This lovely little mess of holiday cheer was pointed out to me on the forum over at badmovies.org. Currently being shopped around in the hopes that St. Nicholas will bring its creators a Christmas contract to turn the short into a feature, I figured that buying a copy of the DVD will only help get Ken Foree that much closer to his next starring role. Was it money well spent? Well, that depends on two things: (1) If the crew gets the fundage to make their feature and (2) if Black Santa's Revenge is even worth expanding beyond its 20 minutes running time.

Ken Foree (star of the original Dawn of the Dead and one of Rob Zombie's cinematic entourage since The Devil's Rejects) plays Black Santa; a dude who decks himself out in the red & white and sits his ass on a big leopard print throne each year so he can listen to poor kids ask him for commercially packaged happiness. Not your average mall Santa like the ass grabber in Elves, BS actually does the job as part of a charity group who passes donated toys on to the tots to bring them a little holiday cheer and hopefully keep them from becoming street statistics a little longer. It's not going to be a very silent night this year though, as 2007's big haul is hijacked by a quartet of lumpy thugs wielding shotguns, who lay out BS and Grinch the kids' Christmas cheer! And what are the 5-0 gonna do about recovering the community center's stolen merch? Jack and shit, and Jack's off pinchin' Yule Logs into Grandma's Figgie Pudding. And so begins, that's right, Black Santa's Revenge! In celebration, allow me to try and be a little creative with the next paragraph:

Laying out the look out and busting the thug's nose, Black Santa cocked his 12 gauge and into the air the honky blood rose! He spoke a few one-liners and went straight to work, exploding fools' heads and ventilating each jerk! The ruckus he caused resulted in such a clatter, that anybody left alive was severely assaulted and battered! Through gritted teeth his vengeance gave a whistle, as every motherfucker in the room was whipped with a pistol! Black Santa takes a few shots but he's not down for the count, cuz that mofo keeps firing till his ammo's run out! Even with two slugs in his arms and losing blood fast, Black Santa refuses to stop kickin' that punk ass! And from the streets of the ghetto to the columns of Stonehenge, now all you kids know the story of Black Santa's Revenge!

Yeah, I'm no Clement Clarke Moore (or even an Andrew Dice Clay), but I thought that was pretty good. As for the short itself, I really enjoyed it! There's plenty of bloodshed, foul language and even a few tits here and there, plus it still carries this whole ho-ho-ho holiday happiness and "good guys beat the bad guys and Christmas is saved" stuff to keep it light-hearted and jolly. Could it be extended into a feature? I don't know. Compressing it into 20 minutes works because there's really no time for the audience to get bored with it and chances are it will leave the majority of viewers either content with it or wanting more. On the plus side though, as I said before, 90 minutes of Ken Foree is usually better than 20 minutes of Ken Foree, so if there's ever a Black Santa feature and the man's in the lead, I'm there. Furthermore, despite a few budget restricted special effects moments where I had unpleasant flashbacks of Night Crawlers, I was really happy with writer-director David Walker's work! The whole short is based on an original comic book of Walker's and even without the obvious hint ("You look like you just came out of a comic book!"), the man's use of black & white shots and scene transitions give BSR a very well done four color feel. I'm still not 100% on whether it could be turned into a full-on movie, but if it'll help Walker get noticed and give bad movie lovers a Ken Foree Christmas classic to break out every December, then by all means, it should be turned into a feature!