Santa Claus (1959)

(On Cable TV, December 2021) There are a lot of Santa Claus movies, but the 1959 version is… special. I understood that fanfic is a natural human impulse when I saw my daughter play with her dolls and invent stories without a care for intellectual property or storytelling coherence, and this film feels a lot like that — Why not have Santa and Merlin fight against The Devil for the goodness of the Earth’s children? Trust me — it gets weirder, such as an incredibly stereotypical succession of kids celebrating Christmas from around the world. Falling into the “you’ve got to see it to believe it,” this Santa Claus is not a good movie — produced in Mexico with a terrible budget by writer-director René Cardona, ugly visuals and very strange ideas about pacing, directing or screenwriting, it’s a curio made even more remarkable by its age — While smashing together characters from various sources for fun is not unusual these days (The French-Canadian horror channel FrissonTV even had a 2021 Christmas special where the antagonist is no less than Jesus himself,) it feels considerably weirder coming from the 1950s. It’s infamous for being featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, but you don’t need wisecracking robots to see the film’s considerable shortcomings. I’m not sure I’m recommending it… but Santa Claus is something all right.