Ahoy, squirts! Quint here from the hallowed grounds of Fantastic Fest once again.
Rare Exports is one of my favorite movies I’ve seen so far at the fest. It’s a dark Finnish fairy tale about the Holiday season… specifically the legend of an evil, child-killing feral Santa Claus.
Imagine if Joe Dante, Dr. Suess, the Brothers Grimm and Guillermo del Toro had sex under the mistletoe one romantic Christmas Eve in Finland and birthed this film and you start to understand the tone of this flick.
Essentially, before Coca Cola got their hands on the Santa legend he was a scary, satanic figure that would reward good children, but punish the bad. Not with a wussy-ass lump of coal, but with spanking so harsh nothing but strips of flesh and a bloody puddle would be left.
Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on how sick you like your movies to get) we never fully get to see that side of Evil Claus, only hear the folklore about it, which is pretty damn great in terms of setting up the freaky shit that happens with the creepy naked man with the big, white beard shows up.
Now, the reason I mentioned Joe Dante and Guillermo del Toro is because the majority of this movie is told from the point of view of a Santa-fearing child who figures things out before the dumb-ass bullies and slow parents can. Both filmmakers have used children as the window into these supernatural universes before in grand ways and this film is a worthy successor of that type of storytelling.
And I just love when a movie like this isn’t afraid to go into some goofy territory in a serious way. The film opens with an eccentric rich dude excavating something found in the ice, that something being the long trapped Santa Claus. The actor is dead serious in his speech to his crew, but the lines he’s delivering are crazy, which combines to an odd, but hugely entertaining set-up to an even odder and even more entertaining movie.
Oscilloscope has picked up the distribution rights to this movie and I have no idea how the hell they’re going to put it out to the masses. If I were King of the Movie Gods I’d give it a 2000 screen Holiday release, but then I’d probably lose a lot of people a lot of money because a subtitled hard-edged dark fairy tale about an evil Santa Claus might be a hard sell. I also wouldn’t want to be the one to read all the angry parent letters demanding to know why there’s so much old dick in this family film.
I’m shocked someone’s not just remaking it, but I give Oscilloscope credit if they really do pursue a genuine US release.
Not only is it a ridiculously fun story, but Jalmari Helander’s direction is assured and done with a great flare for visual storytelling and Mika Orasmaa’s photography is just plain beautiful. You’d expect a movie with this premise to be Troma-level schlock, but the movie looks like a million bucks and forces you to take it seriously… or at least seriously enough to be creeped the fuck out whenever they capture the crazy old bastard they think is Santa Claus.
This flick fits the fest like a glove. It’s absolutely fantastic. You get heroic kids, old man dick, mutilated reindeer, crazed old men that just won’t die and a sweet-ass old book filled with Evil Santa stories. In short, everything a growing movie geek would want in his nightly entertainment!
Seek it out if you’re a festival goer and keep an eye on Oscilloscope’s release plans if you’re not. It’s a really fun flick that could very well start to enter in the yearly rotation of Holiday films for movie geeks.
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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