For those hording toilet paper

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)

It’s Christmastime near the Korvatunturi mountains, and something deep imprisoned inside it has been excavated by a company claiming to be seismic researchers is about to be released by its “elves”. Three men and one of their sons must stop this or else “naughty children” will at the mercy of a monstrous Santa Claus…the original Santa Claus.

The film plays with us for a little bit when it appears a “reindeer wrangler” has caught “Santa” in a wolf pit (it seems the local reindeer have been slaughtered by something ferocious and unusual), believing him to be a human casualty of illegal pit-trapping. It is only a little later the wrangler and two of his local buddies (also in the wrangling business) believe this casualty (who should have died but didn’t somehow) is perhaps Santa unearthed, asking the owner of the excavation company for $85,000 (this as damages for all the slaughtered reindeer).

I think why this was such a hit, as an import, was the premise of the idea that Santa was in fact a monster that killed kids who were bad instead of the jolly St. Nick (the Coca Cola Nick, according to the child hero in the film, Pietari (Onni Tommila)) that we are accustomed to. That the elves look like filthy old men, naked and in need of a shower, also toys with conventions of the holiday season. The film is little over one hour and eighteen minutes so it can fit into the schedule of horror fans (it will be a new addition to the Silent Night, Deadly Nights & Black Christmases that make the Christmas Horror Itinerary annually), and the premise is so unique and different from the norm it is assured for a cult following for years to come. I have read plenty of comments from horror fans, though, who consider it boring, so because there isn’t a strong gore quotient (previews might have you believe it will have a high body count and lots of blood and guts) and the monster never quite gets to be unleashed to tear people to shreds, there will be disappointment.

Surprising to me, this wasn’t as gory as I was expecting, and the ending--with how the Finnish wranglers and their sons become entrepreneurs by using the elves as Santas after solving the crisis of the release of the beast from its icy cage through the use of stolen radiators and stoves as heat sources (with all the village children in the general area taken from their homes as food for this monster!)--left me rather amused. The wintry location, the snow and mountains thereabouts, the impoverished villages shown, and lack of female presences in the cast (the cast is relatively small, focusing just on the three men and two boys, basically) further gives Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale a uniqueness that might be of interest to horror fans.

I certainly think I need to watch this next year (if there is a next year for me, that is) in the early stages of the month; this feels like a good start up to my Christmas horror watching season. I would recommend it to those who are looking for something different but aren’t expecting lots of bloodshed and graphic violence. This turned out to be ingenious and rather refreshingly clever. One specific letdown, I must confess, was not allowing us to really see the encased Santa...kind of felt robbed in that regard, but I understood why the filmmakers resisted.