Last week, the 12 Days of Christmas Marathon took a bit of a turn in the direction of high-camp lunacy with a look at the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special Today we take an even harder left, into the realm of utter derangement, with a look at the innocuously named yet completely bonkers "Mexiscope" classic Santa Claus. The only holiday film, to my knowledge, to get the full-on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment, Santa Claus is a joint Mexican-American production from 1959. It was written and filmed south of the border on an ultra-low budget, and then re-edited by American schlockmeister K. Gordon Murray for a stateside audience. Who exactly this American audience was supposed to be, however, is left unanswered, as the movie makes no sense whatsoever in the original Spanish and actually crosses into negative sense-making in its English translation. Incomprehensible, culturally deranged, acted by people who weren't quite up to the high professional thespianic standards of professional wrestling, and so cheaply made it looks like it's peeling, Santa Claus is the movie equivalent of toys you buy at the dollar store.
Part of the problem with Santa Claus is that Mexico isn't entirely in synch with American Christmas tradition, so, just as the Japanese adapted jolly old St. Nick into "Annual Gift Man", the original producers of this movie envisioned Kris Kringle as a sort of extraterrestrial wizard whose goal is to turn children on the path of good and thwart the wiles of his crafty arch-enemy, Satan. That's right: the villain of this movie is none other than the Lord of Lies himself, and his wicked henchman Pitch, whose job it is to tempt the children of Earth, embodied in Mexican waif Lupita, into abandoning the true path of Santa and shoplifting toys for the greater glory of Lucifer. Luckily, Santa has his own right-hand man -- the wizard Merlin -- who supplies him with an arsenal of Dungeons & Dragons magic items, including sleeping powder, a skeleton key, and a flower that will make him invisible. Are you following all this? Because it doesn't get any less complicated from here.
Pitch, the gibbering little dope, has little success tempting the saintly Lupita to the ways of Satan, but he does have some success with a troika of bratty boys, recruiting them into a wacky scheme to kidnap St. Nick, steal his bag of toys, and, worst of all, make him a slave so that he will manufacture playthings in the name of the Devil. Along the way, he also manages to sic the cops on the Christmas icon, attack him with an angry dog, and generally make him wish he'd never left home, which for some reason is a futuristic floating cloud in outer space instead of a toy factory at the North Pole. Of course, you'd live there too, if it meant you got to play with cool shit like the Ear Scope, the Teletalker, the Cosmic Telescope, and the Master Eye; all this, combined with the garishly surreal set design, makes Santa seem like less of a beloved Christmas icon than a psychedelicized Big Brother. (He also employs kids in his workshop instead of elves, although it's not clear if that's an improvement or not by worker's rights standards, and when children don't fall asleep fast enough to suit him, he dopes them up with a mysterious substance that probably comes from a cut-rate Tijuana pharmacy.
As might be expected from the man who brought the world Robot vs. Aztec Mummy, there's all sorts of intensely strange stuff happening in Santa Claus. The jolly elfin hero has a disturbing laugh much more suited to a prison snitch than a cultural symbol of kindness and giving; Satan is portrayed by an actor nicknamed "Trotsky"; the dialogue -- much of which was translated by Murray himself -- has a hilariously stilted, Engrish-style literalism to it ("I promise, oh Priceless Prince of Hades, that by my many wiles I will
finish Santa off forever, and see that the children commit terrible
deeds, and make Santa Claus angry!"); and there's so much zaniness going on in every scene that it almost seems intentionally crazy rather than just inept. (What to make, otherwise, of Santa's mechano-zombie reindeer, which appear to be robotic but which crumble into dust at the sight of sunlight? Or Satan punishing Pinch by making him eat chocolate ice cream, which negatively affects his Satanic metabolism? Or the serious nightmare fuel of li'l' Lupita's dream visitation by an evil doll who tries to make her steal things?) Whatever the intentions of its various filmmakers,
Santa Claus is truly one of a kind, and best of all, in our modern DVD age, it's available in any city with a large Latino population for no more than three bucks.
12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An robust and tasty 6 geese a-laying this rotten golden egg. It's surely not a good movie by any reckoning, but it's one that you'll never, ever forget -- show it to kids at your peril, because they'll be describing it to their therapists later.
Related Posts:
The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: Bad Santa
The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas
