Santa Claus (1959)

... aka: Santa Claus vs. the Devil

Directed by:

René Cardona

"Ken Smith" (K. Gordon Murray) (U.S. version only)

I for one could use a little faux holiday cheer today after getting up at 6am, driving an hour to my car dealership and sitting in the waiting room for 2 1/2 hours just for them to tend to a (very minor) recall. That was followed by a trip to Kohl's where they only had small and XXL sizes of the hoodie I wanted, and then Wal-Mart, which was packed so they decided to open three registers and let the self-checkouts do the rest so I was stuck in line for 30 minutes, and then IHOP, for a disappointing stack of under-cooked double blueberry pancakes, which concluded with me giving the waitress a 20 dollar tip just because I was desperate to see someone - anyone - fucking smile by that point. Well, let's just say it wasn't my best of days, so Christmas in July it is! Besides, we can't let the Hallmark Channel and QVC have all the fun, can we?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but... Everything you thought you knew about Santa Claus is a lie! He lives at the North Pole? Not exactly. He resides far up in the heavens deep in outer space a zillion miles above the North Pole. Lives in a cozy, humble little abode? No. He actually lives the lap of luxury in a giant crystal palace floating on a cloud. Not particularly religious? Catholic. Elves as helpers? Nope. Children from around the globe (including China, Japan, Africa, Italy, the U. S., Mexico and "The Orient") have apparently been kidnapped and forced to work in his toy factory sweatshop, where they sing (terrible!) songs in their (terrible!) off-key, cracking voices and do things stereotypical to the region. The U. S. ones, for instance, are dressed like little cowpokes, strum guitars and treat us to an ear-splitting rendition of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" while the Mexican representatives do only a slightly better job with "La Cucaracha." And I don't even really want to get into the drum beating child savages from Africa. While the kids "sing," Santa (José Elías Moreno) bangs on an organ making wide-eyed expressions like a deranged maniac.

Meanwhile, in hell (!!), "Lucifer, the King of Hades" gets upset when he catches all of his red horned demon men dancing around and enjoying themselves. He banishes them all except for one: Pitch (José Luis Aguirre 'Trotsky'), the leader of the demons. Lucifer gives him one objective: To go to Earth and make all of the children do evil things because he wants to piss off his "bearded old goat" nemesis.

Santa Claus and his sidekick Pedro (Cesáreo Quezadas aka 'Pulgarcito', who played Tom Thumb in the demented LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD AND THE MONSTERS and went on to do some even more demented things in real life) then use their high powered telescope to spy on some children in Mexico. A trio of little hoodlums ("The devil likes rude boys!") are coerced into pelting an animatronic Santa with rocks, to which Santa solemnly notes: "They will be punished in due course." Restoring his faith in humanity somewhat is poor little Lupita (Lupita Quezadas), whose only dream is to own a doll. Like the proverbial "demon over the shoulder," Pitch attempts to persuade her to shoplift one since her mother (Nora Veryán) can't afford to buy it but Lupita resists the urge and puts it back on the shelf. Good girl, Lupita.

Not content with spying on kids as they go about their daily lives, Santa takes the "he knows when you are sleeping" thing to a creepy new extreme by also using his "dream-scope" to keep tabs on what children are dreaming about! "Little Rich Boy" Billy (Antonio Díaz Conde hijo), for example, has dreams about two giant gifts under the tree with his parents inside because he merely wants more of their time. Lupita's dream, tainted by Pitch when he blows on her (!) while she's sleeping, involves her being in some cavernous, foggy void where two-faced dolls emerge from coffin-like boxes and do a dance routine before trying to convince her that she needs to be just a little evil to get what she wants out of life. I guess he does have a point.

After a montage of kids writing Santa and mailing out their letters, which the post office promptly throws into an oven (!) Christmas Eve finally arrives and uber-jolly Saint Nick (who never stops laughing) and his assistants rush to get all of their stuff together. The absent-minded Merlin the Magician (Armando Arriola) gives Santa a "flower to disappear" which enables him to become invisible and concocts a "magic dust" sleeping powder so that Santa can drug kids (!!) who stay up too late, while a blacksmith (Ángel Di Stefani) creates a golden key he can use to break-and-enter into chimney-less homes. After his sled is loaded, his robot reindeer whisk him off through space to Earth, where he encounters numerous problems in Mexico City.

