Santa Claus: The Movie (1985)

Santa Claus: The Movie (PG)

"Ho Ho, Oh?"

After the megahit Superman: The Movie and subsequent sequels, the Produvers, the Salkinds, who were instrumental to that franchise getting off the ground turned towards another world wide figure and poured millions of dollars into special effects, grand sets and marketing into their new film target: Santa Claus.  A resounding box office failure, SC:TM is razzed for its dark take on Claus' origin story, cynical product placement in a film about the spirit of Christmas and over the top goofiness of both actors Dudley Moore and John Lithgow hamming it to the max.  The starving hobo kids drooling over McDonalds through the windows at the super satisfied fastfood patrons could have been sarcastically painted by Norman Rockwell as a portrait of 80s corporate greed and is completely deaf to the reason of the season.  This much money spent, this much whizbang technology utilized leads to a nice looking movie with entertainment (a million monkeys at a million typewriters...), but kind of misses the whole point of a Christmas movie.  Santa mixed with a kind of strange biblical spirituality, an anti-corporate message (brought to you by a huge Hollywood juggernaut),  and overthought/overspent script and set design really skew a simple story of a fat man who crawls down chimneys in the middle of winter.

5 Seriously, Just use the Xmas story we already know out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)