SanCl-icon3

Just because a story is aimed at chil­dren doesn’t mean it is actu­ally safe for them to expe­ri­ence it.  Since the days of the Brothers Grimm, adults have been scar­ing the beje­sus out of chil­dren with tales osten­si­bly designed to teach morals or just pro­vide light, age-appropriate enter­tain­ment.  Everyone has dis­turbed mem­o­ries of a kid-flick with a dark side that creeped them out (there’s even a web­site devoted to this phe­nom­e­non, the end­lessly read­able Kindertrauma).

Even beloved Father Christmas him­self couldn’t escape the dis­turb­ing kid-flick treat­ment… and that brings us to Santa Claus, the infa­mous 1959 flick mas­ter­minded by Mexican schlock auteur Rene Cardona.  He’s best known to exploita­tion fans for fare like Survive!, Night Of The Bloody Apes and Wrestling Women Vs. The Aztec Mummy, but his com­mer­cial mind­set drew him to the lore of Christmas for this yule­tide cash-in.  The result is per­haps the most dis­turb­ing and demented take on the Kris Kringle story ever filmed.

You know things have gone awry from the open­ing moments.  Instead of liv­ing at the North Pole, this film presents Santa liv­ing in a crys­tal cas­tle in outer space (this image is depicted with a matte paint­ing that eerily resem­bles the cover of the first album by Starcastle).  Inside the cas­tle, Santa Claus (Jose Elias Moreno) pre­sides over a com­plex oper­a­tion where James Bond-style spy equip­ment is used to observe the behav­ior of chil­dren on earth and a squad of inter­na­tional kid­dies replace the expected elves as Santa’s work force.  To make things even weirder, Merlin The Magician (Armando Arriola) gives Santa an array of mag­i­cal tools to use on his jour­ney and Santa also has a sleigh dri­ven by auto­mated reindeer.

Believe it or not, things get even weirder when Santa makes it to earth.  It seems that Santa’s mor­tal enemy in this film is Satan him­self and old Lucifer has sent out his top demon, Pitch (Jose Luis Aguirre) to end Santa’s reign of good cheer by any means nec­es­sary.  He knows that Santa will die if trapped on planet Earth (!) so he plots with a trio of greedy lit­tle boys to trap Santa.  When he’s not work­ing on those evil schemes, Pitch also tries to trick inno­cent lit­tle poor girl Lupita (Lupita Quezadas) into steal­ing since she can’t afford a doll of her own — and tor­ments her with wicked dreams designed to break her Christmas spirit when she doesn’t.  There’s also a sub­plot involv­ing Billy (Antonio Diaz Conde), a lit­tle rich boy who is denied the love he craves by his obliv­i­ous parents.

As the pre­vi­ous two para­graphs should reveal, Santa Claus is an trea­sure trove of child­hood psyche-scarring riches.  Screenwriters Cardona and Adolfo Torres Portillo take a stun­ning amount of lib­er­ties with the Santa Claus leg­end and weave in all man­ner of bizarre, trou­bling ele­ments that shouldn’t be in a kid’s movie.  For exam­ple, the rea­sons Santa will die if trapped on earth because the ris­ing sun will cause his rein­deer to dis­solve into dust and he will per­ish from star­va­tion… and also because he is used to eat­ing food made of clouds and can’t eat the food Earth peo­ple consume.

Even scarier is the thick layer of macabre ele­ments woven into the tale.  For instance, the lit­tle boys work­ing with Pitch to trap Santa not only want to steal all his gifts but also keep him as a slave so they can keep get­ting any­thing they want.  The end also has a Brothers Grimm-ish sce­nario in which Pitch steals Santa’s magic items, traps him  in a tree via a killer dog and tries to trick the peo­ple in a nearby house to pick up guns and shoot “the prowler” out­side.   There’s also a weird dream sequence in which giant dolls men­ace Lupita, encour­ag­ing her to steal and then berat­ing her when she won’t do it — this bit comes off like a twisted Christmas pageant as directed by Mario Bava.

If all that isn’t enough to warp a child’s brain, Santa Claus has one final weapon left in its arse­nal: a down­right mor­bid streak of pathos and over­bear­ing sen­ti­men­tal­ity.  This is man­i­fested in the sub­plots involv­ing Lupita and Billy.  Both chil­dren are posi­tioned to per­pet­u­ally be on the verge of heart­break and dis­il­lu­sion­ment and the film wal­lows in their mis­ery.  Lupita gets it the worst, with the audi­ence also being treated to scenes where her par­ents ago­nize over their poverty and inabil­ity to pro­vide her with proper gifts.  If this movie isn’t try to scare the crap out of you, it doing it’s damnedest to drive you into a deep depression.

In other words, for­get Silent Night, Deadly Night — this is the most dis­turb­ing and wrong-minded Christmas movie ever made.  As such, Santa Claus is an ideal hol­i­day treat for the schlock-minded and essen­tial view­ing.  “Bah hum­bug” to any­one who dares say otherwise.