A curious and quaint staple of 60s and 70s small town rural/rust belt life was the “roadshow” matinee of themed film packages that would come through town, usually around a holiday. I grew up in Wheeling, WV and there were some pretty well freaked out roadshows that I can recall seeing as a kid.
The most “normal” ones were probably an annual five hour Beatles marathon that I sat through several times and double bills of Charleton Heston biblical epics The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur. Then there were the cinematic endurance tests that featured In Search of Dracula, Bigfoot, UFO “ancient astronauts” docs and lots of things narrated by Orson Welles. Being in the heart of the Bible belt—surprise, surprise—I was also subjected to a lot of Christian “End of the World” fare like The Late Great Planet Earth (narrated and starring Orson Welles, who must’ve really hurting for money when he made that turkey) and similar things, like The Man Who Saw Tomorrow about Nostradamus and starring—wait for it—Orson Welles. Hammer horror film bills that would start at 11am and finish at 6pm were a perennial favorite and so were Steve Reeves’ Hercules movies marathons and over-the-top gore shit like Night of the Bloody Apes and Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs.
These packages were put together and would travel with one person who probably owned the prints themselves and would rent out a local movie theater, church or school auditorium, screen them and then move on to the next town. The yearly Christmas package was ultra demented, consisting of the by now familiar Santa Claus Conquers the Martians made famous by Mystery Science Theater 3000 and a kooky Mexican curiosity from 1959 simply titled Santa Claus.
Here’s the IMDB synopsis for Santa Claus. To attempt my own would be… utterly pointless:
Santa Claus, high above the North Pole in his cloud-borne castle equipped with more surveillance devices than the Impossible Mission Force, prepares to deliver presents on Christmas night. Santa is especially interested in helping Lupita, the daughter of a poor family who wants nothing more than a doll; and a young boy whose parents are so wealthy they never spend any time with him (Santa fixes this by feeding them Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters). However, the Devil will have none of this and sends his minion, Pitch, to foil Santa’s plans. Pitch in turn recruits three Naughty Boys to help him set traps for Santa.
They left out any mention of the Merlin character (yes, Santa Claus, Satan, Merlin the Magician and Vulcan (who makes a special key for Santa) are all in the same hallucinogenic Mexican children’s film) but otherwise that manages to wrangle more sense out of the plot than is merited, trust me.
What a thing of wonder Santa Claus truly is, but it’s also pretty fucking bad and I’m not about to suggest that you watch the entire thing for some sort of ironic “enjoyment” because I doubt much of it will be found here, EXCEPT for the astonishingly insane dancing demons scene that happens at about ten minutes into the film. It’s like Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages meets this Marc Almond video, not exactly the sort of thing you expect to see at the beginning of a film aimed at little kids!
That Santa Claus was directed by the same guy who was behind the camera for Night of the Bloody Apes, René Cardona, well… makes sense! The film was bought for American distribution by K. Gordon Murray, the “King of the Kiddie Matinee” known for his redubbing and re-releasing of foreign fairy tale movies and Mexploitation luchador films.
Go straight to the ten-minute mark to see the demons dance and imagine yourself as a wide-eyed child being exposed to this Sid and Marty Krofft meets Ken Russell vision of the bowels of Hell…