In his tomb in upthrust Lapland
Dead Kris Kringle lies dreaming
If you’re looking for a weird Christmas horror movie, you could do a lot worse than the Finnish movie Rare Exports. The son of a reindeer herder/butcher finds out that a team just over the border in Russia are drilling into a mountain they believe to be a tomb.
It quickly becomes apparent that the tomb is that of Santa Claus. And the real Santa Claus is not the jolly fellow of Coke commercials, but a fearsome punisher of the wicked that looks a lot more like Krampus:
What makes the film work is its cold, gritty, unsentimental realism. It really does look like it was filmed in a tiny village in Ass End of Nowhere, Finland. Save an unconvincing CGI helicopter at the end, and the strange coda that gives the film its name, I thought everything about the movie worked pretty well. Of recent Scandinavian horror films, I thought this worked better than Dead Snow, but not as good as Let the Right One In.
Worth viewing, and available on Netflix.
I was going to do a longer review, but I’m running out of Christmas.