Rare Exports, Santa Lives But He Isn’t Jolly [Video]
By Tim Redinger
Let’s play the word association game. If you ask anyone to tell you the first thing that comes to mind when you tell them Christmas, most will respond quickly with Santa Claus. In Rare Exports, you get to meet Santa Claus, but the tale and myth around our jolly old St. Nick just isn’t going to cut it here.
This is less a tale of the glorification of the mystery that is Santa Claus, the kind-hearted soul that rewards children around the world once a year with presents. This Santa Claus doesn’t work that way. Joulupukki isn’t about rewarded good children, but punishing the bad. Rare Exports is our third in the series of the 25 Days of Christmas Halloween Style.
Rare Exports Plot
Aside from the fact that you might be thinking twice before watching a film around Christmas time that sounds like it could be an interesting porn flick, the plot of this movie goes much deeper than just taking Santa Claus and making him a killer.
A team of researchers finds a massive burial mound in the Korvatunturi mountains – and blasts there way into a sacred grave site, except, what it really is the holding spot for a supernatural and immortal being we have glossed over in history as Santa Claus. And this bad ass version doesn’t take to kindly to kids who end up on the naughty list – instead of coal this version of Santa is handing out tombstones.
Forget everything you know about Santa, its all lies….
When local kids start disappearing, they set a trap for whatever hell is torturing the local village. They figure it is an animal of some sort, what they find however, when – the “bait” is gone is something entirely different.
The locals wake up one day to find they have trapped a weak, and hungry Santa Claus. They instantly realize they are going to make a ton of money but selling the worlds largest legend, but simple taunting of Father Christmas just angers him more, and sets off a series of unfortunate events.
With children missing, they realize they don’t have the real Santa Claus, but one of his elves, whose job it is to round up the children; they come to the realization that there is only one way to stop the elves from continuing their evil work, and that is to destroy the evil in site the ancient burial ground.
Once this is done, the elves that have descended upon the area stop acting crazy, and are herded like sheep into a pen. The men finally get to recoup the losses from their lost reindeer expedition. They clean up all the elves, and teach them to act like Santa Claus himself, shipping them around the world for a fee, their very own rare exports.
If you can stomach the subtitles, then this is a must watch if you can get your hands on it. It is an interesting spin on the Santa Claus story, and bucks the trend of the normal depictions of crazed Santa Clauses and bad elves.
Rare Exports Cast
- Onni Tommila as Pietari Kontio
- Jorma Tommila as Rauno Kontio
- Tommi Korpela as Aimo
- Rauno Juvonen as Piiparinen
- Per Christian Ellefsen as Riley
- Ilmari Järvenpää as Juuso
- Peeter Jakobi as Pietari’s Elf
- Jonathan Hutchings as Brian Greene
- Risto Salmi as Sheriff
- Jens Sivertsen as Main Elf
- Sigmund Bøe as Main Elf
- Olav Pedersen as Main Elf
- Nils M. Iselvmo as Main Elf
If the movie was all in English, I probably would have given four trees, here, but given you seriously have to pay attention every step of the way to find out what is being said or happening, 1428 Elm gives this movie three out of five bloody Christmas trees.
Our march towards Christmas continues tomorrow, with another film in the 25 Days of Christmas.