SanCl-icon2

Santa Claus has always been one of the bar­gain bin war­riors of the cult movie world: in other words, a pop­u­lar title amongst trash afi­ciona­dos that has never got­ten a proper release due to tricky rights sit­u­a­tions and a num­ber of grey-market edi­tions.  It recently got a new kick at the can via a blu-ray edi­tion from VCI.  While the results aren’t as tech­ni­cally pris­tine as fans might have hoped for, it’s a big improve­ment on past discs and adds a num­ber of swell, subject-appropriate extras in the bargain.

This trans­fer was taken from a film source: the ele­ment mostly looks good but there is the occa­sional bit of dam­age, mainly a few scratches that run down the right side of the frame on a few occa­sions.  A cou­ple of brief sec­tions seem faded in their col­ors in com­par­i­son to the rest of the film and there are also a hand­ful of moments where the frame seems to briefly “flash” as if the color tim­ing slipped for a second.

It’s also worth not­ing that the disc claims to have both the Mexican and K. Gordon Murray ver­sions of the film.  This is only par­tially true: this appears to be a Spanish lan­guage print that is edited to reflect the American ver­sion, excis­ing one sequence in set in hell, but retain­ing the orig­i­nal Spanish lan­guage titles and signs used in the Mexican ver­sion.  In fair­ness to VCI, they do include the excised Hell sequence and the English lan­guage titles and signs in a deleted scenes sec­tion.  That mate­r­ial is taken from a video mas­ter that was drawn from a 16mm source.

As for the trans­fer itself, it’s a mixed bag: color rep­re­sen­ta­tion is pretty strong, par­tic­u­larly the vivid pri­mary reds on Santa’s and Pitch’s cos­tumes, but the detail level wavers depend­ing on the close­ness of the shot.  Close-ups fare the best while wide shots get kind of hazy in detail.  The end result isn’t an ideal blu-ray trans­fer but it’s still a big step up from all the dupey, standard-def trans­fers of Santa Claus that have flooded the grey mar­ket for years.

Both English and Spanish mono sound­tracks are pro­vided: aside from the occa­sional pop, both sound fine.  Subtitles are pro­vided for the Spanish track but unfor­tu­nately they are printed in white let­ter­ing that blends into the back­ground, par­tic­u­larly dur­ing the scenes in Santa’s cas­tle.  There is also a 5.1 remix for the English lan­guage track but it’s an artificial-sounding affair that is too boomy to make a com­fort­able listen.

The best ele­ment of the disc is a sur­pris­ingly gen­er­ous assort­ment of extras.  Viewers are treated to the­atri­cal, t.v. and radio spots for Santa Claus, all built around K. Gordon Murray’s unique show­man­ship (the film was put out as a lim­ited weekend-only engage­ment).  In addi­tion to the afore­men­tioned deleted/alternate scenes, there are also a trio of “Santaland” shorts that Murray assem­bled by shoot­ing footage at Santa-themed road­side attrac­tions.  Two of these shorts use footage from Santa Claus itself and all three use other “mas­cots” that Murray adopted from his other Mexican releases, albeit in cheaply-redesigned cos­tumes.  This lit­tle tril­ogy is a smirk-inducing trip back to when kid­die enter­tain­ment could be really cheap and weird. Elsewhere, there is an unex­pect­edly com­pre­hen­sive ani­mated stills gallery that fea­tures all sorts of ad mate­ri­als (print ads, posters, color & black and white stills) as well as a Christmas-themed Howdy Doody short.

That said, the best bonus inclu­sions come from Daniel Griffith.  He does a com­men­tary track for the film that works quite well thanks to his exten­sive knowl­edge on K. Gordon Murray and the films he dis­trib­uted.  His com­ments cover the his­tory of the per­son­nel involved, how Murray repack­aged and sold it to an American audi­ence and, most inter­est­ingly, the fact that the Santa Claus leg­end wasn’t part of the usual Christmas cel­e­bra­tions in Mexico, which leads into dis­cus­sion of how the film­mak­ers tried to make it palat­able to their home audi­ence via a num­ber of eccen­tric addi­tions to Kris Kringle lore.

The com­men­tary is nicely com­ple­mented by “Santa Claus Conquers The Devil,” a new fea­turette that presents a con­cise, 14-minute intro­duc­tion to the mind-melting won­ders of Santa Claus.  It incor­po­rates input from cult film per­son­al­i­ties like Larry Blamire and MTS3K’s Kevin Murphy as it divides its time between explain­ing how this odd film came to be and the effect that it had on the young American minds that viewed it dur­ing its ini­tial release.  As usual with a Griffith fea­turette, it has nice graph­ics and a punchy edit­ing style.

In short, this is a flawed disc but the uptick in visual qual­ity and par­tic­u­larly the sup­ple­ments make it worth­while for any­one obsessed with this hol­i­day odd­ity.  If Santa Claus is your cup of yule­tide mad­ness, it def­i­nitely beats those grey mar­ket dupes.