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.

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