SPECIAL ATTRACTION: Santa’s Slay (2005)

The first thing you need to know about Santa’s Slay is that Bill Goldberg, the man in the red suit, is Jewish. The second thing you need to know about Santa’s Slay is that Santa, the son of Satan, is only nice because he lost a bet to an angel 2,000 years ago; a bet that involved curling. Stop-motion curling.

If I had a movie theatre, I’d play Santa’s Slay every December, along with the likes of Die Hard, Batman Returns, Gremlins and Jingle All the Way–Christmas movies that make for great anti-programming in the face of hours and hours and hours of “I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas,” awkward family dinners, antiquated and unchanged state liquor laws and whatever garbage is lurking at the multiplex, trying to rob you of your hard earned Christmas money. Movies like Gulliver’s Travels come and go; they are the flotsam and jetsam of holiday filmgoing. It takes guts (or, at the very least, a shiteating grin) to turn the fat, jolly old man into a Jewish asskicker from the bowels of hell.

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!” Naturally, skepticism hounds Santa; the only people who believe in St. Nick anymore are the very young and the advertisers who still plater Santa on Macy’s displays and bottles of Coke. But it’s obvious from the minute Santa kicks the family dog into the ceiling fan: He’s real, and he hates Christmas. Heck, the premise would have worked without the high stakes curling scene. I imagine Santa isn’t too happy that those wooden trains and hobby horses his elves slave over have given way to iPads and Kindles, that Christmas is an economic institution Too Big to Fail, that a society obsessed with body image still doesn’t want a skinny Kris Kringle.

Yeah, all of this is giving Santa’s Slay too much credit. It’s just a movie where Santa rides around in an ox-drawn sleigh, killing people in the most elaborate way a cynical screenwriter can imagine. It’s campy, perhaps shamefully so, but there’s something to be said for camp when its done right. Spare me your cookie cutter holiday movies, hastily and shoddily upconverted to 3D. Spare me your sentimentality. Santa’s Slay is a Christmas movie for people who see through Christmas. Dole out the eggnog and watch the bodycount rise.