M E E E E E R R Y   C H R I S T M A S !

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SANTA’S SLAY

  2005/18/78m

“He’s making a list… Pray you’re not on it.”

Director/Writer: David Steiman / Cast: Bill Goldberg, Douglas Smith, Emelie de Ravin, Robert Culp, Dave Thomas, Saul Rubinek, Rebecca Gayheart, Michael David Simms, Chris Kattan, Fran Drescher, Alicia Loren, Annie Sorrell, James Caan.

Body Count: 38

Laughter Lines: “You bought me a gun? I don’t mean to be ungrateful but… are you fucking retarded!?”

Brett Ratner produced this wickedly amusing flick, which would give those parents’ groups that protested Silent Night, Deadly Night‘s depiction of a homicidal Santa Claus twenty years earlier coronaries.

Santa, it turns out, is a son of Satan (wow, my dad was right!) and has done 1,000 years of good deeds after losing a wager with an angel. As the thousand year penance ends, so does his good behaviour. Setting his sights on the small Canadian township of Hell (police mantra: ‘Crime doesn’t stand a chance in Hell’), where crotchety old people, sleazy pastors, and all manner of hypocritical types are gruesomely done away with, as well as Carol Singers and strippers.

Indifferent teens Nicolas and Mary (de Ravin, of Lost) are the ones charged with the task of bringing the madness to an end. There are a lot of dark laughs here as the body count goes stratospheric – watch for the awesome teens where a pair of spoiled brats get their heads blown off by their presents and their tired grandma wearily says: “Fuck.”

Santa slashers are strange critters, but this plays it the right way, albeit one that would probably upset more than a few evangelicals. The end does seems to sag under the weight of a few too many in-jokes that don’t quite translate to screen very successfully, but up until then this is probably one of the better examples of it’s sub-sub-genre.

Blurbs-of-interest: Robert Culp was ironically in Silent Night, Deadly Night III; Rebecca Gayheart was in Urban Legend and made a cameo appearance in the sequel plus a small role in Scream 2; Douglas Smith was in Stage Fright (2014).