Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

MOVIE #1,218 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 11.01.23 50 MOVIES IN 32 DAYS! This movie is so bizarre. American, umm, businessmen (??) unearth the body of "real Santa" from the snowy Russian mountains right on the border of Finland. This Santa is actually a massive horned beast and unlocking his body (which is still trapped in a giant block of ice) awakens a horde of elves (which look like skinny Santas who are also butt naked lollll). These "little helpers" kill a bunch of the Americans and also the reindeer that the Finnish people hunt and rely on for their survival (??). They also sneak around on Christmas Eve and kidnap all the children in sacks and steal a bunch of heaters and furnaces in order to melt the ice encapsulating their master.

Are you still with me? So the Finnish folk, led by a small boy (the classic character trope of child who knows more than the adults because he has been studying books on the real Santa) tie up all of the kidnapped kids still in their sacks to a helicopter and lead the naked dudes into a reindeer pen enclosed by a four-foot high fence and these dudes, who just pulled off a massive heist and kidnap scheme, are seemingly dumbfounded and unable to fight back (maybe because they killed the real Santa and this deactivated them or something, but it’s hurting my brain to give it any more thought).

Meanwhile, the kid's dad chainsaws off Santa's huge horns FOR SOME REASON and then blows up the warehouse that his body was in. They calculate that the captured naked Santa men are worth around 85K each or over 16 Millie total (WHAT? WHO IS BUYING THESE… PEOPLE?!). Cut to early the next year and we see the men hosing them down in a gym shower and then, after another time jump, training these guys to be mall Santas. And on December 1st, they start putting all these guys into wooden crates (marked "rare exports") and the film ends as they prepare to load them onto a plane, ostensibly to be delivered all around the world to, you know, all the establishments who “bought them.” This is a slavery movie???

After watching the Iron Sky films and then this, one can only come to the conclusion that everyone involved in Finland's film industry in the 21st century is certifiably insane. But while those wacky movies are clearly comedic, this one is played 100% straight. I cannot even begin to unpack the cognitive dissonance this creates. Watching the final act unfold was like staring at a series of random, bizarre AI-generated art prompts. This is happening. Now that is happening. There is no motivation other than someone (writer-director Jalmari Helander, in this case) thought these things could and should happen. In a movie. That was actually made. And I watched it. I don't even have the slightest idea as to what genre this belongs to (Wikipedia lists it as a “fantasy action horror comedy film”). It is wholly and honestly unclassifiable.

I’m not sure if I’m even capable of stating whether it’s worth watching or not, either. It’s fairly cinematic looking for its more than modest budget (around a million dollars), and despite its insane plot, it feels and flows like more or less like a real movie before the final twenty minutes or so. It is certainly an artifact that exists! I have no idea where or how or why I stumbled on this but it feels like a fitting WTF conclusion to these 50 movies in 32 days. And I’d like to end on this, presented without further comment…

Roger Ebert awarded the film three and a half out of four stars and called it "a rather brilliant lump of coal for your stocking" and considered it "an R-rated Santa Claus origin story crossed with The Thing." He continued, "Apart from the inescapable [fact] that the movie has Santa and reindeer in it, this is a superior horror film, a spot-on parody of movies about dead beings brought back to life. Oh, and all the reindeer are dead." Ebert concluded that "this is a fine film. An original, daring, carefully crafted film, that never for one instant winks at us that it's a parody. In its tone, acting, location work, music and inexorably mounting suspense, this is an exemplary horror film, apart from the detail that they're not usually subtitled A Christmas Tale and tell about terrifying wild Santas."

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Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is a 2010 Finnish fantasy action horror comedy film written and directed by Jalmari Helander about people living near Korvatunturi who discover the secret behind Santa Claus. The film is based on the 2003 short film Rare Exports Inc. and its 2005 sequel Rare Exports: The Official Safety Instructions by Jalmari Helander and Juuso Helander, both of which involve a company that traps wild Santa Clauses and trains and exports them to locations around the world. It was released on September 24, 2010.