The opening scene was wonderfully gory and camp, and it was the best scene in the movie. The Goldberg Santa, after cooling his heels for 1,000 years, was ready to rock, roll, and kill. He went down the chimney of a random rich folks’ house and proceeded for no apparent reason, to toss the little…

While the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol (1951) is still the B&W standard bearer for the genre, this lesser known version again brings us back to the dark, creepy and scary aspect of this timeless story. Sir Seymour Hicks was a consummate Scrooge, so bent over, joyless, disagreeable and Ruthless, that we can…

  At Ruthless, we have our heroes, the Arnolds, the Kinskis and Herzogs, but one of our favorite unspoiled characters is that of one Ebeneezer Scrooge. We love him for what he was, not what he was to become; another casualty of religious guilt and coercion. This 1938 version originally cast Lionel Barrymore, but health…

Anyone who has been reading Ruthless Reviews faithfully knows that I have already reviewed a half-dozen versions of this Christmas classic. The Muppets animation hybrid is the most underwhelming of the lot of remakes of the Dickens novel that I have reviewed. The Muppets Christmas Carol (1992) takes a slightly different approach to the Carol,…

  To wind up the Christmas reviews of 2014, I have Santa Claus (1959) as I must review something that is truly horrible, even more horrible than the Christmas season itself, which is well upon us. I probably don’t even have to watch this horror show to review it, in fact, I don’t even have…