Santa Claus (1960)

Very Cool!!!

Excellent but underrated film

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I want to say, right from the start, that this film is boring, the pacing is unbelievably slow, every single scene takes a really long time. The film is also pretty poorly made, with bad set design, and poor acting but those are minor details compared to the all pervading slow pacing. You cannot fathom how boring a film could be until you have seen this, trust me, watching paint dry is more exciting.The lack of action aside, I consider it a pretty good film, not as the children's movie it is supposed to be, because this is not for children. What I like about it is how messed up this stuff is; let me give you a few examples.The film starts with an introduction of Santa's workshop which is not run by elves, but by children, Santa seems to think child labor is a good thing. To make it even more offensive, the children are all a bunch of racial stereotypes. Further more, Santa spies on all the children of the world with his high tech surveillance equipment built by the clearly deranged wizard Merlin. After watching a few of the children's rather creepy dreams, Santa goes down to earth to deliver presents but ends up fighting Satan instead. I tell you, this stuff is bizarre, I just wonder how they were able to make it so boring.

I got this movie imported from somewhere as a gift. So I sat down and watched it. As soon as it was over, I just sat there with my mouth open, thinking "this is the worst movie ever made." Here's why: The film opens with something like 20+ minutes of Santa playing an organ and making weird facial expressions as the narrator shows all the stereotyped children working in Santa's workshop. I guess the elves wanted to stay in The Lord of the Rings series. Then we see Santa's magical spying machine to watch the children on Earth. By the way, did I mention that Santa's castle is sitting on a cloud? Anyways, Santa's magic machine consists of a giant set of swollen-looking lips, a radio antennae with a large ear on it, and a large telescope with a tiny plastic eye on a stick attached to it.Then we meet Pitch. Pitch is a pathetic demon sent by Satan himself to stop Santa from coming to town. With the sound of an annoying piano key, Pitch literally pops up here and there, trying to convince children to be naughty.Then we meet Lupita, the girl who wants a doll more than anything, and she's determined to be good. But when she finally does get a doll, which is about as big as she is, she appears to care very little! Then there's Merlin. Merlin lives in Santa's castle and spends his time making odd things for Santa, such as a "flower to disappear". Merlin is also just filler to lengthen the movie. In one scene, he needs to brew something for Santa in an urn. Now, Merlin walks in a very slow, limping gallop-ish walk. Every time he walks across the room to get an ingredient, guess what? He forgets the urn! Then he has to walk all the way across the room in his weak, Merlin-walk.As the film progresses, we meet three little boys who Pitch has under his spell, and a boy who is neglected by his parents and wants "their love" for Christmas. Boo-hoo for little boy. Then it just gets weirder as Santa begins flying around in his sleigh (flown by plastic reindeer!) and also, as we soon find out, Santa brews magic cocktails! This is the weirdest and worst movie I have seen (so far), but I recommend that every person see this at least once in their lives.

When people talk about the truly bad films. You know the worst ones that were ever made - this movie needs a place in the discussion. I am not saying it is the worst - just saying it should be in contention as it is truly bad and truly boring. Santa Claus - Mexican style - is getting ready for the big evening when the devil's minion, a devil named Pitch that looks like a small guy in a suit, tends to spend the evening disrupting Santa's goodness. How does he do this you might ask. Well, he whispers in the ears of "bad" boys. He tries to convince a small girl into stealing a doll. He moves a chimney from its place so that Santa will try and go down into a concrete dead-end. He heats a door knob so Santa will burn his hand and not gain entry into a small residence. There may have been more but I was bleary-eyed and doing everything in my bag of tricks to stay awake just so I could say I saw this whole piece of rubbish. Of course we do not get all this until AFTER we see almost 20 minutes of Santa at an organ looking into a screen where we see children from all over the world sing songs supposedly symbolic for their nations. Ridiculous. The children sing in such a bland and repetitive manner while Santa moves - sometimes undulating - at his organ chair in the most pronounced and absurdist way. When the American kids came on and were supposedly typical American kids, I about lost a breath or two from laughing at just how bad this film was - and that was early on. Don't get me wrong. This would be a great film to watch drunk. The first 30 minutes or so are the ones most likely to have unintentional humour: from the kids singing, to Santa wildly(almost inappropriately) gyrating as he watched kids sing, to the bizarre ways Santa has to check on children like a machine with a eye on it to one with huge lips(I will say no more about this other than it is extremely creepy in not the best creepy ways). Santa goes to get a master key from a guy with no shirt on. Merlin is there to help as well. The reindeer are mechanical. Santa moves through space with the speed of a geriatric race with motorized scooters. K. Gordon Murray, the American distributor of this film, does the narration and it is sublimely bad. The actor playing Santa - one Jose Elias Moreno - is so over-the-top that he is indeed fun to watch prancing and gesticulating, but that show gets boring quickly and I found the second half of this film to plod like nothing had ever plodded before. Make no mistake that this really is a #1 out of ten for what it is, but I gave it a #3 just for its eccentricities which should be seen rather than read about. I do recommend viewing it for that but not for absolutely any other reason. It is BAD!

