Santa’s Slay (2005) Review

It’s that time of year again, Christmas and what’s traditional at this time of year? That’s right watching crappy horror movies based around Christmas. Sure there’s a few good ones but it seems a really missed opportunity that there’s not more. Evil Santa’s killing people, demon elves, Rudolf on a rampage there’s loads of options. I decided to start the festive horror season with Bill Goldberg as a murderous Santa because why the hell not?

I’ll be hopefully watching and reviewing plenty of Christmas based horrors over the coming weeks no matter how terrible they are!

Director: David Steiman

Writer: David Steiman

Stars: Bill Goldberg, Douglas Smith, Emilie de Ravin

Run Time: 78 minutes

The story to this one is simple and it starts of in spectacular fashion, a group of instantly unlikable people are having their Christmas meal. There’s the cheating wife, the annoying sort of teenage maybe kids and a boring angry old man, it’s worth noting there’s some recognisable faces in there as well.

Their Christmas is interrupted when Santa comes down the chimney and bursts out of the bricks into the front room, punt kicks the dog then kills everyone in the room, welcome to Christmas.

Turns out Santa is a demon that was tricked by an Angel 1000 years ago, he lost a bet and had to become the giver of joy and presents on Christmas day for 1000 years. that was in 1005 and now he’s returned to his murderous ways. He works his way through the town of Hell looking for the Angel and killing all sorts of people in all sorts of ways.

There’s a visit to a Deli, a strip club, a hunting party, he also rams people off the road and is a general menace played by the menacing looking Bill Goldberg of WCW fame. The film focuses on Santa but also on a young lad and his unrealistically good looking (for him) girlfriend. They find out the truth about Christmas and what Santa really is from the lad’s grandpa who has raised him.

All this leads to a confrontation between the two youngsters, Santa and the Angel who originally tricked him inside a school. However Santa manages to escape and we get another chase and battle before the end of the film.

The Good

• Goldberg won’t win any acting awards but he’s got a good look for this part.
• Quite creative deaths.
• The explanation of the bet from one thousand years ago is well done in a kind of animation form.
• Rudolf is cool.
• The opening scene is fantastic it’s a pity the rest of the film didn’t follow on from that.

The Bad

• Although the deaths were creative they should have been more gory, it’s described as a black comedy but I’d have gone for over the top gore as the comedy elements weren’t great.
• Needed a couple more interesting characters, that the character development outside of the main lad was pretty poor even for an 80 minute horror film.
• Some dodgy actors.
• Tommy “Tiny” Lister was stupidly underused, if he’s in a film like this make him an elf or something crazy!

Overall this isn’t a bad watch, it’s far from being a great film and certainly borders on the so bad it’s good category. However I think it’s well worth a watch as a Christmas horror, it’s only 78 minutes long so is quite fast paced it’s funny in places although not gory enough and if you’re a wrestling fan like me you’ll get a kick out of Goldberg as Santa.

Overall Rating – 6/10