‘Santa With Muscles’: Hulk Hogan’s god-awful Christmas movie
Fictional professional wrestler Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson from Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler once said, “The ’90s sucked”. Real-life grappler Hulk Hogan probably agreed.
Part of what made that decade suck so terribly for his ilk was the parade of musclebound berks from the world of muscles-panto who felt that their particular brand of Dianabol-and-cocaine-enfused charisma could translate onto the big screen.
The 1980s had shown that it could work, with Rowdy Roddy Piper and Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura appearing in a few absolute classics. Hell, Andre the Giant could barely speak English, and he was in The Princess Bride.
Like cancerous clockwork, though, whenever something good happened to a professional wrestler in the 1980s, Hulk Hogan had to stick his skullet-clad head in and act like he could do it better. Now, I won’t lie and say that everything the Hulkster did in his prime was a waste of time. The man did very much earn the nickname Cunt Hogan with aplomb for his behaviour backstage, but in the world of pro-wrestling, there was something pretty compelling about him.
Any fan of the grapplers that says they can watch him build up a head of steam in one of his classic promos and not at least see why he was the biggest name going in the 1980s is made of sterner stuff than me. Then he decided that if Piper could be a movie star, so could he. Reader, he couldn’t. When your best effort is one of the worst Rocky movies, you know you’re in trouble. A Hulkster movie marathon doesn’t even have the decency to be the fun kind of bad, and it got so much worse when the pasta-hawking racist decided that he’d had so much experience with snow that there was only one thing for it.
He was going to make a Christmas movie.
What was the Hulk Hogan Christmas movie?
God bless the humble film critic. So many of them had to sit through Santa With Muscles, and I can only hope the venom they got to spit in their reviews of it was worth it because God only knows that they weren’t paid enough to suffer like that.
At the very least, the Hulkster is playing a character a little more true to his real-life personality. Hogan plays Blake Thorn, a conceited, image-obsessed bodybuilding mogul who will happily sell any tat with his gormless face printed on it.
Due to events too stupid to even bother going into here (it involves paintball, a police chase and an elf named Lenny), Thorn loses his memory while wearing a purloined Santa suit. This gives him a crash course on the true meaning of Christmas, which helps him defeat the evil scientist Ebner Thorn and save the orphanage he grew up in. Both of which now matter, for reasons the film didn’t bother to detail until about half an hour in.
If this were released in the mid-1980s, at the height of Hulkamania, that would at least be understandable. Instead, this cinematic ingrown toenail was released in the winter of 1996, when Hogan had just shocked the world by turning heel in WCW and forming the New World Order. The butter wouldn’t melt, kid-friendly aesthetic shown in Santa With Muscles was a relic of a bygone age. One that WCW crowds had spent two years booing him to shit for before his heel turn. Thus, the film cratered at the box office. Which means that Santa With Muscles did do one good thing for humanity.
It ended Hulk Hogan’s film career. Joy to the world.