My 100 Worst Movies of the 90's - 18 - Santa With Muscles (1996)

Santa With Muscles (1996; Cabin Fever Entertainment)

This is a truly strange movie.  In fact, I don’t even know what went through the minds of anyone who worked on it.  The film is about a psychopathic fitness mogul who gets his jollies out of violent acts against his staff and others who suffers a blow to the head and wakes up convinced he’s Santa Claus.  Hulk Hogan is the brain dead St. Nick in this sad, sad flick.  

After Blake wakes up from a knock on the noggin wearing a Santa costume, he becomes convinced he is Santa Claus.  He then resigns from his vitamin-selling mega-millions position to aid a local orphanage that an evil scientist wants to take over.  Dr. Ebner Frost controls a team of evil doctors who constantly terrorize the orphanage and Blake/Santa works overtime to try to thwart their efforts.  It turns out that under the orphanage there is a secret series of tunnels which house crystals that store tremendous amounts of energy.  These crystals are potentially worth millions of dollars and that is what the evil doctors are after.  So, by the end of the film, the orphanage is destroyed, Blake is knocked back to his senses and he learns the err of his ways so he opens up his massive mansion for the kids and the orphanage staff (I always wonder how he filled out his 501 c 3 for his super mansion that doubles as an orphanage..?)

This is an incredibly stupid movie (that sentence is becoming redundant).  Santa With Muscles does not really have anything to do with Christmas outside of the fact that Hulk Hogan is wearing a freaking Santa costume through most of the movie (there are a few throw away scenes passingly mentioning Christmas, but that’s about it).  He could be wearing a freaking Easter Bunny suit and it wouldn’t have affected the plot at all.  The whole plot with the evil doctors is so terrible, so unfunny and so poorly written that it would go right along with the worst stuff Seltzerberg could conceive.

The performances are all around awful.  Hulk Hogan is wasted here.  He has a few moments of toughness but he is mostly used as a joke, so we can laugh at him looking silly.  This was a trend (I’ve mentioned this before too) in the 90’s:  take a tough guy and emasculate them.  I actually like the Hulkster and am more than a little angry when I see any star that I like reduced to lame comic relief at their expense.  It works with some actors; not with others.  The only saving grace of this film is a very young Mila Kunis years before That 70’s Show.  Other than that, this flick is a waste of celluloid.