Santa Claws

Despite my life-long romance with the horror genre, then I had never seen this movie before, nor actually ever heard about it. But as I stumbled upon it here in 2024, by random luck, I opted to sneak it into my Christmas movie marathon, yes of sappy romantic Christmas movies, just to break the string of endless sap.

However, I have to say that the movie's cover didn't exactly paint writer and director John A. Russo's 1996 movie as a particularly great movie. And in all honesty, I harbored zero expectations to the movie. But then again, maybe writer and director John A. Russo had something grand up his sleeve.

The storyline in the movie was nearly non-existing. So it wasn't as if I had been missing out on a particularly grand horror movie experience here. Writer John A. Russo failed to deliver anything impressive with the script and storyline.

Essentially, the movie felt like little more than a sad excuse for John A. Russo to show off naked ladies.

The only performer on the cast list that I was familiar with was Debbie Rochon, and it is only because I've seen sufficiently many low budget movies. The acting performances in the movie were fair, despite the fact of the actors and actresses having a simplistic script to work with.

The special effects in the movie were exactly that, special. The gunshot wounds were laughably bad, as were the rake puncture wounds. It was essentially nothing but fake blood placed in circles at where the wounds were supposed to be. For a movie made it 1996, it was incredibly amateurish and ridiculous to look at.

"Santa Claws" was a movie that snuck in under the radar unnoticed, and it will just as quietly fade into oblivion and never be seen again.

My rating of writer and director John A. Russo's 1996 movie lands on a two out of ten stars.

I watched this film and found it to be somewhat ok, and even better than some big budget multimillion dollar films.

YES, it does have problems, many...infact.

The modelling scenes were just boring annd bland, even for T&A gratuity shots and served no purpose.

Wayne's character was poorly created and developed, but somewhat funny.

Love Rayven...maybe it's the name...but over all, for a movie that was filmed with less than the cost of a new minivan, this is an ok film, *considering it was free to watch...I certainly wouldn't have paid for this.

During the Christmas holidays, a B-movie scream queen/pinup model is stalked by an obsessed, murderously psychotic fan...

Blah blah blah. You know the score, sight unseen: women get naked, people die. Apparently the raison d'être for SANTA CLAWS was to plug the fan magazine writer/director John Russo was publishing at the time, "Scream Queen" — it gets a very prominent mention. In the film, the magazine staff is producing a low budget horror video called "Scream Queen Christmas" — try saying that three times fast! — starring B-movie celebrity Raven Quinn (Debbie Rochon). Her most ardent admirer, the disturbed young man (Grant Cramer) who lives next door, spraypaints a cheap Santa costume black and goes on a killing spree with a garden weasel. (Really. A frickin' garden weasel.) SANTA CLAWS touts its lineage to the original 1968 NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD as a selling point but you wouldn't know it from watching this cheap-looking, amateurish piece of crap. (Russo co-wrote NOTLD with George Romero and directed the minor cult fave MIDNIGHT; three members of the NOTLD cast have small roles in the flick.)

Rochon, whose films have never really proved worthy of her talent, is the only real reason to endure it. Not only is she beautiful, she acts circles around everyone else in the cast, who are just plain terrible. (Cramer's over-the-top rantings are good for a laugh or two, though.) Gore is practically nonexistent; only the frequent nudity, served up as Christmas-themed striptease acts for the video shoot, will appeal to exploitation junkies. Rochon doesn't whip out her love muffins until the final twenty minutes but she's almost worth the wait. For best effect, I recommend turning off the cheesy soundtrack and playing the naughty Yule classic "Santa Baby" while Debbie's doing her thing.

I had pretty low expectations for this. On paper this seems like a typical cheap B-grade slasher-horror film. In reality it's even worse.

It is cheap and a slasher-horror but calling it B-grade would be flattery. The plot is very basic and what there is doesn't make much sense. Production values are incredibly poor. Direction is woeful: some of the scenes seem more like a slapstick comedy than a drama.

Dialogue is laughable and, allied with this, performances are poor. Worst of all is the guy who plays the slasher-murderer. So bad you'd think it is a comedy.

Nothing positive at all about this movie except than it is quite short (83 minutes) so at least the pain of watching this is over quickly.

I have to admit that this flick is pretty terrible and the only reason to watch it would be if you are a fan of Debbie Rochon. The reasons that this movie is so terrible is you have a very unintimidating and laughable killer. Here's a line from him. "I'm not Wayne, I'm Santa Claus!", then you have very unattractive women save Debbie Rochon dancing horribly to bland stripper music, very little gore, and bad sound dubbing. But there are a few good sides to this flick. It's cheesy, Debbie Rochon, more Debbie Rochon, more, and more Debbie Rochon, and John Russo in a badly acted cameo. What more could you want. For a badly acted, cheese fest, I give it a 5. For just an all around terrible horror flick, I give it a 3! But get it anyways to see Debbie Rochon in an early role!