This film is a Mexican Christmas classic, each December 24th it is aired on television in my country for the joy of small children, and many Mexicans like me watched it and have fond memories of it. When I looked for it at IMDb I got an enormous surprise finding out it was listed as one of the worst 100 movies in history, but my surprise turned to disappointment when I saw the reasons for its bad reputation. It turns out the rights for this movie were bought by an American producer to exhibit it on his country, for what I read this man, K. Gordon Murray, was not particularly good with the way he treated those films, he created badly done dubbed versions, edited them as he pleased without respect for the original film and took no notice about the quality of the process. This U.S. version has been seen by many persons in that country and it has a big responsibility in the bad reputation of the film, which is unfairly judged based on a different version of the original. Also and worst of all is that for everything that I've read It seems this movie has been judged based on the United States Folklore, and not on the Mexican culture in which it was born. Many reviews criticize this based on the fact that it is a version that does not conform to the U.S. version of the character, like if that version was unique and inalterable, well here is a surprise for You, it's not, and if you are watching this film first you have to understand that, the traditions it shows are from another culture and therefore, while they have similarities they also have differences. The creators of the movie made it only for Mexican children and they never thought it could be distributed to another place. Please consider this before making harsh judgments of the film. With this points clarified here's a quick summary of the film, the original Mexican film which is the one that should be reviewed as it is not fair that this is trashed on the grounds of a crappy edition made by an irresponsible distributor. The plot is rather simple, it is Christmas Eve and Santa Claus is getting ready to fulfill his yearly mission of delivering presents to the good kids in the world. But at the same time in Hell, Satan himself sends a devil called "Precio" to stop him. Once in earth the story focuses on five Mexican children: a poor girl that wishes to have a rag doll, a rich boy that wishes to have his parents alongside him because he is lonely and a group of three spoiled boys that think they can get away with having presents despite being bad all year; while the stories of these children develop we see Santa struggling to overcome the attempts of Precio to stop him and, while for a moment it seems that the envoy of hell will beat Santa, like in every Christmas film we have a happy ending. Now allow me to explain a few important things that have been said about this film based on the misguided ideas I mentioned above. The Devil against Santa Claus? Yes, this comes from a Mexican tradition called Pastorela which has its origins on the colonial epoch and it still exists today; pastorelas are simple plays whose ultimate end is evangelization, they show Satan trying to stop small groups of shepherds that are on their way to worship the newborn Jesus at Betlehem. In modern times different cultural elements like Santa himself have been added to the original tradition, but the root of the pastorela is religious and hence the important part of the devil. Christmas is a religious celebration and that is still very important in catholic latinoamerican countries. Santa is a friend of Jesus? Why,of course. I thought this to be common knowledge but apparently it isn't so You just have to watch a documentary, read a book Or simply visit Wikipedia and you'll learn that the origin of Santa Claus is in Christianity and in the figure of Saint Nicholas. It wasn't útil the XIX century when the world famous version of the character started to take form and it didn't do it in a massive way until Coca-Cola used the character as part of an advertising campaign when it became the marketing figure it is today. In the United States you may have a very defined idea of how this character must be, but can't you accept that in other places it evolved in a different way closer to it's religious roots? Well that's what happened in Mexico and the film itself says in the introduction that Santa is no other than Saint Nicholas, that means a Christian saint. Now in catholic countries saints are very important figures, they serve as intermediaries between God and men, in this case rewarding kids that are good and punishing those that aren't. So as a Christian saint it makes perfect sense that Santa prays to Jesus and it makes much more sense that the devil is trying to stop him; he does this not just because he can, but because making Santa fail will prevent that he spreads his Christian message. Anyway these are the most important points I wanted to write about, because it is completely unfair that you trash this film because you don't understand its context or its message: judge it in base of its cinematographic merits and considering the audience it is aimed for, those are small children.Considering this I can say Santa Claus is not a specially good film, it has bad acting, bad costumes, bad scenarios and it is very naive. But it achieves its goal to entertain kids and give them a nice moral message. Is it a bad film? Yes. Does it deserve to be at the bottom 100? Absolutely no.