SANTA'S SLAY (2005) - a comedy horror minus the comedy and the horror is a movie about nothing, or so Zen master Costanza says

Here's the halfway decent opening scene that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Take special notice of the shame on James Caan's face. That's what you get for doing favors for people.

I don’t normally put much stock in a movie’s title. Usually, it’s some generic horseshit that some marketing douche with a ponytail comes up with between lattes and bouts of bitter insecurity. However, I have before me a movie that is supposed to be funny, and we got a verbal pun right there in the title. Unfortunately, we’re reading it, not hearing it, so the pun slams into the ground like a fish committing suicide by jumping off a skyscraper (although a fish would probably not have survived the climb to the top floor, but bear with me and my metaphoric fancy). You could maybe get a chuckle out of a play on the words “sleigh” and “slay” when properly worked into a conversation about a creepy looking Santa Claus. I think Groucho Marx might have been able to pull it off. Unfortunately, whoever the fuck directed this piece of shit ain’t no Groucho Marx. Hell, he ain’t even Zeppo Marx.

Of course, the filmed is littered with puns throughout (the evil Santa says “ho ho ho” went he walks into a strip club, for example), all written by someone who, based on the title alone, can’t even make the distinction between a verbal pun and a written one, let alone come up with something that’s actually fucking funny. The other predominant running “joke” is the fact that Santa is played by wrestler Goldberg, obviously a Jewish fellow. However, he also happens to be the least Jewish Jew that ever walked the land, desert or otherwise. Only people familiar with his work in spandex would make the connection and put two and two together, but by the time the dots are connected, the fleeting opportunity for humor would've probably already passed. For others, this conceptual pun, not even completing the transition from mind to paper, will fly over their heads. The Goldberg Santa could’ve been played with some Jewish humor, but as just another tough guy (albeit convincingly so), any supposed attempt at a hebe subversion of Catholic iconography (via the Coca-Cola company) simply doesn’t read on the screen. This, my friends, is no way to start a comedy.

So, basically, what we have here is another direct-to-video horror comedy script that seems theoretically humorous to the drunk frat boys who happen to be sitting around writing it, thinking that if their drunken idiot friends thinks this shit is funny, the world at large MUST be exposed to it. Curiously, this script got a fairly sizable budget, but still no theatrical release, alas. Digging deeper, I noticed that the director is only previously known for being Brett Ratner’s assistant, and that Brett helped to produce the movie. I’m sure it’s all a coincidence, that the movie was greenlit entirely based on merit, not because the director “knew a guy”. After all, this is America, where you can rise from nothing to the top of the mountain based solely on merit and hard work, and not because you’re just some drunk frat boy who can coast through life because your dad owns a car dealership.

The movie consists of two cross cutting “stories”. Grandpa (Robert Culp, of all people) stands around and gives exposition to his grandson about how Santa and Satan are one in the same (another pun, albeit in anagram form…he he). The other consists of Santa running around killing people in supposedly hilarious ways. He seems to be murdering random people for fun, but the film presents them as slightly flawed individuals who deserve to die, like strippers and thieves and jerks and the like. I guess we’re supposed to cheer their comeuppance, for they fall short of the Catholic Caucasian ideal of humanity. However, these slightly flawed individuals are no match in the asshole department for a dude running around killing people, Santa suit or otherwise. Curiously, he stabs a honest, hard working Jewish deli owner with a Menorah, and some gentile pork officers laugh about the innocent victim, cracking wise that things aren’t kosher and what have you. I guess being a hebe is a crime punishable by death, but the authorities lack the proper clearances to do anything about it. So, they are chuffed to bits when a vigilante Santa takes the law into his own hands and starts impaling innocent Jews with whatever is at hand, whether a Menorah, or a star of David, or maybe a velvet portrait of Jerry Seinfeld. As long as it gets the job done.

