Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
You guys remember Opie, right? He did a great job covering Sundance for us this year, and now it turns out he lives right here in the LA area and has decided to keep the reports going all year long. So what prestigious, heavily-anticipated film did we decide to make his kick-off report for us as a regular AICN spy?
A movie starring Goldberg the wrestler. Yay, us.
Imagine, children. What if... Saint Nick wasn't a saint at all? What if he was... (gasp) a... demon? The purely evil spawn of Satan? What if he lost a bet, a thousand years ago, during a curling competition (yes, the pseudo-sport involving brooms, stones, and a frozen lake), conceived by a crafty angel, the punishment for which was to bring holiday joy to children across the world for one thousand years? What if the thousand years had finally expired, and Santa was at last free to go on a bloodthirsty rampage, slashing his way through the township of Hell in small-town America, on Christmas Day? Oh, yeah, and kids? Kids? What if this evil Santa were played by Goldberg, the former pro "wrestler?" Um... would you be in?
I must admit, the premise is deliciously trashy. It sounds so spectacularly awful, so worthy of a place in the annals of B-movie history, that it just screams for your attention. And, there are definitely moments early on when it appears that the film will pay off. Snide humor, wry pop-culture references, buried subliminal jokes (the desk sergeant at the police station has a placard that reveals his name: Dick Zucker - hardy har), gratuitous strip-club nudity, and the presence of the lovely Emilie Di Ravin (of "Lost," currently the best reason to watch television) make the movie's opening reel actually promising. I mean, how can you find fault in a film in which Chris Kattan, Rebecca Gayheart, AND Fran Drescher are brutally slaughtered before the opening credits? I almost applauded.
But the scenes of carnage are part of the problem with the film, ultimately. The film is striving for a tone reminicent of Child's Play, or Shaun of the Dead, or Gremlins. It wants to be funny, gory, gleeful fun. However, there is nothing at all about the violence in this film that is fun or exciting in the traditional, horror-movie way. It is filmed with no flair, no creativity, and with all the visual excitement of a junior high school christmas pageant It all blends together and becomes so blase, that the violence is shocking only in how little an effect it has. CRASH! SLICE! CHOP! BANG! (YAWN) This is slaughter, people! This is Santa Claus murdering people! How can you make that boring?
Part of the problem lies with the character of Santa Claus himself. Goldberg plays him with one note for the entire film, and that note is a loud roar. He trudges through the film, chopping people up for no apparent reason other than the fact that he hates the human race (although, in a particularly ugly and cringe-worthy moment, it appears that he hates Jewish people more than others), and looking like some sort of giant, deranged Viking. There is no glee in his homicidal rage. No real sense of menace, either. This could be only partly due to the fact that Santa Claus is not given much dialogue, nor many emotions to play, except rage. He's not funny, and he's not scary, so how can you root for him, or against him?
And since the rest of the film is populated with paper-thin cariactures instead of characters, their ultimate fate means little to us as well. I won't spill details of the plot here, because, in all honesty, it's really inconsequential. No one really comes to films like this for the plot, anyway. Needless to say, Santa Claus, instead of taking his revenge on the whole world as you would expect him to, decides for some odd reason to remain in one single small town, and try to kill as many people as he can, giving a young boy (generic pretty-boy Douglas Smith) enough time to, with the aid of his platonic friend (di Ravin) and his trusty grandpa (Robert Culp), devise an incredibly simple plan to bring him down. This all culminates in a choppy, vague climax in which nothing really gets resolved or explained, and everything is set up for a sequel. I guess.
This film is frustrating when it is supposed to be fun. While the concept, and a few of the jokes (including a fun flashback sequence that apes the old Rankin-Bass Christmas specials even better than Favreau did in "Elf") create promise and potential, the film ultimately fails to thrill when it comes to the real bread-and-butter of the horror-comedy genre: A well-crafted villain, and entertaining carnage. The version I saw was not complete yet, so there is still time to make this one decent. But the filmmakers seem to have pulled too many punches here, and something tells me that, come Christmas, this film will go the way of the fruitcake.
-Opie
I also saw Opie at the STEAMBOY screening, and I’ll be running his take on Otomo’s film later in the week. Nice to have you aboard, man.
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