"Santa's Slay" - Zach's Take

The only thing worse than a truly awful film is one that that thinks it knows it's awful and tries to wink at the audience. Santa's Slay is such a film. Maria and I had pretty high expectations, I mean, casting a wrestler as Santa Claus? Awesome. But not when you have him spouting off one-liners fit for junk like Epic Movie or Meet the Spartans. Sadly, that's what this film really ends up being.

It's all over the place in terms of tone. It goes from using dumb dick and fart jokes to attempting to have actual emotional moments between the characters. Honestly, it's just a collection of cheap, easy gags with moments of bafflingly stupid drama.

If you took out the violence and gore (which isn't even well-done) this would be a TV movie for the Disney Channel. It's that level of cheese (the wrong kind to be entertaining, in fact) that permeates throughout this whole film. One of the worst aspects is the cast. At first, when I saw Chris Kattan in the opening scene, I smiled. Not because I'm a Chris Kattan fan (do those actually exist?) but because I was amused at how low his career has come. Then Fran Drescher popped up. Then Rebecca Gayheart. Then, I shit you not, James Caan. James. Caan. After that, I realized somebody had called in a few favors and the producers who thought they were making a fun, ironically bad movie had ended up making a plain old bad piece of shit.

Seriously, this should have just been called Paycheck: The Movie.

The whole cinematic calamity is underscored by the fact that it was produced by Brett Ratner. The man is like the reverse King Midas of cinema -- everything he touches turns to crap.

If there's one thing to be learned from 'Santa's Slay' it's that Brett Ratner should not be making movies. If there's two things to be learned from 'Santa's Slay' it's that it is doubly-embarrassing to make an intentionally bad movie that fails at being as good or entertaining as an unintentionally bad movie. Avoid this thing at all costs.