Then again, the writer/director appears to be Jewish himself. Maybe this whole scene is supposed to be satire of a sort, but who can really tell. You know, if you’re fucking up puns left and right, please, god, stay out of the satire business. It is said that even good satire will open up on Friday and close on Saturday, and that leaves a bunch of shitty jokes about nothing clogging up the rest of the week. So, in summary, I’ll just quote James Earl Jones from the film Soul Man. Playing a uptight law professor, he asks for a precedent, and C. Thomas Howell (in an afro wig and shoe polish) retorts “the precedent sir is…Ronald Reagan”. Jones sternly warns him: “if you insist on interrupting my class with jokes, please see to it that they are funny”. That about sums it up I think. Then again, I would think C. Thomas is already interrupting the class on a perpetual basis by his hilarious appearance, sporting an afro and looking like he just crawled out of the La Brea tar pits. How can I be expected to learn when my sides are hurting? Perhaps the ultimate lesson of comedy is best expressed in such a form, a mysterious koan of sorts, as it defies any conventional western analysis. Dear Grasshopper...if you laugh, it is funny, and it is funny because you laughed. Now all I need is a comedy mantra. Are round eyes even allowed to have comedy mantras? You know what…the hell with it.

TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT (1980) - the lost pseudo-gem of the Santa slasher genre, hidden beneath an onslaught of disorientating film exposures

here's part 1 of the movie, posted by some wondrous soul on the Youtube gizmo

To All a Good Night could be seen as the “other” Santa Claus slasher, a precursor to the festive delights of Silent Night, Deadly Night (with all apologies to Christmas Evil, which is more of a “real“ movie). Unfortunately, the Christmas aspect is somewhat incidental. For one, the movie involves a group of young people on Christmas vacation, but takes place somewhere in Los Angeles. Sunshine and palm trees doesn’t exactly evoke the spirit of the holidays. Also, the killer is more or less an average psycho schmuck wearing St. Nick attire. There are no cool scenes where the big red fat ass throws a hand grenade down a chimney, or dismembers a naked girl with a razor sharp sled. It just doesn’t contain the “Christmas season gone very wrong” aesthetic the way Silent Night, Deadly Night does, and hence the film managed to skirt notoriety and outrage, and, resultingly, ticket sales.

We begin with a young girl during a vaseline smeared flashback (she isn’t smeared in vaseline, the camera lens is). She is being chased by her finishing school classmates over the side of a balcony, and her cranium structure gets irrecoverably rearranged on the concrete below. This will no doubt fuel a series of revenge murders when we flash forward to Christmas time two years later. Throughout, we bear witness to the unmistakable auteurist stamp of its creator, the indomitable David Hess, star of Last House on the Left and similar sicko epics. This amounts to cutting thick slices of hamfistedness (like repeatedly cutting away to the killer’s knife and gloves, or to a photo of the dead girl), mismatched/inadequate lighting, and a score that sounds like someone molesting a cello with a cheese grater while a dying robot weeps in the background. This was his only directorial effort, so maybe he was less an auteur than a flat out amateur. I guess we’ll never really know.

Our final girlisms rest capably in the sympathetic, sweet virginal hands of Jennifer Runyon. I myself remember her from Charles in Charge, as she repeatedly diverted my attention (with some help from Nicole Eggert) from the double A toolness of Willie Aames. She sits around and mopes while the other girls get frisky with the opposite sex. Intriguingly, the token nerd is seduced by the token slut in the bikini, and this results in actual sex sans a humiliating rebuttal. Me thinks she may be less a token slut that is selfish, conniving, and evil, but rather, an honest soul who wants to screw whoever happens to be around. God bless her.

Occasionally, a crazy soothsayer (the gardener Ralph) pops up and lectures the young people on the presence of evil, presented in plant metaphors, as opposed to Friday the 13th, where a soothsayer named Ralph makes no such allusion to soil and seed, and comes with the more direct “you’re all gonna fucking die!”. St. Nick ends up obliging his rants, showcasing what a truly ruthless fatty he is. My favorite murders are when he sticks a victim’s severed head on a shower nozzle for a soon-to-be victim to find, and when he sneaks into the small getaway plane that doesn’t fly (eschewing the stereotypical getaway van that never starts) and turns on the rutter while two victims are trying to fix it, thereby slicing them into Vic Morrow sized nuggets.

The final showdown is the true golden highlight of the film. Leah, the nutty ballerina, at some point completes a descent into batshit Kate Bush territory, and just starts dancing and singing as if no one else is around (let alone a dude in a Santa suit running around killing people). Santa is revealed to be the mother of the dead girl from the beginning (surprise), and she chases Jennifer Runyon around for a while, with Leah twirling and warbling in the background. Eventually, Jennifer pushes the killer over the balcony, and the mother ends up just like the daughter, although we never actually see the fall. We see her get pushed, and the film suddenly cuts to her spread out on concrete. I guess they couldn’t find a stunt double for an aging female Santa.

