Ho ho ho! Merry December! That’s right, the guy who hisses like a frightened possum when he hears Christmas music before Thanksgiving is setting up another month dedicated to winter-themed holiday movies. But I’m not dedicating the entire month to it, as The Cabinet of Caligari and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari remake indicate. Anyway, remember that poorly planned Shark Week I did back in August? It was an excuse to cover most of the films on the “Shark Bait: 6 Killer Shark Films” DVD pack I picked up during quarantine. I had previously covered Ghost Shark, but that week checked off Mississippi River Sharks, Ozark Sharks, Swamp Shark, Shark Island, and also Alligator Alley because this is a weird collection. All that was left was Santa Jaws, which I was saving for December. Well, the time is now. Let’s finish this!

Santa Jaws stars a kid named Cody, played by Mr. Reid Miller–the dead gay kid from Joe Bell–as a nerd who is desperately trying to convince us that he’s straight, possibly because he doesn’t yet realize he’s super gay. Oh god, is this what I was like in early high school…? Horrific flashbacks aside, he’s an artist on a little comic called Santa Jaws, about a shark infused with evil Christmas magic who kills people. Like you do. After getting a magic pen that brings to life anything you draw–no, the movie doesn’t explain it any better–Santa Jaws is brought to life and starts eating Cody’s family. It’s up to him and his best frie–oops, no, the best friend died. It’s up to Cody, his brother, and the girl that Cody lik–wait, shit, now the brother’s dead. It’s a fucking massacre and Cody’s entire family dies. To add insult to injury, getting the pen back and trying to kill Santa Jaws with it backfires beautifully, leading to the shark having razor sharp ornament fragments for teeth and a candy cane horn like a Christmas narwhal of doom. But it’s okay, because it was all a dream. But he still learned things in the dream about his crush that turned out to be true in real life? I liked this ending better the first time I saw it, when it was in a movie called Krampus and had more of an ominous feel.

Just like every other movie on this DVD multipack, there are a number of actors that have been in other made for TV shark movies. A dude who gets his legs chopped off and then eaten while dressed as an elf was also in Mississippi River Sharks, Ozark Sharks, and Alligator Alley. The grandpa here was the dad in Alligator Alley–who, again, got turned into a mutant alligator, because that movie was insane. And I already talked about director Misty Talley’s prolific work in Shark Island.

Was this good? No. No! Absolutely fucking not. It’s a SyFy original shark movie that got crammed into a 7 movie DVD multipack and sold for less than $10 at my local Fred Meyer. These are movies that give actors a small paycheck, and then they can either go on to make more made-for-TV movies that suck, or go on to be in a big budget film that sucks in the case of Joe Bell. The shark being Christmas-themed was amusing, but you start to get sick of seeing the incredibly fake looking shark fin after a while, Santa hat or not. But was it the best movie in the pack? No, because Alligator Alley had mutant alligators who spread their mutant alligatorness via bite (or improperly cooked meat). But was it the best shark movie in the pack? I’ll answer that question with another question: Does this movie have a chubby kid being eaten by a spectral shark while he’s sliding down a Slip ‘N Slide? So no again. But at least it’s not Mississippi River Sharks, so that’s at least some faint praise.

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