Santa on the lam in RARE EXPORTS: A CHRISTMAS TALE (Photo: Oscilloscope Laboratories)

Written & Directed by Jalmari Helander, based on an idea by the Helander Brothers
Produced by Petri Jokiranta
Released by Oscilloscope Laboratories
Finnish with English subtitles
Finland. 80 min. Not Rated
With Onni Tommila, Jorma Tommila, Per Christian Ellefsen, Tommi Korpela, Rauno Juvonen, Ilmari Jarvenpaa & Peeter Jakobi

There’s no easy way to prepare you for this year’s most unique holiday offering. Santa Claus returns to his homeland of Finland via a major polar excavation by a British corporation. The catch: this is the Finnish Santa of lore, an aggressive kidnapping psychopathic monster out to nab all the naughty children in town with the aid of his vicious elf army. It’s up to a young boy, Pietari (Onni Tommila), to uncover the truth and save Christmas.

With just the right amount of viscera and dread, most of Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is by-the-book horror, despite its wacky premise. When Pietari’s father and his hunting buddies discover their payload herd of reindeer has been slaughtered and left to rot in a nearby meadow, they assume the mega-corporation is responsible. The men set out toward the dig site for some old-fashioned Nordic reconciliation but are sidetracked by the discovery of an evil elf, a decrepit bearded man who will stop at nothing in his hunt for misbehaving children. As the town’s children slowly disappear, Pietari puts the pieces together and leads the makeshift hometown militia to Santa in a final showdown.

An allegory develops when the actions of the faceless corporation seemingly wreak havoc, causing private strife in a community that relies solely on its yearly reindeer crop. It’s impossible not to be reminded of the diminished salmon populations in the Yukon or the shrimp populations in Southeast Asia, for instance. Pietari and his father share a tender moment over the few scraps of gingerbread that will have to serve as Christmas dinner after the loss of the valuable herd.

Despite the macabre imagery, this B-style film doesn’t take itself too seriously, often finding humor in the scenario—“They only took the sacks,” says an astonished potato farmer after the kid-nabbing elves rob his barn. Whenever the script starts feeling clunky, a well-timed joke lands, reminding the audience of just how self-aware these filmmakers are.

Sadly, the setup eventually falters, and the final showdown falls flat on its face. Rare Exports could have earned cult respect, a la Leprechaun 2, but instead finds itself split into too many genres—a horror satire, an action film, and a social statement. The computer graphics in the final scene are atrocious, resembling a ’90’s-era video game, and there’s no bloody, head-bashing payoff even. The film spends an hour-and-a-half building up the mystery of what exactly came out of that mountain but leaves too little time for action. An alternative to midnight mass perhaps, but as a yearly tradition, I sure hope not.