The three evil boys plot to jump Santa, tie him up, kidnap him, make him their slave (!!) and then steal all of his toys and candy. Meanwhile, Pitch does what he can to try to prevent Santa from delivering all of his gifts, including moving chimneys, trying to set his ass on fire, making a doorknob red hot by blowing on it and trying to kill him by unleashing a dog and trying to trick people into shooting him. Santa retaliates a few times, like shooting Pitch in the ass with a toy cannon, but is mostly up a tree at the finale begging Merlin for help.

This has been popping in and out of IMDb's Bottom 100 list since the list has existed (note: as of this writing it's no longer on there), frequently shows up on "Worst Movies of All Time" lists and there are versions available with MST3K and Rifftrax "riffing" it in case you don't want to come up with your own wisecracks. But is the movie itself really that bad? That is a question I simply cannot answer. It's complicated.

For starters, any criticisms about the film being ridiculous and silly should automatically be discounted because, let's face it, every Santa Claus movie in existence is silly and ridiculous when we get right down to it. This is a fairy tale about a fictional character magically zapping around one night of the year giving out billions of presents we're talking about here, not reality, folks. Does it really matter if Santa lives at the North Pole or in space? Are toy robot reindeer any sillier than the U.S. version of actual magical reindeer that sometimes talk? Of course not. Knocking Mexican Santa mythology, at least per this film, merely because it deviates from your culture's representation of the character is sillier than anything you'll actually see in this movie. However, that also doesn't mean one can't marvel at or be amused by the differences, which I was at times and you'll no doubt also be.

It's also impossible to give this completely fair shakes due to the horribly-dubbed English language version courtesy of K. Gordon Murray, which relies heavily on new, perfunctory and often extremely dumb narration. I've no clue how the original Spanish language version stacks up but we all know how bad dubbing can ruin an otherwise perfectly fine film. That said, this is clearly not a perfectly fine film from a technical vantage point! While the sets and costumes are fun at times, the film is heavily padded, posits Santa as a mythical God stand-in in a basic religionized good vs. evil morality play and has plenty of irritating moments (it truly does take an iron will to make it past the ten-minute-long opening musical number!) to go along with the more amusing stuff. It's also extremely sentimental and schmaltzy at times, but the same can be said for most other holiday films and it has a few honestly affecting moments. But what this is really best known for nowadays is the high-for-a-kid's-movie creepiness factor. Many viewers of a certain age even remember being somewhat traumatized seeing this when they were young and I can fully understand why!

I'm sure Murray made an absolute fortune off of this when he released it as a children's matinee feature back in the day. In fact, it was still playing theaters as a seasonal Christmas film well into the 1970s! It was also shown often on TV and, heavily marketed as a bad movie cult feature, has been released numerous times on VHS and DVD by nearly every budget label under the sun.

★★

Death by Invitation (1971)

Directed by:

Ken Friedman

Jittery camerawork. Ragged editing. A severely washed out color palette. Terribly unconvincing period costumes, including some curious 17th Century blue jeans. Pasty white face make-up. Filmed on Staten Island. You'd be forgiven for thinking this was an Andy Milligan movie from the opening sequence of a suspected witch being tormented by Colonial Era villagers and then beheaded, but that notion is quickly dispelled almost immediately after. This ends up moving more in the direction of George Romero's underrated suburban witchcraft drama Season of the Witch (1972), though it's not executed with nearly the same skill nor is it as focused and effective.

Death by Invitation was the film debut of a chap named Ken Friedman, who, unlike Milligan, actually went on to something of a career in Hollywood, writing the crime drama Johnny Handsome (1987) starring Mickey Rourke and the comedy Cadillac Man (1990) starring Robin Williams. More interesting in context to this early effort is a pair of female-driven films he also wrote: Heart Like a Wheel (1987), about successful real-life female Top Fuel drag racer Shirley "Cha Cha" Muldowney, and Bad Girls (1994), a rare woman-centered western about four prostitutes on the lam after one kills an abusive client. In a way, this can be seen as a precursor to those later higher-budgeted efforts in that this also carries unexpectedly heavy feminist themes. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite seem to know what to do with any of them the further along it goes.

