1959
René Cardona
Santa Claus (José
Elías Moreno) watches over the Earth from his floating castle of nightmares;
featuring monstrous robot reindeer, machines with sensual full lips and a room
filled with child slaves from around the world. A demon (José Luis Aguirre)
does some modern dance in Hell and then heads to Earth to corrupt the children
of Mexico. With innocent kids caught in the crossfire, these two titans of evil
collide on a fateful Christmas night and only one will live to tell the tale.
By turns schmaltzy, sentimental, wacky and utterly
terrifying, ‘Santa Claus’ encapsulates the holiday perfectly. In either a
genius move or a idiotic one, everything surrounding Santa, especially the
things in his flying castle are horrifyingly bizarre, while everything about
Pitch is completely silly and weightless. I have yet to see it in Spanish but
the dubbing is pretty typical of other films K. Gordon Murray brought over from
Mexico, i.e. Not great. The movie has a couple of out of place song and dance
numbers mixed in with a lot of unfunny comedy and some halfhearted melodrama.
There is something weirdly compelling about all this, and admittedly it is
pretty fun watching Santa and Pitch try and one up each other. If only the
movie had spent more time on that and less on the conflicted soul of a little
girl it might have been a better movie. Then again, if it were a better movie,
I might not love it so much.
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