Not to be confused with the better-known Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, this season five episode of everybody’s favorite show about wisecracking robots featured a 1959 Mexican Christmas film in which Santa Claus, operating from his floating palace in the clouds somewhere above the North Pole, is forced to do battle with Satan himself, who sets out to convince the children of the world to do evil.
There are movies, there are bad movies, and then there are movies that seem to have been filmed for no other reason other than to allow guys like the MST3K/RiffTrax/Cinematic Titanic casts to flay them alive. This isn’t just the worst Christmas movie I’ve ever seen (even worse than Pia Zadora’s aforementioned “classic”) but perhaps one of the worst movies ever made. The film opens up with an extended and painful sequence where Santa seems to have kidnapped children from all over the world to study in his toy shop as they sing a horrible song that makes It’s a Small World sound like the Daft Punk soundtrack to Tron: Legacy by comparison. From there, we see Satan given orders (?) to set out and make all of the children of the world do bad things so that Santa won’t give them presents.
It goes downhill from there.
Satan trying to turn a little girl into a shoplifter? Creepy. Santa’s invocation of Jesus? Somehow sacrilegious. The children? Evoking every national and ethnic stereotype you can imagine, all in one ten-minute orgy of global hatred. The wind-up reindeer? The stuff of nightmares. Truly, I feel for anybody who attempted to watch this film without the benefit of Mike and the ‘bots. If, however, you love the Riffing like I do, this is a fantastic time. Rarely has there been a movie so deserving of mockery, and rarely has there been any crew so up to the challenge.
If you want to throw in a little weirdness into your Christmas viewing this week, there are several ways to view this film — it’s available for download from Amazon and iTunes, for streaming on NetFlix, or on DVD in the MST3K Vol. XVI boxed set. Truly, this is a film worthy of your mockulation.
Yes, I just made up the word “mockulation.” It’s that bad.
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