After the witch sequence, we're introduced to a wealthy, modern W. A. S. P.-y American family who live in a mansion and own a Rolls Royce. Peter Vroot (Aaron Phillips), the patriarch of the clan, is a portly, short-tempered real estate vulture who frowns upon his children associating with hippies, or "way out people" as he calls him. When he's not going into religious tirades, he's a heavy drinker and, probably not coincidentally, has staffed nearly his entire office with young women in miniskirts. Naomi (Sarnell Ogus) is his obedient wife and homemaker whose chief purpose in life thus far has been to pop out as many kids as possible going by her over-filled, hectic household. Among all those kids is unpleasant eldest daughter Coral (Rhonda Russell), whose fiancé Jake (Norman "Paige" / Parker) is living in their home and looking for work, meek teenager Sara (Sylvia Pressler), who's being forbidden from dating, the nerdy, straight-A-student Roger (Denver John Collins, brother of folk singer Judy Collins) and a couple of younger kids. I kind of lost count!

Naomi gets a reprieve, and an injection of excitement, fun and companionship in her stuffy life, from an attractive new friend named Lise (Shelby Leverington). The early-20-something Lise is not only much younger than Naomi, but she's intelligent, confident, outspoken yet friendly and has a carefree way about her that Naomi and Sara admire and every man of a certain age in the household is attracted to. Well, except for Peter, of course. He hates her and all that she stands for.

Peter's hate really all boils down to the age old dog vs. cat debate. There are those who prefer dogs and those who prefer cats and those who enjoy (or at least can tolerate) both, but there's also this subset of dog people who have a bizarre and over-the-top hatred of cats. These people are almost always major control freaks whose enjoyment of pets is limited to the subservient nature of a dog. If they can't be the "master" and exert complete control over it then they're not interested. They seem almost offended by the cat; an animal that always retains a part of its independent nature and one they can never fully dominate and control. Hit a dog and it comes crawling right back. Hit a cat and you'll be lucky if it comes within 20 feet of you for the next few years and it will probably hiss and swat any time it sees you and hate you forever. Peter is definitely a dog-lover-who-hates-cats kinda person.

The breadwinner's dominance over his household is threatened by the mere presence of Lise, who represents open sexuality, independent thought and an absence of religious restrictions (she's an atheist). She is the cat when all Peter wants to surround himself with are dogs and he's worried she's going to lead his entire repressed family astray. Turns out he's right in that assumption, though not in the ways he probably imagined. Lise is the reincarnation of the witch who was killed in the opening sequence and Peter is the ancestor of those who killed her. Haunted by flashes from her past life and execution, Lise sets forth in destroying the Vroot family one member at a time.

The interesting subtext and then-timely subject matter are almost completely negated by the technical ineptitude here. The photography and camerawork are bland, the editing is frequently awful, the sound recording is poor, the music score is grating at times, most (though not all) of the acting is amateurish, characters are so poorly established at the beginning it takes awhile to even figure out who is who, plot points and character motivations are hazy at best and there's some sorely misplaced comedy, like a pair of truly idiotic detectives and a scene at the father's office where most of the dialogue gets drowned out by overbearing muzak. Exploitation fans are also going to be disappointed as this delivers very little in the way of overt horror, no nudity and very little blood, though it does have a decapitation and a bag filled with bloody body parts toward the end.

Clearly the best thing about this is the alluring, talented lead actress, who at one point even gets a six-minute monologue about how in some South American cannibal tribes the female members are dominant over the men and delivers it brilliantly. Leverington is so good in this that looking at her subsequent filmography and seeing almost nothing but TV guest spots and bit parts afterward is rather depressing. She certainly deserved more starring roles. The executive producer was Leonard Kirtman, who himself directed Carnival of Blood (1970) along with dozens of hardcore titles, often using the name "Leo De Leon."

The first VHS release for this one that I'm aware of was on the Market Video label out of the UK in 1984. It wouldn't be until a decade later that Something Weird Video would release it on VHS here in America, though their version was only in black-and-white! A color print was eventually located so SW put that out on DVD in 2006. In 2013, Vinegar Syndrome released this as part of their "Drive-In Collection" series and paired it with either Dungeon of Harrow (1962) or Savage Water (1979).

★★