A CHRISTMAS FANTASY (1950)

 Two little kids fall asleep and then a creepy Santa, who kinda resembles Leatherface, shows up in this holiday short that's mercifully only a little over 5 minutes long. This really plays more like a holiday music video than a proper movie of any sort. I first encountered this with the Rifftrax fellows goofing on it which is probably the optimal way to view it. A good one to add to your weirdo Christmas playlist. 

 There's both black and white and color versions floating around.

 

VIOLENT NIGHT (2022)

  Appropriately enough I watched this at a Christmas Day gathering. I can't say I gave it my undying attention for most of the opening segments but luckily this isn't the sort of film that you really have to invest much energy in watching. It's basically a mobster film where our action hero is Santa Claus who's not afraid of getting quite violent with those who are naughty. Fairly predictable for most of it's runtime it's at least a mildly entertaining series of bloody wacky kills. Also Santa here has a Viking origin and uses a big hammer like Thor so that's kinda unique. Also he looks like Hacksaw Jim Duggan so old-school wrasslin' fans can enjoy that.

CHRISTMAS EVIL (1980)

 This is director John Waters favorite Christmas movie and also one of mine. One part slasher movie, one part psychological drama dealing with one man's strange obsession with Santa Claus and all things Christmas. There's so many great weirdo elements that make this one stand out from all the more generic holiday horror flicks of the time including our wack-a-doo Santa Harry's big books of good and bad children, his use of treetop stars as weapons not to mention the flying van/sled that Harry rides around in! There's also a very TAXI-DRIVER-esque vibe to many scenes with Harry emoting to himself in seasonal joy before going off on some violent escapade. Strangely this movie didn't get the mass outrage that SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT did over depicting a killer Claus.  Perhaps that's because the advertising budget wasn't as high here and it played more seedy Times Square showings and the typical public morons just weren't as aware of it. Would make a nice holiday double feature with SILENT NIGHT but this one is definitely a higher quality/better made film that actually seems to have a message buried under it's bizarre veneer about how screwed up the modern world is even on Christmas. AKA YOU BETTER WATCH OUT and TERROR IN TOYLAND

A CHRISTMAS HORROR STORY (2015)

 This starts out with cgi snowflakes. Perhaps this is where I shoulda turned it off. What a shitty way to start your movie. From there we get William Shatner as a DJ. His inserted bits are amusing even though at times they just reminded me of those Priceline commercials that he did. Then it's on to the main stories in what's sort of a modernized version of a CREEPSHOW anthology deal. It's a brand-new horror film so of course 90% of it deals with stupid ghost-like things happening, possessions and a shaky camera. The best of these stories, to me, was the main wraparound one which consists of Santa himself battling it out with a bunch of zombified-elves and that evil German-Santa Krampus character who is uber-popular this year for some bizarre reason. Of course even this one has a bunch of really awful cgi-fx thrown in that takes you right out of the experience and places you abruptly in video game land. The other main problem with this is, unlike something like CREEPSHOW which shows the stories sequentially, this jumps from one tale to the next right in the middle of the action. I assume this is supposed to feel fresh and innovative except it comes off as disjointed and a little jarring. It worked for PULP FICTION because there was some excellent editing involved and characters that you cared about. Not so much here. If you are starving for holiday horror entertainment give it a look. Just don't expect anything mind-blowingly great despite how overly-hyped this seems to be getting.

SANTA AND THE ICE-CREAM BUNNY (1972)

 It's a toss-up whether this is the most bizarre Santa Claus movie ever or if it's that Mexican one where he fights the devil.  This one's definitely less watchable as a film with the plot consisting of a sweaty Santa stuck on a Florida beach trying to get his ass back to the North Pole. There's a bunch of kids, various farm animals and even a guy in a gorilla suit that give pulling his sled out of the sand a try and fail miserably. Then right in the middle of the movie Santa tells us a lame story about Thumbellina. Which to make things worse is a musical! There's also another different version where it's the slightly less boring but equally lame Jack and The Beanstalk tale that gets inserted in(also with musical bits). Finally after all that crap a guy in a shitty Bunny suit shows up on a firetruck with no ice-cream at all. While I wouldn't give this a high-rating for solo viewing it is a great tool to use to astound your less adventurous friends with or just to clear a room of lame-asses.
 I recently caught the Rifftrax version of this in the theater and their quips did help make the repetitious nature of the film a bit less mind-numbing.

