Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #155 Santa's Slay (2005)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.
As with The Weird Accordion to Al, the Travolta/Cage Project and the Spookthology of Terror, I’ve been going through Kitaen and Gayheart’s filmographies in chronological order but the kindly patron who commissioned these series has given me permission to jump ahead in the timeline and watch and write about movies that are seasonally appropriate.
I had a blast revisiting Gayheart’s Scream 2 and Urban Legend in October for the spooky season along with Kitaen’s Witchboard and now I’m hopping ahead in the timeline to 2005, when Gayheart appeared in two decidedly different Christmas movies.
I’m doing this because I love to watch Christmas movies during the Christmas season, and also I DESPERATELY NEED THE MONEY. At this point you might be thinking, “Jeez, Nathan, you seem to mention desperately needing money an awful lot here on the site. Is that because it’s a self-deprecating running joke about how hard it is to make a living doing what you do?”
I suppose that’s true but it’s also true that I DESPERATELY NEED THE MONEY, ESPECIALLY AT CHRISTMASTIME. Beyond DESPERATELY NEEDING MONEY, I was also intrigued by Santa’s Slay.
On paper, this naughtiest of Yuletide fright flicks radiates tremendous promise. It’s a surprisingly star-studded, tongue-in-cheek terror tale in which Santa Claus is not the twinkly-eyed gift-giver of the popular imagination but rather a homicidal maniac with a body count equivalent to some small wars, a murderous grudge against humanity and the towering physique and grappling skills of the superstar professional wrestler playing him.
Best of all Santa’s Slay runs a lean 75 minutes or so. So even if it fucking sucked it wouldn’t take up too much of my precious, precious time, time that I need to try to make THE MONEY I DESPERATELY NEED.
Thankfully Santa’s Slay does not fucking suck. I’m pleased to report that it more than lives up to its tremendous promise for campy, kitschy, blood-splattered, bad taste fun.
Santa’s Slay gets off to an audacious start with an opening that introduces the movie’s biggest stars and gruesomely murders them in a manner of minutes. We open on Christmas Eve, with a nightmare brood celebrating Baby Jesus’ birth in the tackiest possible fashion.
Jason Mason (Chris Kattan) and his busty, hot to trot sister-in-law Virginia (Fran Drescher) are diddling each other under the table, much to the horror and modification of their spouses, Darren (James Caan) and Gwen Mason (Rebecca Gayheart) respectively.
Teenagers Beth and Taylor meanwhile, thank the Lord for “not making us poor” and “Mexican pharmaceuticals” before praying “that those who are less fortunate than us work harder.”
Then Santa Claus, in the form of WWE superstar Goldberg, one of many Jewish actors in the cast, kicks down the fireplace and does what he does best in Santa’s Slay: brutally murder people in vaguely Christmasy ways.
Let’s just say that the phrase, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” has never seemed more sinister, or been uttered with such homicidal intent.
Santa Claus has always been a very physical icon. He is famously robust, with a belly that shakes like a bowl of jelly and enough strength and physical stamina to travel the world over the course of a single night, shimmying down chimneys and doling out presents to the deserving and chunks of coal to the naughty.
James Caan in Santa’s Slay. End of caption
In Santa’s Slay that brawny physicality takes on a monstrous dimension. Because he is played by a legendary wrestler, Santa Claus here is a one-man wrecking machine, a towering brute with nothing on his mind but killing as many people as possible as viciously as possible.
This is not your daddy’s Santa. This is a Santa with attitude, a Santa who both fucks and fucks people up whether they’ve been good or bad, naughty or nice. This Santa uses a stripper pole as a lethal weapon, quotes Ludacris and fatally impales a Jewish deli proprietor played by Saul Rubinek to a wall with his own menorah.
In a flashback neatly rendered in Rankin-Bass-style stop-motion animation, we learn that what we know now as Santa Claus began life as the literal son of the devil. This sire of Satan, a virgin birth like Jesus, commemorated Christmas as a “Day of Slaying” until an angel beat him in a bet that forced him to spend a solid millennium spreading Christmas cheer and joy by traveling around the world giving presents to children.
As Santa’s Slay opens, that one thousand years of being nice has officially ended and Santa is eager to make up for lost time.
The only people standing between Santa Claus and a world that does not understand his true nature, and real goals, is sulky, tellingly named teenager Nicholas Yuleson (Douglas Smith), his girlfriend Mary "Mac" Mackenzie (Emilie de Ravin) and Nicholas’ eccentric Grandpa (Robert Culp).
Culp is, of course, one of the stars of the Monte Hellman-directed direct-to-video Christmas slasher movie Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! That’s right: the brilliant maverick who gave the world Two Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter directed a sequel to Silent Night, Deadly Night that skipped the theaters altogether en route to a discreet direct-to-video burial.
Culp is consequently Santa horror royalty. He’s a god of this most distinguished field, a true icon of movies where someone in a Santa suit commemorates Jesus’ birth by murdering a fuck-ton of people.
Santa's Slay respects Culp’s iconic status by casting him in the larger than life role of an unsuccessful inventor, that favorite cinematic professions of lovable dreamers doomed to failure.
Grandpa knows an awful lot about the secret sadism of Santa Claus because his history with this mythical figure of pure menace goes back longer than his grandson could possibly imagine.
Goldberg plays evil Santa Claus with a light touch, a murderous gleam in his eyes, unstoppable momentum and just the right note of tongue-in-cheek evil. Goldberg’s VERY bad Santa derives just as much infectious, palpable joy in mass slaughter as his kindly counterparts do from being the world’s most prolific and well-known gift givers.
At seventy-five minutes or, Santa’s Slay is the perfect length. The horror-comedy’s brief runtime doesn’t afford it an opportunity to wear out its welcome. It’s nasty, it’s funny, and then it’s over.
So, if you’re at all curious, give Santa’s Slay a try. It's a demented Yuletide treat, an extra gory cinematic version of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “The Night Santa Went Crazy” that deserves at least the modest cult that seemingly greets every piece of Christmas entertainment that is not pure garbage.
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