Okay, that's enough of the goofball so-bad-it's-good stuff.  We all enjoyed taking a gander at bizarre foreign intrusions, both Mexican and Wookie, into the Christmas traditions in the form of Santa Claus and The Star Wars Holiday Special, but by the time I was done with those two, I needed a nice healthy dose of holiday melancholy to remind me that the festival season can be one of ineffable sadness as well as inexpressable joy.  And nobody does ineffable sadness and inexpressable joy like the Irish, so I decided to get things back on the straight and narrow with John Huston's final film as a director, The Dead.  Though it's not often thought of as a traditional holiday film, its action takes place on Epiphany, which in the Catholic calendar is the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas.  And, considering how important the role of epiphany was in his writing, it's no surprise that this is based on a short story (from Dubliners) by the mighty James Joyce, who, like Huston, was an Irishman through and through despite his sometimes standoffish relationship with his homeland and its culture.

The Feast of Epiphany, like Christmas, is a time for family gatherings, for coming together and for realizing how important your friends and relations are in your life.  Joyce needed little reminding of the subject; he lived most of his life in the long shadow of his family, for good and for ill.  Likewise, John Huston -- literally deathly ill when he made The Dead, the third movie of his highly improbable but hugely successful late-stage comeback -- knew how important family was in his life.  His own career as a successful actor and director had been predicted and preplanned by his father, Walter, and The Dead featured a fantastic screenplay by his own son Tony and a tremendous performance in the lead role by his daughter-in-law Anjelica.  Like the characters in the story, Huston was surrounding himself, likely for the last time, with the people who loved him, and in the shadow of the people who made him, for one last realization, one last epiphany.  The result is one of the smallest and quietest, but also one of the greatest, films of his career.

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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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