SANTA CLAUS (1959)

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.


 

SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS (1964)

 While Christmas movies, children's films and musicals are some of the worst things ever created by the human race this one here at least has the decency to be full of kitsch value, bizarre elements and it appears to have been filmed by maniacs who tried to throw everything into the film that a kid of the early 60's could want(besides maybe some monsters which would have been fantastic).  Of course you get the titular Martians who are just idiots with their skin painted green wearing stupid hats with antennas on them, a possibly insane Santa Claus who laughs uncontrollably at nothing, a guy in a ragtag polar-bear suit and a guy in a shitbox robot suit who both terrorize some annoying little kids.  There's also a bumbling Martian who acts like Gilligan and Pia Zadora(who would go on to get very naked in NC-17 rated films when she got older) as a little Martian girl.  While this film is extremely stupid with dumb sci-fi elements it's at least stupidly mildly amusing and not even close to the worst when you dig into the holiday crap that's out there. I also appreciate that they kept the music part down to just one awesomely obnoxious song about Santy Claus that should have become a seasonal classic.




                                                           This inspired a comic-book:

                                                 
                                          and my favorite punk band of all time:

SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT PART 2 (1987)

Caught this last night in a cramped little theater in Brooklyn full of loud obnoxious drunken and/or pot-smoking hipsters and mutants and that's probably the best way to watch this sequel to the notorious controversial holiday classic. Almost half of this movie is comprised of a bunch of flashbacks to the first movie so watching them back to back is probably pretty pointless. It's also pointless trying to understand how Ricky, the little brother of the original Santa Claus-killer, who's telling us these tales, knows exactly what happened since he's not even present in most of the flashback stuff. The new material is also pretty similar to the first since it's just little brother Ricky going nutso, finding a Santa suit, murdering attempted rapists, his girlfriend and her creepy ex-boyfriend and ironically enough, for me anyway, a guy who talks loudly in a movie theater. The main difference is that it's supposed to take place in December but everything looks very Spring-like outside.
 The most memorable scene, and popular YouTube clip, has our hero/villain shooting some suburban slob putting out his garbage cans while yelling "garbage day!" that delighted the weirdos and brought the house down last night. So if you think you would enjoy a stupid 80's Christmas slasher flick where overbearing nuns are just about equally as naughty as serial killers then have a couple of beers so you can drown out the worst acting you've probably ever seen and check this out.



Happy Garbage Day everyone!:

SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT (1984)

OK, here's my late X-Mas entry. This film is ridiculous, but in that purely exploitation way that I personally love. What happens in the film doesn't make sense in any kinda real-world logical way but that doesn't take away from the entertainment aspect for me. Little Billy sees his parents murdered by a guy dressed as Santa so by the logic of this film he grows up to become a kooky nutso guy who freaks out at the site of Santa. That part would actually make sense, it's the next part where he's forced to play Santa by his boss and flips out and becomes a holiday-themed Michael Myers/Jason Voorhees that turn up the wacky factor. Of course it's not just the plot that makes one scratch his head at the wonderful goofiness of it all. There's crazy old grandpa who gives one of the best speeches on Santa ever and that amazing montage when Billy gets his job at the toy store that just screams 1980's cheesiness. As a bonus you get to see Linnea Quigley's perky little boobs and lots of little kids being traumatized. I remember watching Siskel & Ebert trash this movie back when it first came out for being mean-spirited and anti-female. Comparing it to those torture flicks that are around today this thing looks pretty quaint in retrospect. Of course that's just my jaded opinion. Oh yeah and PART 2 is even better and, if you can believe it, more wacky. Just remember kids "punishment is good!".