This is a film that I heard is one of the worst Christmas movies to have ever been made for its weird and bizarre choices that people either say are god awful or so bad that they're good. This was a film that I've been wanting to see, as well as review for quite awhile to see if it is a so bad it's good movie, or if just a plain bad movie; and after reviewing a film involving a different and unique take on Santa Claus that still holds-up, I guess now would be a good time to review this movie. What category of bad does this film fall under in my opinion; ON WITH THE REVIEW!
The first problem that I noticed with the movie was the opening credits. I know that's a weird thing to pick on given the time that the film came out, but you know in a Christmas movie like "It's A Wonderful Life" for example, where in the opening credits we get are different pictures of illustrated winter scenery in a story book that shows each piece of credit; this film pretty much does that, however, instead of changing cards for each piece of credit, they're all shown on the same exact card at a very slow pace! I wouldn't mind it so much if the card that the opening credits are shown had a nice Christmas look, but as you can tell by the picture, it doesn't at all. It looks very bland! The only sense or feel of Christmas that we get in this opening, (with the exception of the title) is the Christmas music, but even that sounds bland. It almost sounds like the music you'd hear in one of those Christmas shorts made at the time that this film was released, it sounds very standard.
After those incredibly bland and slow moving opening credits, the first image that we see in the film is Santa's Workshop. But instead of it being set in the North Pole, it’s a Castle on a cloud in Outer Space that's somehow above the North Pole! Just by that first image and setting alone, you know right off the bat that this isn't going to be your ordinary Christmas film that involves Santa! Santa's Castle in Space doesn't even look like a place where Santa would live; it almost looks like a place in the Clouds that Flash Gordon would visit. Things get even weirder when we're introduced to Santa as he's putting up a creepy looking miniature of the Nativity scene, to suddenly talking to it, and walks away from it humming the song "Silent Night" all while laughing and humming menacingly. This has got to be one of the scariest Santa's that I've ever seen on film! He doesn't look or act jolly and happy, he looks and acts like a crazy maniac with his creepy expressions, odd behaviors, and laugh that sounds evil, instead of cheerful! Just by watching Santa put up the Nativity set almost looks as if he's taunting the set while laughing evilly with his mind set that the kids care more about him and the gifts he gives them instead of remembering Christmas being the date of Jesus' birth.
Things only get freakier and weirder, when we discover in the following scene that kids work for him, and I'm not saying that it's kid actors dressed up as Elves like in "The Santa Clause", I'm talking about kids from different countries around the world are making the toys. So in this version of Santa, he not only lives in outer Space, but he's a crazy and creepy old man who won't stop laughing and has kids from around the world slaving for him. This is pretty messed up! The crazy thing is when we first discover all this, we get a very long and slow moving sequence of the kids singing as Santa plays the Organ as he laughs menacingly. The sad thing about this sequence that doesn't at all help how bad and insane the idea of kids slaving over Santa is, is because the kids not only look racially insensitive, but they don't at all look happy or cheerful, they look sad and depressed as you watch them forcefully sing on a painfully obvious sound-stage (P.S., all the sets in this film look fake, instead of being stylized). This whole sequence looks and feels joyless and unpleasant as opposed to being cute and magical. It almost feels like watching a bad Christmas short from the era that the film was made, except that it's part of an hour and 35 minute movie, instead of being a short film that's less than 10 minutes that would make the sequence a little less painful. The kids also get another musical number later on in the movie as they load Santa's Sleigh that's not only as bad as the first musical number they all part take in, but the song itself is twice as bland and painfully forced in the movie along with that really cheap Organ Music. Also the different verses that the kids and Santa sing separately almost feels like they're not even singing the same bland and forced song.
