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.
