Santa's Slay - DVD Review

'a tale of a lost bet against an old guy who happens to also be an angel and a game of curling. No really. Curling.'

Santa. Jolly fat man right? Magics himself down chimneys, sings ‘ho-ho-ho’ in a non-gangster related Christmas tinkle? Reindeer too, apparently he has plenty of them.

Well… not in Santa’s Slay, a horror-comedy (a homedy?) where for no real discernible reason Santa has turned into a vicious murdering so-and-so played by WWE’s Bill Goldberg. Of course the story does attempt to lend justification to this with a tale of a lost bet against an old guy who happens to also be an angel and a game of curling. No really. Curling.

And in the above two paragraphs you kind of start to get an idea about what sort of film Santa’s Slay is. It’s big and silly with no clever ideas, a few gory deaths, some amusing one liners (Santa trying to overtake an old woman dead pans ‘move bitch, get out the way’) and a WWE wrestler having his first stab at acting. It’s a concept movie where the pitch was ‘Santa is really really bad and kills people’.

Of course as such it is absolutely rubbish. The acting is appalling, the plot is thoroughly un-engaging and at some points completely ignored so as to have Santa kill some more people. It’s not scary, gory, creepy or even jumpy in the slightest and the novelty of Goldberg in a Santa suit quickly wears off.

Having said that it does have a certain level of charm akin to the perennial underachiever in class who gets an answer right and illicits a round of applause from all those present. You can’t help but laugh at some of the jokes, the cheap, even tacky, sets and clothes and the fact that for God’s sake, the entire thing is based on a game of curling between an old man and Goldberg. What would Mrs Claus say?