Santa Claws (1996)

Hello everyone! To those who celebrate Christmas, I wish you a merry one and all that stuff. To those who celebrate Hanukkah, I hope you’ve had a happy past few nights. Kwanzaa? Festivus? Any other seasonal holiday? May they be some of the most joyous days of your year. With all that said, it’s time for a special Christmas Day post for another not-so-great movie. Consider it a gift from me to you as part of your holiday celebrations.

Since it’s Christmas, I stuck with the Christmas theme for this week’s movie. I usually go about choosing my Christmas lineup in a way where I get one very Christmas themed Christmas movie, one Hallmark or Lifetime movie, and one horror movie. This is the horror movie for this year’s lineup. It’s another in a long line of movies where a person dresses as Santa Claus (they may or may not be the real Santa) and goes on some sort of murder spree. Horror filmmakers love seeing the jolliest gift-giver giving a much bloodier gift around the holidays.

Santa Claws was a horror movie from 1996 that was about someone dressing as Santa Claus and committing murder. Raven Quinn (Debbie Rochon) was a famous horror icon with two kids and an estranged husband. Trying to keep her professional life going while juggling a hectic personal life, she befriended her neighbour, Wayne (Grant Kramer). Little did Raven know, Wayne was obsessed with her and was going to continue a murderous rage on her acquaintances, the same way he had murdered his mother and uncle when he was a child.

There was an important theme tackled by Santa Claws. Raven Quinn was famous. Wayne was an obsessive fan. The movie was about how dangerous it could be to have obsessive fans. It went into the violence and life-threatening situations that could result from an obsessive fan forcing their way into a celebrity’s life. This was some four years before Eminem would bring that idea into the mainstream with the release of his song, Stan. Since then, the name Stan has taken on a new meaning, coming to mean any obsessive fan of something. However, it kind of lost the negative connotation. People are glad to say they stan something that they deeply like, when the true meaning of stanning something would be to love it so much that you become a threatening presence.

The idea that Wayne would become so obsessed with Raven that he would violently attack anyone who came between them was a predecessor to that song shining a light on the same concept. Neither of them were original ideas. They pulled from real life situations. There were things like the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt that shared similarities to Santa Claws. John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan because he wanted to gain the attention of Jodie Foster, a 19-year-old celebrity he was obsessed with. There’s basis in reality for the themes that Santa Claws plays with.

Santa Claws did have some problems, though. It wasn’t a perfect movie. The obsessive fan theme was intermixed with numerous scenes of women stripping for magazine photoshoots. I would dare say it was split down the middle with the horror and the titillation. The two didn’t even coexist. There would be a horror scene. There would be a nude scene. The horror never invaded the nudity, and the nudity never invaded the horror. There may have been some cross-cutting, but they never directly interacted. It made the nudity feel like it was for the sake of nudity and not for the sake of telling the story.

The other major problem with Santa Claws came from the expectations that the description brought. It was a movie described as an obsessive fan killing people while dressed as Santa Claus. He was only dressed as the jolly gift giver for one, maybe two murders. The rest of the movie saw him in a ski mask, calling himself “The Black Claw.” This was because the ski mask was black, and he killed people with a gardening claw. If you, like me, when into the movie expecting to see Santa Claus killing people, then you, like me, would be disappointed by the lack of Santa slaying people. That was disappointing, to say the least.

Santa Claws was not a great movie. It was pretty darn bad. There was a solid theme in there with the obsessive fan stuff. The way it got violent could hit home for some people, especially when related to real life instances of this sort of thing happening. Maybe not to the dressing up as Santa, calling himself “The Black Claw” extent. But people have done some evil, murderous things for the sake of celebrity attention before. The excessive scenes of nudity took away from that message, though. Every time there seemed to be something interesting to say about obsessive fans, the movie would cut away to some woman taking off her clothes. I get that it was Raven’s job to pose for those pictures, but we probably didn’t need four different scenes devoted to different models doing the same thing when it didn’t add to the story. The message was lost in the nudity.

That’s another Christmas post down. I think it might have been the first post to fall on Christmas day, but I could be wrong. Either way, it was the yearly Christmas horror movie to be covered for Sunday “Bad” Movies. Every year, I try to do one of those. What’s the holiday season without some chills? The weather outside is frightful, and so is whatever screen you’re watching your Christmas movies on, if you’re doing things right. I certainly am.

With that out of the way, I want to wish everyone a happy new year. I won’t see you again until 2023, since New Year’s Day is when the next post should be going up. For anyone who lives in or around my area, I hope you’re doing well with all the snow we had dumped on us this past week. It’s been a crazy one. Here’s to a white holiday season, and here’s to a new year of bad movies coming at us all. Thanks for reading!

There are a few notes I must toss in here before I go:

• The only returning actor in Santa Claws was Debbie Rochon. She has been in Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (week 84), Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (week 110), Battledogs (week 346), Tromeo and Juliet (week 516), and Vampire’s Kiss (week 517).
• Have you seen Santa Claws? Have you heard of Santa Claws? What did you think about it? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
• If there are any movies you think I should cover for Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know. You can drop a suggestion in the comments section.
• Sunday “Bad” Movies is on Instagram. Check it out for some other Sunday “Bad” Movies material.
• What’s in store for next week? I know you’re asking, and I’m asking too. I scheduled it a while back and can’t remember right now. Let’s check the schedule. I’m going to be watching a movie from 2014 called A Long Way Down. I can’t remember what it is right now, but I’ll be sure to find out and let you know for next week. See you then.