SANTA JAWS (2018)

 

(TV/Syfy Channel Original film; director: Misty Talley. Screenwriter: Jake Kiernan.)

Review

SANTA, a Syfy Channel Original film, is fun in parts, with serious lag time in others (even for viewers like me, who don’t take films too seriously). For the most part, I don’t blame screenwriter Jake Kiernan for SANTA’s boring parts─after all, the film has a microbudget, limiting its story and FX, and required padding for it to be a feature. SANTA, with its limited budget and natural-length storyline, is a forty-five-minute short at best. It doesn’t help that the acting is less than convincing, even for an on-the-cheap self-aware horror comedy.

What follows could save you from possible time-wastage (if you must see SANTA, for whatever reason).

After energetic Cody (Reid Miller) gets his supernatural pen as a gift and draws Santa Jaws (also the name of Cody’s comic book) and someone gets killed, you can fast-forward to the next kill scene. There’s a lot of characters-running-around footage, so you probably won’t miss important talking points. SANTA becomes focused in the last quarter, highlighted by Cody’s priceless “It’s not a shark─it’s Santa Jaws!” as well as memorable, schlocky-humorous kill scenes that are sprinkled throughout the movie. While SANTA is a bad-in-a-bad-way flick, fast-forwarding (which I wish I could have done as a non-review writing viewer) might make it (more) fun, with only a half-hour to forty-five minutes of your time spent on it. SANTA is worth checking out if you’re quick on the fast-forward draw or turn some of its elements into the basis for a drinking game.