Next up is Santa With Muscles from 1996. Remember when Hulk Hogan was a movie star? This one is pretty terrible but hard to completely write off - it’s dumb but clearly aimed at little kids so I can forgive it. The Hulkster plays musclebound manchild Blake, who’s made millions selling health food and bodybuilding supplements. He’s slightly more interesting than your usual ‘Scrooge’ type as rather than being a skinflint, he uses his money to pay his staff to surprise attack him and have big, elaborate paintball battles with motorbikes and jeeps, in order to give him “a workout” or something. He thinks nothing of letting these high-speed battles spill out onto the city streets, causing chaos for the locals.
Chased by the cops, Blake sustains a head injury and, for convoluted reasons is tricked by Don Stark’s sneaky department store elf Lenny into thinking he’s Santa Claus. Soon, he’s dragged into a plot to save an orphanage from some cartoonish bad guys.
It’s all a big excuse to have the Hulkamaniac throwing baddies around while dressed in a cut-off Santa suit that expertly displays his “24 inch pythons”. I adored Hogan and his larger-than-life “Real American” WWF persona when I was a kid, but even then I was acutely aware that the proto-Dwayne Johnson could not act. I met him once in a book store in Toronto but decided to keep those opinions to myself as his hands were like big, bloody shovels.
Anyway, Hulk totally hams it up and, with the help of some adorable little ‘uns, uses his formidable biceps and newfound festive cheer to oppose the sinister machinations of eccentric germophobe mad scientist Ebner Frost (Ed Begley Jr). Interestingly, this film features an early role for Mila Kunis, as one of the precocious orphans and who acts Hogan off the screen.
The poor acting is eclipsed by some even worse puns, like “Oh Santa, you sleigh me.” You know they could do better if they tried, but it’s a mid-’90s kids film cashing in on the rise of Hulk Hogan. What are you gonna do?
It does have some decent special effects and lots of colourful baddies. Frost is aided by a bunch of technicolour Batman-villain–style henchmen including a babe who shoots electricity and a guy who has foul gas breath. Sadly, they're too easily outwitted by the children who just trip them up and throw buckets of water and stuff.
The film has some questionable moral messages too, with the day being saved not by good Christian festive cheer but by oodles of comedy violence. When one kid takes out some baddies with a slingshot, ‘Santa’ chastises him before justifying his own savagery by claiming “I did what I had to do.”
It’s forgettable crap but under-12s will probably dig it. I can’t completely slate it - it’s full of imagination and silly fun, even if the kids’ claims that Hulk is “better than Santa” are absolute nonsense.
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