SANTA CLAWS: Attack of the Hooded Claw!

By Steve D. Stones

I have to admit that when I purchased this film on videotape in the late 1990s at a local Media Play store, I bought it mostly because it had a busty picture of Debbie Rochon on the video box cover. The back of the video cover also had a sexy girl in a bikini being attacked by the villain of the film, The Hooded Claw. This is obviously a clever marketing tactic to sell the video. After all, sex does indeed sell, even if the film is a total bust (no pun intended).

My other interest in purchasing this film was that I had heard that many of the actors involved in the original 1968 Night of The Living Dead were involved in this film, such as Marilyn Eastman, Karl Hardman, Bill Hinzman and John Russo. Russo played a zombie in Night of The Living Dead and was also screenwriter. Russo wrote and directed Santa Claws.

A teenage boy named Wayne witnesses his widowed mother in bed with his uncle Joe on Christmas Eve. This angers him, so he finds a gun in the bedroom dresser and kills both his mother and uncle Joe. That’s the last Christmas they’ll ever have! Wayne is rushed to a psychiatric clinic for mental evaluation. Director John Russo has a cameo in this scene as a police detective.

Fast forward 10 years later. Wayne is now a grown man living next door to Raven Quinn, a model and actress working in soft-core adult films for Scream Productions. Although Raven has a Master’s Degree in Zoology, she chooses to be in the soft-core industry for the easy money. Wayne has become a fanatical fan of Raven, and has a shrine devoted to all her movie collectibles, including a doll in her likeness that he fantasizes making out with.

Raven’s marriage to her husband Eric is on the rocks. Her husband is unfaithful by seeing one of his employees in his spare time. While picking up her children from her mother in laws home, Raven has an argument with her mother and sister in law. Both do not approve of Raven’s occupation as an adult film actress and model, even though her husband makes his living as a porn photographer. It seems it’s OK for members of their family to be involved with porn, but it’s not OK for an in law to be involved in the business too. Families sometimes have double standards.

While visiting Raven in her home, Wayne discovers that her marriage is quickly going downhill, so he volunteers to baby-sit her two children. Raven reveals to Wayne that some of the girls at Scream Productions may eclipse her popularity as the most popular “Scream Queen.”

In an attempt to maintain Raven’s popularity, Wayne then decides to murder one of the girls at Scream Productions while dressed in dark overalls and a black ski hat. He calls himself The Hooded Claw from a character in a Scream Queen film, and kills his victims with a gardening claw. He even manages to attack and kill a Scream Queen producer, played by Night of The Living Dead star Karl Hardman.

Later, Raven asks Wayne to baby-sit her two children. He puts sleeping pills in their hot chocolate so he can leave the home to go out on another murdering rampage.

Eric decides to leave his mistress and go back to Raven. When arriving home, he discovers that Wayne has doped the children to make them sleep. He leaves the home to go look for Raven at Scream Productions.

Before Eric arrives, Wayne sneaks into Scream Productions and kills several employees. Dressed in a black Santa suit, he waits for Eric to arrive and attacks both him and Raven. The two men struggle in a fight, but Raven eventually kills Wayne with his own gardening claw.

Aside from the fact that the film takes place during Christmas time, it is really not much of a Christmas film at all. Several strip tease sequences in the film show girls dancing around a Christmas tree and Christmas decorations, but the film is obviously more of a horror and soft-core sex film than a Christmas film. I'm sure the producers of this film were fully aware of this. Sometimes it makes good marketing sense to mix holidays with horror and sex.

Like so many Christmas horror films, the killer of the film really has no specific motivation for killing his victims. Even if he does, it doesn’t seem to be much of a motivation at all. In Silent Night, Deadly Night, for example, a young boy grows up to become a killer dressed in a Santa suit as a result of witnessing his parents killed by a man dressed as Santa when he was a child. In Santa Claws, Wayne the killer has even less of a motivation to kill his victims. He simply is a fan of a popular screen actress who does not want her fame to fade, so he begins to kill anyone who stands in her way of continued success. Is being a fan of anything really worth the risk of killing people?

Santa Claws is certainly not a Christmas film intended for the entire family, so I wouldn’t recommend that you watch this with the kids. Only fans of Debbie Rochon and soft-core sex and horror films need apply.