips and a dick-nose included) movie that I can't help but give it a watch almost every Christmas even though it's a really bad movie made even worse by the fact that a big chunk of it features a bunch of kids singing terrible songs. Still it might be the weirdest holiday movie ever made with only stuff like SANTA AND THE ICE-CREAM BUNNY or SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS even coming close. Check it out if you're a weirdo.
Luckily there is a Mystery Science Theater version of this out there for added laughs.
Amazingly this was directed by Rene Cardona who also gave us the super-gory NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES and many other Lucha-Libre Mexi-classics.
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