I can definitely see why people hate 1996's grim, seedy Santa Claws. This one is infamous but barely qualifies as a movie, seeing as it's really just piss-poor softcore porn dressed up in a yuletide slasher Santa suit. There is a seed of a decent idea in this story of a B-movie horror actress being stalked by a psychotic fan and lead 'Scream Queen' Debbie Rochon has real presence but it's all so horribly half-assed. It's as though director Jack Russo thought "if we put enough boobs in here, maybe nobody will notice we don't know what we're doing".
It's an incredibly cheap looking film and almost nobody in it displays any acting talent, though Grant Kramer as delusional nut Wayne gives it his all, aiming for terrifyingly unhinged but mostly just looking silly. He's a good metaphor for the whole film in which the cinematography is awful and half the dialogue sounds like it was recorded in a cupboard.
We open, unpleasantly, on Christmas Eve many years ago with Wayne's overweight uncle revealing to his mom that he'd drugged the boy so they can have horrible, squelchy sex. Urgh. As is standard in psycho Santa films, the groggy teen walks in on them and, likely just as disgusted as the audience, pulls a gun and blasts them. He's sent to juvie and years later lives next door to 'actress' Raven (Rochon), who's famous for starring in terrible-looking horror films, with a sideline in 'glamour' (eg. nudie) photo shoots. She's married to, but estranged from, a dick called Eric (John Mowod) who is now with some other starlet who is also fond of showing her boobies often. If I haven't yet made this clear, there are a lot of boobies in this film.
Wayne seems pleasant on the outside but behind closed doors he's a cliched movie sicko, with a creepy Raven shrine and a mannequin that he likes to chat with. Raven somehow doesn't spot that this guy's completely cuckoo and trusts him to babysit her kids. Oops.
For a horror movie, the film seems overly concerned with the drama of Raven's personal life as she prepares to divorce Eric and falls out with her prudish in-laws over her saucy career. Even more time is spent showing us the production of the "Naked Christmas" film she's part of, which is essentially just semi-clad, disinterested buxom babes slowly dancing to bad '80s hair metal. If you came to this looking for horror thrills, you'll likely be disappointed but if you came for grot, you'll be quids in.
The film is mildly amusing whenever it returns to crazy Wayne who decides it would be fun to kill some porn stars with a jaggy movie prop claw while dressed as Santa. Various scantily clad lasses get unconvincingly murdered, before the film decides that, actually, adulterous dweeb Eric is the hero and has him swoop in to kick Wayne's ass. Raven does get to triumph over her tormentor in the end and looks pretty badass, clawing him to death while still in her lingerie.
There are some interesting points here about how women are generally reviled as 'sluts' and 'whores' for working in the ‘glamour’ modelling business, while the men behind the cameras laugh all the way to the bank. Any sort of empowering feminist subtext is clawed to death though, when it's presented as a happy, fairytale ending that Raven ends up back with the cheating husband. Not very Christmassy.
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