The five weirdest Christmas movies of all time
For 11 months of the year, an entire subgenre of cinema lies dormant in irrelevancy, but all bets are off once December rolls around and it becomes time for the annual revisiting of the Christmas back catalogue.
Throughout the years, a number of movies have become established favourites that get rewatched by countless fans around the world each and every year without fail. Whether it’s the whimsical It’s a Wonderful Life, the delirious comedy of Elf, the never-ending debate on whether or not Die Hard fits the bill, the hard-edged satire of Scrooged or anything in between, there are certain titles that can’t be avoided.
However, on the other end of the spectrum are the films that will arguably never become staples of the festive calendar for everybody, even if plenty of diehard fans out there defend them to the death as Yuletide necessities. That extends to such eclectic additions to canon as the action-packed Violent Night, crime thriller Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and comic book blockbuster Batman Returns, to name but three, all of which are held dear in the hearts of many.
Christmas movies have their own set of conventions they’re obligated to tick off, but there’s been more than a few to have gone about it in the strangest way possible. Technically, all of the incoming five features are indisputably festive in nature, but they don’t come much weirder than this.
Five weirdest Christmas movies:
Fatman (Ian and Eshom Nelms, 2020)
Following his repeated controversies, casting Mel Gibson as the warm and cuddly face of Christmas was a strange decision in and of itself, but tasking the disgraced actor to play Santa Claus was just one of many bizarre aspects of Ian and Eshom Nelm’s blackly comic action thriller Fatman.
For one thing, the entire narrative hinges on a child who decides to hire a hitman to assassinate Jolly Old Saint Nick after getting a lump of coal in his stocking, with Walton Goggins’ killer tracking down Santa to his North Pole base for a blood-soaked showdown.
All that, and the milk-and-cookies enthusiast already facing hard times when the United States government threatens to withdraw its funding of his operation after Santa’s annual trip around the world loses much of its economic viability in a world where kids are misbehaving more than ever before.
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (Nicholas Webster, 1964)
Completely self-explanatory, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians does at least live up to its title, which is something. Beyond that, it exists as a cult curio that also made history as the first appearance of Mrs. Claus in a feature film.
Regularly decried as not just one of the worst Christmas movies ever made but one of the worst in any genre, that’s precisely why Santa Claus Conquers the Martian has proven to be such an endless source of fascination. A Martian ruler becomes infuriated by his planet’s children becoming too obsessed with Earth’s pop culture, which he naturally seeks to remedy by kidnapping Santa and repeatedly trying to kill him to no avail.
Santa’s Slay (David Steiman, 2005)
Based entirely on Santa’s Slay, professional wrestler Bill Goldberg didn’t stand a chance of accomplishing the feature film career of Hulk Hogan, never mind Dwayne Johnson or Dave Bautista. The pun-tastic title is the cleverest thing about it by far, with its one-note gimmick quickly running out of steam as the leading man’s supremely jacked Santa embraces his origins.
In this instance, those origins are the product of a virgin birth that positions Satan as his father, with December 25th known as the ‘Day of Slaying’ until the year 1005, when Santa lost a game of curling to an angel and was forced to spend a thousand years delivering presents on his hulking ‘hell-deer’, as one does.
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (Jalmari Helander, 2007)
The difference between Rare Exports and the rest of the titles on this list is that it was the recipient of widespread critical acclaim and exists as a genuinely well-made, exciting, and unexpected deadpan delight. However, that doesn’t make it any less weird, considering the premise.
The excavation of a tomb buried deep underground in Lapland uncovers the origins of Santa Claus, a monstrous creature who would punish the wicked. The discovery of slaughtered reindeer and a feral old man caught roaming the woods lead to a cavalcade of gore-soaked insanity that incorporates murderous elves, distraction by gingerbread, and a hulking horned beast encased in ice into its wondrously deranged spin on Yuletide lore
Elves (Jeffrey Mandel, 1989)
Questions should have been asked of writer and director Jeffrey Mandel when he submitted the screenplay for Elves, harbouring the intention of turning it into a feature film, with the plot so outlandish and borderline offensive that it remains a mystery how it actually ended up being made, and not just because the end product was irredeemably awful.
During a pagan ritual known as ‘Anti-Christmas’, the spilt blood of Julie Austin’s Kirsten resurrects a demonic elf, who naturally turns out to be the central figure in a Nazi plot seeking to achieve Adolf Hitler’s goal of a master race. It’s not quite what’s in the history books, though, with the Nazis really plotting to selectively create a bloodline of half-human and half-elf hybrids.