As if all of this wasn’t enough, Jennifer is then attacked by another killer Santa, this time the useless pork chief from earlier in the film, who happens to be the dead girl’s father. At least when a police officer is wearing his standard uniform, you can spot captain piggie from a distance and haul ass for the proverbial hills. Then again, at the rate this is going, it's also probably safe to assume malfeasance of some sort when confronted with a fella wearing a Santa costume. Anyway, the nerd shows up, grabs a crossbow, and bags himself a fat fuck fairy-tale/pork-trough hybrid asshole, and then runs off with Jennifer. I guess he would now have to be officially classified as an ultra cool super stud, assuming he dumps the glasses and gets contacts. Meanwhile, crazy Leah continues her melodic moans, eventually pirouetting her way out on to the balcony for her big freeze frame finale; a walking non-sequitur amidst a pretty righteous dual Santa slaughter.

THE DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1982) - not an Amityville kegger, but rather, a Christmas slasher closed off from any outside festivities

Here's the badass poster

Things begin much like Antonioni’s Blow-Up, what with a truck load of college students careening down the road during homecoming or some such event. A student is hiding in the brush, just as David Hemmings lurked through the park, accidentally photographing a murder while engaged in his artistic process. Hemmings eventually reinvigorates his craft by attempting to solve this murder, and the identity of the killer becomes irrelevant. Rather than a murder victim inspiring an artist, the student becomes the murder victim, thereby removing the narrative wall (and, consequently, the “big idea”) that “respectable” cinema deems so important. Maybe the comparison is a bit of a stretch, but hey, I'd thought I'd give it a stab.

The real story begins at a hopping dorm party, where our heroine Joanne and future almost-star Daphne Zuniga party down by standing around and providing exposition. It seems Joanne is heading up a Christmas time cleaning of an old dorm building, and does so with strong organizational leadership and a cheerfully seasonal sweater. Daphne says she can help out for only one day, but then has to bolt to attend to some Jesus-day family bullshit. While her parents are waiting outside to pick her up, she finishes up her business in the deserted hallways of these hopeless, sanguinary living quarters. Her impatient father goes in to fetch her, and is promptly bashed in the head with a spiked baseball bat by someone wearing Chuck Taylors. He then strangles the mother and backs over a dummy of Daphne with the car, which thankfully frees up the real Daphne to later star in Melrose Place, and whatever else she has accomplished.

As you would expect, the red herrings come fast and fishy. There’s a homeless nut named John (ominously wearing Chuck Taylors, and played by Woody Roll, which sounds like a really shitty ventriloquist dummy). We also get a craggy handyman and some contractor guy that Joanna has to deal with. Mr. contractor suspiciously wants to drive around alone at night, despite the subtle yearnings of his girlfriend, who flashes her tits, asking “you're gonna walk away from these?”. Unfortunately for her, titties shalt not coral a man into an alibi, freeing him up to remain suspicious in the minds of the viewing public.

Meanwhile, one of the schmucks along for the dorm cleaning ride pulls the old "toss a plastic spider on a fried egg" trick, which used to be hilarious back in…oh wait, never. He also explains how he is able to maintain a solid GPA with the intellectual drive of a drunken weasel; forget about learning stuff and whatever, just kiss up to the professors. He also constantly hits on a girl who is clearly annoyed by his advances. In summary, please get fucking killed ASAP. The group finally splits up to search the darkness for the homeless asshole in the Chucks. To placate the audience throughout this long stretch of dark wandering, the killer sticks an electric drill through the skull of the handyman, effectively ending his apparent fishiness. Some unseen asshole then takes that pesky spiked bat and lays waste to the dinner table, which prompts them to call the pork patrol. A friendly officer leaps into action with the following queue:

1. The breaking information that the homeless guy may or may not have already been arrested.

2. The hopeful revelation of a possible future phone call to confirm or disconfirm #1.

3. The comforting reassurance of the knowledge that, if someone should start murdering you or someone in your party, go ahead and give the boys in blue a call. They will be more than happy to assist you at that point.

Against all odds, the murderer stays several steps ahead of the fuzz, and immediately cuts the phone and power lines after the bacon train heads back to the station. This allows the killer to really get down to business, while doing so in familiar fashion. One of the guys (the non-schmuck) gets killed in a scene copied verbatim from Friday the 13th, in which a guy has a flashlight shone in his eyes in order to blind him during a machete hack. This and the other murders are accompanied by a Friday the 13th-ish score that sounds like the string “orchestra” (i.e. three college band nerds ) having their violins and cellos slowly hacksawed in half. I guess that's the idea...you know, free form dissonance and what have you.

