‘Santa with Muscles’: The Christmas movie starring Hulk Hogan
“Sometimes,” advised the trailer of Santa with Muscles, “the only way you can feel the spirit of Christmas is to be hit over the head with it”. It’s a fitting message, given it starred WWE wrestler Hulk Hogan, who traded his infamous tache for a Santa beard in the 1996 box office flop. To this day, Hogan’s festive film graces lists of the worst Christmas films of all time.
While wrestlers like Bautista and John Cena have seamlessly crossed over to lucrative Hollywood careers, Hogan’s effort is best summed up by a critic at the time, who declared his onscreen work made Arnold Schwarzenegger “seem like Laurence Olivier”.
Unperturbed, Hogan continued accepting film roles, and in all fairness, his most recent was a box office smash in 2011 when he voiced Terrafirminator in Gnomeo and Juliet. But Santa with Muscles was a real blight on his filmography, which included gems such as Gremlins 2: The New Batch and Mr. Nanny that even the most dedicated Hulkamaniac couldn’t defend.
The film’s chief issue was its total lack of understanding of the memory loss trope, which it employs with all the elegance of a back suplex. Hogan plays Blake Thorn, an idiotic millionaire who sells bodybuilding supplements with his face on them. During an inexplicable police chase after a paintball game, he’s concerned in a shopping mall. After concealing himself in a bright red Santa suit, he slides down the garbage disposal chute like Santa in reverse and promptly gets whacked on the head.
As the amnesia kicks in, an errant elf mistakes Thorn for the mall Santa, who then mistakes himself for the actual Santa Claus. As all the confusion is setting in, an evil scientist is trying to take over an orphanage to gain access to the magic crystals that are hidden underneath it. However, Thorn learns of Ebner Frost’s evil plan and sets out to rescue the children, having taken on some newfound festive morality.
Inevitably, he beats up all the bad guys and gets thrown onto the orphanage roof by Christmas decorations. As he plummets from the roof, his memory returns – but the goodwill of Santa remains. Thorn, who we learn grew up in that very orphanage (and had forgotten about it), protects it from Frost and his henchmen.
After Frost’s arrest, he takes over his old compound, where he and the orphans enjoy watching him do hard labour in prison through a telescope.
Hogan’s character suffers multiple brain injuries, delights in beating up bad guys and introduces orphans to the joys of watching their enemy rot away in prison. It remains an outrageously bad attempt at stirring festive cheer, but it had a sort of campy charm that most ’90s action films do. Sometimes, the only way to enjoy such a bad plot is to let yourself get hit over the head with it.
