Santa's Slay

2005

Director: David Steiman

Cast: Bill Goldberg, Douglas Smith and Emilie de Ravin

Plot: Santa Claus is actually a demon who lost a bet with an Angel, so he becomes the giver of toys and happiness. But when the bet is off, he returns to his evil ways.

Since I like watching horror movies year round, I often have trouble deciding which horror movies I'd like to watch on Halloween. I love cheesy holiday films of every genre, but surprisingly Halloween-themed horror movies are harder to find than you might imagine (this year I forced Mr. Moneybags to watch Trick 'r Treat with me, not horrible, but unlikely to make its way onto Anna Paquin's resume). At Christmas time I usually go with the flow and watch all those sappy xmas classics, little did I know that the Christmas/horror merge not only existed, but was rather prolific! I was delighted to find how many options I had to choose from, there were even well-researched lists online to direct me to the more choice movies in this genre. Unfortunately, when I took my list of Christmas horror movies to my video store, some ass clown had the same idea (and list) and had rented all the major Christmas horror movies, hence I had to wait until after Christmas to see some of the more interesting titles. We watched several movies, and we still have Gary Busey's The Gingerdead Man for tonight, but our favorite had to be Santa's Slay.

First and foremost its just superior in terms of film making to most of the other movies we watched. The whole pace of Santa's Slay felt natural and entertaining, and right around the midway lagging point we were rewarded with a pretty awesome snow mobile chase sequence! Really awesome, our main characters jumped cars, huge hills, basically any and everything that came into view on that snow mobile. In general the killing sequences were also pretty good, sort of similar to the Terminators opening sequence only instead of Arnold, its Santa walking around taking out groups of dumbfounded people in bars, strip clubs, etc. Then you have professional wrestler Bill Goldberg as Santa, which was compelling since he looked pretty scary. This is no trivial point, many Christmas horror movies have a real hard time making their Christmas-themed villians scary, for instance it was hard to feel spooked by the evil snowman in Jack Frost just because his eyebrows were pointed down menacingly. Luckily, Bill Goldberg's huge hulking form and exuberance make up for his cute Santa suit, and he still comes across as someone you wouldn't fuck around with.

Unfortunately, the storyline of Santa's Slay is not one of its strong points, so I won't go into explaining why Santa is actually the spawn of Satan or why he has got it out for our main protagonist. I will mention that the favorite Canadian pastime, curling, does feature heavily in the story, and that the main backstory is told in a claymation sequence, fun! One of my only other complaints is that Santa's Slay had the capacity to perhaps go a bit more serious and scary, but instead remained mostly comedic throughout. Overall it was a great little holiday gem, which is a lot more than I think I'll be able to say about The Gingerdead Man tonight.