445) Santa with Muscles (1996)

445) Santa with Muscles (1996) Dir: John Murlowski Date Released: November 1996 Date Seen: December 12, 2009 Rating: 0.5/5

There's nothing so hateful nor so unintentionally funny as a children's film that hates children so much that it doesn't even try to come up with a convincing or even vaguely funny conceit to justify its existence. Enter: Santa with Muscles, a film starring Hulk Hogan as a Paul Newman-type millionaire (he sells salad dressing and other products with his face prominently displayed on them) that gets amnesia while wearing a Santa suit and winds up saving the orphanage he was raised in as a child. The orphanage is under attack by his childhood bff, now an evil scientist (Ed Begley Jr., the only actor other than Hogan that's playing his part with verve and gusto) with a cadre of lesser evil scientists (The evil physician that attacks with his stethoscope and T-square--no, we don't know why a doctor has a tool used by architects either! The archeologist with funny glasses and a funnier hat! The chemist with a thing for methane gas! The girl with the electroshock gloves--yes, she too is a scientist somehow!) who all want to demolish the orphanage to get at the priceless mineral deposits underneath the church, locked away from prying eyes by an enormous vault that only Hogan can open. Yes, this movie exists. No, there was no greater thought put into it than the above, scanty summary. Yes, I think it's ridiculously stupid but in a very funny way (What other movie have you seen lately where the villains drive around in an ice cream truck that plays the theme song to Alfred Hitchcock Presents?).

Note: the child actors in the film are especially pathetic. It's as if they're hand-picked to look as manipulatively churwish, I mean churlish as possible (here's wishing I wasn't looking at you, tiny Mila Kunis).