Our Holiday Favorites: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Through time immortal we have viewed Santa Claus as a sweet, portly, cookie- and milk-addicted grandpa, who brings us happiness and joy. This joy is delivered in bundles of presents delivered with FedEx-like efficiency down a fireplace. It is well known that that Santa has a list of who's been naughty and who's been nice. He brings the joy to the nice kids and coal to the naughty ones. I don’t know about you, but I cannot recall ever receiving that bag of coal in years where my naughty points exceeded my nice points. So what if Santa decided to actually punish the kids who were naughty? This is the concept Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale explores.

The first act of this movie from Finland deals with a mining company that unearths something buried under a small mountain on the Finnish/Russian border. That something is Santa Claus and he's not that jovial bowl of jelly we've grown to love. He's a vengeful grandfather with a bone to pick. He's ready and willing to punish the naughty kids and adults. It's this juxtaposition that makes Rare Exports so enjoyable. I appreciated being exposed to a new, fresh and somewhat twisted view of the Santa Claus mythology. It's a real treat to have a character such as Santa Claus juxtaposed the way it was in Rare Exports, which originally premiered in Austin at Fantastic Fest 2010.

Want to watch? Rare Exports is available at I Luv Video and Vulcan Video, and will also be showing at Alamo Drafthouse Ritz this weekend. There is one item you need to know: The DVD/Blu-ray and the website include two short films that formed the inspiration for this movie. I highly recommend watching these AFTER you see Rare Exports. I would consider them spoilers for what happens in the third act of the film. After watching the film, I found them to be whipped cream on a serving of pumpkin pie.

A subtitled trailer for Rare Exports is embedded below.