David Steiman’s Santa’s Slay is an extremely stupid but very funny addition to the killer Santa cycle which at least features the “real” Santa, albeit one far from the cuddly, benevolent figure we’re used to.
On Christmas Eve, the appalling, self-absorbed and fractious Mason family is massacred by a hulking Santa (former wrestler Bill Goldberg) who literally bursts through their fireplace and dispatches the bickering Masons in a variety of inventive and grisly Christmas-related ways. It turns out that Santa was once a demon, the result of a virgin birth caused by Satan and his annual holiday, Christmas, was a traditional “day of slaying” until he was defeated by an angel in a curling match and forced to spend the next millennium being nice and delivering presents to children. That sentence is now up and Santa is free to return to his old ways, something he does with unseemly enthusiasm, first laying waste to the staff and punters of a strip club before descending on the small town of Hell Township to wreak havoc. Standing in his way are teenager Nicholas Yuleson (Douglas Smith), his crazy grandfather (Robert Culp) who is more than he first appears to be and Nick’s friend Mary “Mac” Mackenzie (Emilie de Ravin).
The opening sequence is alternately hilarious and cheerfully sick with a host of cameo from the likes of an uncredited James Caan, Rebecca Gayheart, Chris Kattan and Fran Drescher meeting spectacularly sticky ends. And the film continues in a similar vein for a demented 78 minutes. It’s not in any way subtle and it isn’t particularly clever but it is huge amount of fun. Like Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984) it (mostly) cheerfully subverts the cloying wholesomeness of most Christmas films with random acts of violence.
The cast is mostly good value. Caan is a nice surprise in his all too brief cameo and though Smith is a bit bland as Nick, de Ravin (who had previously been in the TV series Roswell (1999-2002) and had just started on Lost (2004-2010)) is good fun as his sparky would-be girlfriend and gets most of the best lines. Veteran Robert Culp is a scene-stealer as the enigmatic grandpa, an eccentric inventor, who’s part Doc Brown from Back to the Future (1985), part Rand Peltzer from Gremlins and part Dudley the angel from The Bishop’s Wife (1947) and Bill Goldberg is perfect as the super violent, take no prisoners Santa whose sleigh is pulled by a monstrous, man-eating “hell deer” that resembles a giant white buffalo and who hands our exploding presents to unsuspecting passers by.
Santa’s massacre at a Christmas themed strip club is a riot with a surprisingly hygiene conscious Santa cleaning the stripper’s dancing pole before putting it to far from hygienic use, there’s an odd stop-motion animated flashback to explain Santa’s origins and the finale gets a bit too strange with Grandpa being revealed as the archangel that originally defeated Santa. The actual climax is a bit too abrupt, seeming to set up a sequel that never happened while the end credits roll with the cast and crew divided into the naughty and the nice and is interspersed with some not terribly funny outtakes.
Steiman’s script is full of some terrible dialogue (the Caulk and Bush in particular scene is dreadful) but also has some real gems (“Go home! Run away! Santa’s on the loose!”). Santa’s Slay remains to date Steiman’s only film as writer/director – he was formerly an assistant to Brett Ratner who produced Santa’s Slay, Steiman working as a production or director’s assistant on films like Inspector Gadget (1999), What Lies Beneath (2000) and Red Dragon (2002). Santa’s Slay is far from perfect – the climax comes out of nowhere and seems at odds with the gleeful, bloody subversion of the rest of the film, but it’s a lot more fun than it might at first appear to be. It’s easy to become jaded with killer Santa films but Santa’s Slay takes a different approach to a yuletide terror theme that has been somewhat overdone – Dick Maas’s Sint (2010) would later do something similar, presenting its version of Santa as a similarly demonic killer intent on bloody mayhem regardless of who’s been naughty or nice.
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