Peek beneath the cap of every well-scrubbed fairy tale and you will find primal blood. Though audiences enjoy Universal's profitable "Violent Night" mostly for the novelty -- Santa smashes multiple baddies with a sledgehammer -- the cathartic mythic content is hard at work.
In the movie's best scene, the semi-immortal Claus (David Harbour) confesses his distant past as a ruthless Viking raider, which was followed by his magical rehabilitation and transformation through many names and images. Now Santa has become, much like our current Spirit of Christmas, a debauched irrelevancy, divorced from primary purposes, including his relationships with his wife and even his reindeer. All that's left is his love for children.
That's the core; the rest is gore, with splatter masterfully staged for connoisseurs of acrobatics. And as an upper-crust bitch, a head thug, a moral flipflopper and a dewy innocent, one could hardly ask for better players than Beverly D'Angelo, John Leguizamo, Alex Hassell and Leah Brady, all just a warm shade truer than cartoons.
"Violent Night" also claims major points for having cake, eating, eliminating and reconsuming same. No genre risks exclusion: grinder, actioner, weeper, melodrama, comedy, satire, seasonal feelgooder -- you half expect director Tommy Wirkola to resurrect Jimmy Stewart as a kung-fu vampire. Though Wirkola (age 43) was born Norwegian, one can see he'll make an excellent American.
Some people won't like "Violent Night." They probably didn't like "Bad Santa," either. They definitely wouldn't like "Hellbent," an '80s Richard Casey cheapo for which this writer made some music -- instead of having Santa kill a gang, it had a gang kill Santa. But for plenty of other people, the abstract sanctioning of bad holiday behavior represents a welcome release from stress.
Stressed people and shopping malls, one hears, are a poor combination.
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Listen to Dio (with Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi on guitar) performing "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" here.
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PHOTO BY ALLEN FRASER COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL PICTURES.