After the other girl gets boiled alive in a steamer, Joanna, schmuck boy, the contractor, and the homeless guy are left to their own devices, running around this blood soaked dorm in insufficient lighting. The horrific tunelessness of the score washes over this numbing, nihilistic, grain soaked, festival of drab hokum. Joanna tumbles around with these jerkys until schmuck boy reveals that he has been, in fact, living a lie. His annoying jackass persona was in fact a façade. Indeed, he is less an annoying jackass than a homicidal retard. In a last ditch holdover of the killer’s previous loud mouth persona, he explains all of the various plot holes and inconsistencies. However, he never does explain, nor does anyone else, the fierce conundrum known as the “Chuck Taylor discrepancy”, where-in both the stalking figure and the homeless guy wore Chucks, yet I don’t recall seeing schmuck boy wearing them. I guess it’s one of those ripple in the universe deals, maybe the "Chuck Taylor black hole paradox".

The motive becomes clear. Joanna turned down his advances (he admits he “is the smartass nobody likes“, a surprisingly lucid bit of self-examination), and everyone had to be murdered as a result. He should’ve realized that homicide is not the answer. Instead, maybe he could have started a literary revolution, one in which smartass losers gain acceptance in society by starting blogs about how they’re annoying putzes that nobody likes. Just like David Hemmings in the Antonioni film, he could have funneled his ennui into a jug of artistic production, or whatever pretentious metaphor you wanna throw out there.

Well, Joanna is forced to plead for her life by agreeing to become his girlfriend, but luckily, she is saved by the red herring contractor. Unfortunately, she is promptly unsaved by the pork patrol, who immediately show up and blows the “hero” away. They then have the utter blasé temerity to leave the murder scene, saying they’ll be right back, when and if they get around to it, because, you know...donuts and shit. This leaves an unconscious Joanna alone with the killer. Not only does he get off scot-free, he completes his transition from annoying schmuck to total and complete asshole by coldly tossing Joanna into the furnace.

The end.

Fuck you.

Well…at least Christmas is coming up. Yay presents!

SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (1984) - a Christmas-y assault on bullshit family values that warms the cockles of my coal black heart

here's a trailer for my all time fave Christmas movie

Boy it’s hard to rape the spirit of Christmas.

Oh sure, you could head over to the local mall during the holidays and interrupt St. Nick and his bratty lap fest, rest the wrong (right?) end of a sawed-off shotgun underneath his chin, and robustly proclaim “YOU LITTLE FUCKS WERE NAUGHTY THIS YEAR! ALL OF YA!”. When the children start weeping uncontrollably, you could yell out “BUNCH OF NO JOLLY LYING MAGGOTS!!!”, right before sending Santa’s skull fragments splattering across center court, pelting the cardboard Alf display in front of Spencer’s Gifts.

Granted, this gets the job done, but also proves impractical. Snuffing out fat, mythical symbols is mostly frowned upon in society, and not to mention, totally against the law. It takes a pretty monumental effort to ruin Christmas through legal means, as the promise of merchandise and/or cash and/or a gift certificate for Hot Topic tends to override the impact of your more standard holiday horrors, like watching daddy smack mommy in the head with a giant candy cane for screwing up the Christmas ham.

Silent Night, Deadly Night, however, is clearly up to the task, presenting everyone’s (i.e. minus a few straggling Muslims and Jews) favorite holiday as a circular madhouse of rape, murder, decapitated snowmen, shitty acting, inappropriate mammary glands, deaf priests getting blown away, old, fucked up nuns, and, most importantly, a secret weapon: the unrelenting mutilation of hope.

The opening is almost as disgustingly perverse as the last 700 Club Christmas special. A family is headed to the “Utah Mental Facility” to visit their zombiefied grandpa and presumably chill with other Mormons. On the drive over, mommy is laying down the commercialized rhetoric to innocent little Billy, about how the good are rewarded, Santa is awesome, etc. Billy, his innocence not yet ripped out and tossed in the garbage disposal, dutifully believes what she is shoveling. The visit with Grandpa seems to be going as planned; a perfunctory acknowledgement of relatives during the holiday season, to give the illusion that the family bond has not yet totally disintegrated.

