The second day of Holiday Hoopla finds us watching Santa Claus (1959, dir. René Cardona), better known by its unofficial sobriquet Santa Claus vs. the Devil. Contrary to my expectations, this was not in fact about a knock-out, drag-out, bare-knuckle brawl between St. Nick and Lucifer himself. In fact, the pseudo-titular Prince of Darkness barely features outside of a momentary vocal appearance, and the antagonist of the movie is a lesser devil named Pitch.
Quinn was giddy about me watching this one, since they had seen the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode featuring this movie and had at least some idea of the insanity that awaited.
The movie kind of plays out like a fever dream, lulling me into a drowsy torpor with ten minutes of awfully dubbed singing before throwing out bonkers concepts without warning. It continued to pull this trick all the way through its runtime; at an hour and a half in total, it feels about twice as long as it probably needs to be for the amount of content the story actually has.
But it's hard to say I was bored at the end of it. The zany, random moments Santa Claus that has, kept my eyes on the screen for most of the duration. The inventiveness of the set design and effects certainly helped, as they're pretty impressive for the time, especially given that this was one of the first effects-heavy movies to ever be produced in its country of origin, Mexico.
Apparently a lot of later Mexican sci-fi and fantasy films owe a bit of their DNA to this production, which seems like a worthy legacy to me. Even if the movie isn't, strictly speaking, "good", you will probably have fun watching it.
4/10
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