Since Santa's location is in outer Space it would seem fitting that he would have futuristic equipment, and yes he does but these have to be some of the strangest and weirdest piece of futuristic equipment that I have ever seen. He has a machine with a giant pair of lips that echoes as it freakishly moves its lips. A telescope that Santa uses to spy on children with the end of the scope looking similar to the telescope that the Aliens use in the original "War Of The Worlds" only it has a giant creepy green eye attached to it with eye brows as Santa looks through it with a pedophile look. And he uses an antenna with an ear attached to it so he can view kid's dreams. For his trip to Earth, he carries magic powder to put kids to sleep (what is he the Sandman too?); a magic key that can electrocute locks on doors; a small flower to make him disappear; a magic cocktail that can make people remember what they love most (as he somehow disguises himself as an off-screen Waiter); and he has a tiny parasol. WHAT THE HELL AM I WATCHING?! For transportation, since Santa lives in space you'd expect him to use a rocket or something right? Well actually he doesn't want to use modern day Space equipment to travel to Earth since he feels bad about leaving his Reindeer behind. I'd buy into this logic if only one thing didn't prevent me from not sympathizing with Santa's decision, his Reindeer aren't even real. They're just gigantic lifeless Wind-Up Toys. Why would Santa feel bad leaving his Reindeer out of the job if they aren't even real? If you think the idea for these Reindeer are crazy, well their designs and the animatronic puppetry used for these Toy Reindeer are scary as hell! They look like broken down malfunctioned Chuck E Cheese animatronics, they're just too scary and awkward to look at. Incase if you're wondering what kind of logic the film uses for Santa to go down the chimney, he doesn't use Magic; he actually uses one of those old exercise Jiggling Machines to reduce his waste-line so he can fit through chimney's, but that piece of logic makes zero sense not just because that chimney's come in all shapes and sizes, but also because he still looks like his same old fat Santa self.
Oh I forgot to mention, aside from the kids who work for Santa with no pay, do you know who else works for Santa, the Wizard Merlin. So Merlin, who is best known for working with King Arthur, is now working for Santa. Exactly who were the writers for this film, children? This film makes no sense! As for the character of Merlin, while not as creepy as Santa, he is pretty damn annoying with his over the top performance and absent minded humor that drags on way too long. He also loves to pretend to be riding a horse whenever he walks, even when Santa's life is on the line; I seriously don't get it? If that's not strange enough for you in terms of people working for Santa, Santa has the Greek God Vulcan as his Blacksmith. This can't be real, this seriously can't be real. Who in their right mind thought that any of these ideas were good? They're not good ideas, they're ludicrous ideas! How do all these different ideas go hand and hand? The obvious answer is THEY DON'T!
I'm sure you're wondering at this point what the plot of this movie is since I haven't even gone over it yet like I usually would. It's simply about Santa fighting against one of Satan's minions from hell named Pitch who's trying to ruin Christmas. That's pretty much your plot. God, even the film's main premise is horrible. Santa going up against the Devil, unless if this is a South Park Christmas Special, Santa and a Devil from hell shouldn't be together in a family friendly Christmas movie! Whose idea was to associate this wonderful Christmas icon with devil's and hell, the same writer's who thought it was a good idea for Santa to use children's as his slaves in outer space! The costume for the Devil is atrocious; it looks like a guy dressed up in a Halloween costume with his face painted red. What Pitch does throughout the film is set-up traps for Santa, which leads to Santa always finding away to outsmart Pitch and none of it is funny at all, due to the bad acting and the timing being off during the slapstick. Even the ways Santa gets out of these situations aren't funny or cool for that matter, especially in the scene when he fires a Toy cannon with an arrow in it that pierces through the Pitch’s butt. It's not funny; it's dull and really sick considering that Santa was going to give this weapon to a child, where he's more than likely going to shoot his eye out! Santa's a sicko in this movie! Oh and incase if you're wondering what will happen to Pitch if he fails, he will be forced to eat a Chocolate Sundae for all entirety! Granted, I understand that the cold is the Devil's weakness since he lives in a world of fire, but his ultimate punishment is to eat a Chocolate Sundae? Sure it's a kid's film, but wouldn't banishing him to the Arctic or dunking him in Ice Cold Water be a more suitable punishment. I mean an Ice Cream Sundae; really that's Satan's torture of choice? You can't be serious!
