#61 Santa With Muscles (Wes)

Santa With Muscles

Well last time around I was rueing the fact of the poor timing of this list and having to watch a movie called Santa Claus in the summer, well sometimes life is far from wonderful and is just plain rubbish. Sometimes life decides that your suffering isn’t quite enough and it makes you watch two Christmas movies in a row in the middle of summer. Sometimes one of those movies stars Hulk Hogan. Sometimes I hate this bloody list!

The evil scientist Ebner Frost (Ed Begley Jr) is trying to forcefully buy all the buildings in a neighbourhood, including the local orphanage, as he wants some magical crystals that are in a cave underneath them. Whilst all looks lost for the orphans the evil (well just a bit psychotic really) millionaire Blake Thorn (Hulk Hogan) loses his memory whilst wearing a Santa costume (he’s hiding from the police after a paintball incident). Naturally he assumes he’s the real Santa Claus, and with the help of Lenny (Don Stark), an elf who knows his real identity, but is trying to stop him finding out (out of greed), he sets out to defeat the evil Frost and save Christmas.

Like the little girl at the start of this movie I think there’s only one way to address this movie and that’s with a plea to Santa to stop anything like this ever happening again. So here we go…

Dear Santa.

How are you? I’m not doing so well. There’s this really, really bad movie named Santa With Muscles that we had to watch, and I need your help. I know I stopped believing in you over thirty years ago, but I don’t know who else to turn to. I’ve been really good I swear and I’m only asking for your assistance as something really ought to be done and since I’ve seen you beat both The Martians and The Devil you seem to be pretty good at sorting out the worlds problems. See the thing is, I think that so many of these movies that are released around Christmas seem to be missing the point of celebrating your birthday and something needs to be done about this.

  

In the latest one I had to watch you was being portrayed by the wrestling legend Hulk Hogan, and whilst he may have been a sensation in the wrestling ring, on film he just doesn’t do anyone any favours. Now I’m sure you’ll agree that his cameo in Gremlins 2: The New Batch was fun, but didn’t anyone learn from Suburban Commando or Mr Nanny, that he really doesn’t have the acting ability to pull off a lead role? Even worse, the charisma that made him such a popular wrestler just gets completely lost when he’s out of the ring.

To make it worse in this movie he then seems to be doing a bad Snagglepuss impersonation whenever he speaks. I think it’s supposed to make him sound posh, but it just makes him sound like he learned how to speak by watching Burt Ward in Batman. I think that maybe the makers of this film thought that would be funny, having Hulk Hogan speak like one of those wholesome teens from the sixties, but Santa, it’s just not. It’s awful. These things are being done in your name, is there nothing you can do to stop them?

  

As you’d expect with Hogan in a movie, there’s a lot of cartoonish violence. Now Santa, you know how I like a bit of slapstick violence in a movie. I grew up on Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry cartoons, I can overlook the awful performance of Macaulay Caulkin in Home Alone for the brilliant traps the two burglars get caught up in, hell, I even think that Guest House Paradiso was pretty funny. But even I have limits. From the first scene where Blake’s staff are trying to beat him up in a Cato style way (if you don't know who that is, then once you've finished reading this I thoroughly recommend you watch the original Pink Panther movies (he was introduced in A Shot in the Dark), The Pink Panther Strikes Again having my favourite Clouseau vs Cato fight), to the god awful way that Blake stops two petty thugs in the mall, to Blake stopping a speeding truck by grabbing a chain it’s all just a bit embarrassing. This movie is no Jingle All the Way…

To make matters worse he’s teamed up with Don Stark being so weasely, that he’s stoat-ally annoying (sorry Santa, that was bad), and three children (Can you really have an orphanage with only three kids? Surely they’d have been transferred to other orphanages if everyone else had been adopted?) who could have only been more irritating if Jake Lloyd had played all three in the style of Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove. To make matters worse, Hogan even attempts to sing with one of them at one point. The results truly aren’t pretty, as both Hogan and the girl (Aria Noelle Curzon) have more trouble holding a tune than Edward Norton had holding the soap in American History X.

  

But Santa, after everything I’ve said, I think there’s something that that movie misses more than anything I’ve ever seen in a Christmas movie. It’s just doesn’t feel Christmassy in the slightest. You can’t even blame where it’s set, as both Lethal Weapon and Die Hard were set in California and had a conspicuous absence of snow, but they both managed to convey something of the Christmas spirit into them. Of course there’s one major difference between those films and this one, and that’s that they were aimed at adults. Santa With Muscles is a family movie, so I will ask the important question… Where’s the snow?

This is a ridiculous movie Santa, with terrible acting, a script so bad that it was possibly found in a Christmas cracker, and even less Christmas spirit than Jaws: The Revenge. It’s so bad that even a young Mila Kunis in her first Hollywood film role looks embarrassed to be in this. So Santa, if you could find a way to delete this movie from the world that would be all I want for Christmas. If you can’t, then I’ll settle for some Weebles and an Eagle Eyes Action Man.

Love Wes, age 37 and 1/4