However, Grandpa somehow manages to unzombiefy himself briefly in order to let Billy know that, yes, Santa is awesome, but only if you rigorously accept the formalism of society. Outsiders, free thinkers, and general shenanigan facilitators will be greeted with a punishing ass load of coal. Of course I’m paraphrasing. Soon after, by sheer unadulterated coincidence I’m sure, a dude in a Santa costume robs a convenience store and blows away the clerk. He then hails down our family of protagonists in their all-American station wagon, shoots daddy in the head, rapes mommy, and slits her throat. This is all in full view of little Billy and his baby brother. This tub of bearded jolly is truly not fucking around.

Several hopeless years pass. Billy is now an orphan trying to cope with the rigmarole of a school run by some asshole nun. This structured superstition is responsible for further fracturing his psyche, and sporting a horrible mullet certainly doesn’t help matters. The aforementioned Mother Superior represents this cold fist of crushing authority, while another nun voices logical solutions with caring and understanding, only to be scoffed at and ignored. Mother Superior’s misguided attempt at therapy exemplifies this, as she forces Billy to cope with the Santa-based rape and murder of his parents by forcing him sit on Santa’s lap. This of course backfires in spectacular fashion, and by spectacular, I mean he cold cocks Santa right onto his plump, reindeer-stroking ass.

Jump forward another 10 years, and Billy seems to be finally integrating into society, what with a budding romance between himself and a sweet, lovely, soon-to-be-raped female. He also seems to be moving up in the world professionally speaking, and this is illustrated with a montage showing him gainfully employed as a stock boy in a toy store, accomplishing many a rewarding task, like making sure the Krull board game stays stocked on the shelves. Holy shit…they made a board game based on Krull? I need to get on Ebay pronto. Anyway, things start to fall apart. His supervisor is a swearing prick. and Christmas is soon on the horizon. Any mention of Santa causes Billy to convulse and sweat like he just mainlined some tainted egg nog. By sheer unforeseeable coincidence, Billy is promptly called upon, as a last minute replacement, to play Santa for the store. Ho ho ho motherfuckers!

However, what ultimately makes him jolly in the head, and rightfully so, is seeing his vision of loveliness getting frisky with his asshole supervisor; his last bastion of hope in humanity being felt up by a sweaty hog. He sees her get sexually assaulted, just like mommy, and so begins a parade of punishment unparalleled in the history of Santa Claus. He punishes a bunch of less-than-jolly fucks with less-than-classy means, including Linnea Quigley in daisy dukes and absolutely no top whatsoever. During his mission, Santa Billy also keeps repeating his catch phrases (“PUNISH!!!” and “NAUGHTY!!!”), as if to subtly indicate that he has zealously adopted the inflexible standards that were pounded into his head.

Only one victim is spared; the young girl that Linnea was babysitting. Her confident assertion that she has been good all year spares her from certain doom (like, say, getting impaled by a Christmas tree). Rather, per Santa’s contract, she gets a gift. In this case, a worn and bloody exacto blade. This proves rather quizzical to a young innocent mind, as she is unable to process this symbol of rusty, hopeless nihilism. Well, not to give everything away, but two Santas end up being shot dead right in front of a flock of moppets (not at the same time, that would be confusing). However, out of all of these newly traumatized tykes, only Billy’s brother Ricky gets twitchy enough to inspire a sequel, which I believe is called "Silent Night, Deadly Night- The Next Entry in the Series Part 2 the Revenge". This one is famous for having a forty minute flashback consisting entirely of scenes from the first movie (“Remember back in that earlier film, when this scene occurred? Well, I sure do!”), as well as a bunch of ass ruling nonsense that I think is supposed to be funny. In the middle is a little detour where-in Ricky goes on a date with the lovely Liz Caitin, and they decide to go see a movie, namely, Silent Night, Deadly Night (the first one). Seriously. No shit.

In summary, I’ll just relay that Roxanne T. Mueller of the Cleveland Plain Dealer proclaimed that “Silent Night, Deadly Night is a sleazy, miserable, insulting piece of garbage”. Maybe so, but sometimes that’s exactly what it takes to counteract the pervasive cancer of holiday cheer.

P.S. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!! I'll throw up some other Christmas related slasher reviews in the next couple of days.

P.P.S. If the little date on the carton of egg nog is earlier than the current date, FOR GOD SAKES STAY AWAY! The nog is officially tainted. If this proves confusing or you are unable to tell, just go ahead and guzzle beer instead. With the family around and all, you're gonna need it.