Meanwhile, as Santa and Pitch challenge each others wits, we get a few subplots involving kids in Mexico. Why Mexico if you may ask, because this film is actually a Spanish Foreign Film and the one that I found is the English dub, and yes the dubbing for this film is just as awful as the dubbing for the Godzilla movies that I reviewed, where the Spanish accents sound phony. The voice acting sounds way too rehearsed to the point where they lack real emotion as they just simply phone it all in where it becomes insufferably corny, annoying, and dull. And the lip-movements are incredibly off on numerous occasions! Getting to the subplots for the kids in Mexico, there's a rich a kid who wants to be with his parents who neglect him and leave him home alone on Christmas Eve; a poor little girl who wants a doll, that her parent's can't afford, which causes Pitch to try to talk her into stealing a doll: and three trouble making boys that Pitch recruits to help him foil Santa's journey! I'm not going to bother going into detail with these subplots because they're all very corny and boring subplots that are extremely predictable and poorly executed! But I will say though, out of all the forced the subplots involving the kids, the most pointless one out of the three is Pitch hiring kids to foil Christmas, since they hardly do anything at all and are only in the film as one dimensional secondary antagonists!
As if the plot isn't enough to carry us through all the lameness that the film has to offer, the film even has a narrator throughout the movie who is so pointless that you can run the film without his narration since he mostly just states what the characters are obviously feeling and doing. The film does a good enough job expressing itself without a narrator through its horrible visuals, there's no need for a narrator, especially one who sounds really dull. In fact, the narrator even says that Santa's first stop is Mexico, but later on in the film, the character's say that Santa has already been around globe, which makes no sense at all in terms of continuity and visuals since the visuals never indicate that Santa’s been traveling else where! The editing in this film is some of the worst editing I've ever seen. We get a burning Newspaper where the headlines change from English to Spanish. The scenes of the Devil appearing and disappearing are so poorly edited together that it's obvious that the scenes when he appears and disappears were filmed separately. And when Santa enters his Gym, the scene immediately cuts to Santa on his exercise machine before the narrator can even finish his sentenced! Now to be fair, most of the bad editing in this film is due to the fact that the editors for its American release wanted to edit out the scenes that have signs and Newspapers written in Spanish, but it's still poorly constructed editing that seems very obvious that the editors are trying to edit something out. What I also noticed about the film is, you know how much Michael Bay loves to show off explosions; well this film loves to show off its smoke effect! The film's pacing is also painfully slow with scenes that drag on way too much, I've already gave examples of that through the earlier scenes, but did you know that it takes Santa a minute and a half to reach the chimney! Also if you think robotic reindeer, an evil laughing Santa, and the Devil and Hell aren't scary enough for you; don't worry you'll be freaked by every other scene that involves creepy giant dolls that can't dance, two ugly puppets that love to kiss and beat up each other, and a giant robotic Santa that looks scarier than the life-size dancing Santa dolls that you'd find at your local retail store during this time of year!
Out of every Christmas movie and Special I've seen, this has to be the worst one, or in the very least the worst Santa Claus movie I've ever seen! In a way, I can see people enjoying this movie for how bad it is for its ludicrous decisions, but in my opinion this film is way too bad to even be considered for that category. There's nothing in the film that I find funny or even remotely enchanting about it for how messy, corny, annoying, slow, awkward, and scary it is! It's just a very weird and unpleasant film from beginning to end that makes you feel dirty and terrified while watching it! Unless if you don't want to sleep soundly this Christmas Eve for the amount of nightmares that you will get from this film, I recommend you stay away from it, and for those who are interested in seeing this film after reading my review, well don't say that I didn't warn you for how bad it is.
RATING 0/5
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