Black XXX-Mas

Feeling more like a cynical Scrooge this year than ever before, I decided to forgo my annual viewing of A Christmas Story (1983) and instead hunted for the most callously cynical and just plain fucked up Christmas film that I could find sans Santa slasher flicks, which ultimately led me to a Belgian short of all things with the blatantly intentionally trashy title Black XXX-Mas (1999) directed by Flemish auteur Pieter Van Hees (Dirty Mind, Waste Land). Judging by the title, one might assume Van Hees’ film is an interracial porn parody of Bob Clark’s classic Canadian proto-slasher flick Black Christmas (1974) and even though it does feature some revolting jungle fever scenarios, it is actually an absurdly grotesque and sadistically sardonic anti-avant-garde molestation of the classic European fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood featuring a nasty and rather nihilistic Nordic take on blaxploitation cinema and set in a decidedly dystopian Belgium of the near future where whites have become a sheltered and soulless minority and Santa Claus is a drunken negro robber who, instead of leaving presents, takes more than just milk and cookies on Xmas eve, especially while lurking around the nice and cozy homes of rich crackers with fireplaces. A film that was made as part of the relatively unknown Belgian film movement ‘Trauma 99’ that was started as a reaction against the patently pretentious Danish ‘meta-realist’ film movement Dogme 95 started by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg that went completely against the grain of the European arthouse world by advocating the use of gratuitous special effects whenever possible, Black XXX-Mas is pure and unadulterated celluloid trash with an aesthetically and thematically iconoclastic punch that features an intentionally artificial and plastically flashy aesthetic that makes the $100 million explosions of Michael Bay seem quite ‘avant-garde.’ Although I did not realize it until after watching it, I was shocked to learn that the short was directed by the same Flemish filmmaker who directed the arthouse ‘folk horror’ flick Linkeroever (2008) aka Left Bank, which is a fairly serious and elegantly paced work with ancient European pagan themes that hardly seems like it was assembled by the same kind of guy that would make culturally pessimistic Xmas-themed black comedies featuring kraut cannibal cops, teenage mulatto cokeheads, and a colored crook Kris Kringles. Opening with the words “Warning: An Exploitation Tale,” Black XXX-Mas is the way exploitation films should be as a short and sweet assault of audacious aesthetic aberrance, unwavering moral bankruptcy, and keenly kitschy carnage in a work that exploits every unsettling social plague and rubs it in the viewer’s face with the utmost malevolence, thus forcing the viewer to confront an unfortunate reality that they would never be exposed to in any Hollywood hack piece. 

 Opening with the Dogme-95-mocking inter-title, “This certificate proves that BLACK XXX-MAS was made according to the rules of TRAUMA 99,” Black XXX-Mas then introduces ‘God’ (Manou Kersting)—an obscenely goofy-looking dude with a white leather-fag mustache that almost resembles a negro sporting ‘whiteface’ due to his somewhat primitive facial features—sitting on a fancy souped-up hammock in an all-white ethereal pleasure-dome playing a fairly cheap looking portable video game system (aka ‘God’s Gameboy’), which contains planet earth and ultimately reveals the setting of the film on its screen, the ‘Urban Jungle,’ where the discernibly sadistic master of the universe manipulates humans into doing mostly bad and degenerate things.  From there, the viewer is introduced to ‘Little Red’ (Rochelle Gadd)—the mulatto progeny of a beer-chugging black career criminal and a haggard-looking old white slut that seems to suffer from estrogen deprivation—and as she narrates to the viewer with a trashy lower-class British accent in a fairy tale sort of way, “Once upon a time, there was a thing called reality. Now, in reality, there are no good guys or bad guys; there are just bad guys and guys that are worse. Well…that’s what my dad says.” Little Red’s daddy is ‘Black Santa’ (Trinidadian actor Don Warrington, who appeared in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996)) and he might be a ruthless robber, but he knows that the multicultural ghetto is no place for anyone, least of all little girls, and as he tells his daughter after seeing her reflection in his beer can as she attempts to sneak out at night in a red mini-skirt, “IT’S A FUCKING JUNGLE OUT THERE!!!!” After watching some trashy TV and drinking some cheap canned beer, Black Santa heads out to rob some rich white folks on Christmas eve, which gives Little Red the opportunity to escape out of her apartment window and enter ‘The Forest’ (as advertised on a beat-up car) where she is sexually harassed by seriously scuzzy black and Arab gangsters while going to buy some cocaine from a slimy Chinaman. When Little Red gives the oriental dope dealer the cash, he picks it up with his teeth and then proceeds to grab the miscegenated teen’s derriere as she goes to grab her bag of coke from a clothesline (!), so she gives the sneaky slant-eyed chink a nice big karate kick to the gut, aggressively declares to the yellow man, “don’t fuck with me” and “the customer is always right,” and goes on her merry way. 

 Everything seems great after Little Red gets her dope and she celebrates by lighting a big fat joint, but the one-lady party soon ends when a fascistic cop with a phony German accent named Wolfgang Schutzwald (also played by Manou Kersting)—a fiendish fellow whose surname ironically translates as ‘protector of the woods’—pulls up in a typically ridiculous-looking smart car and begins feeling up the poor little half-black girl after she fails to show ID. When someone takes photos of Wolfgang (or as he tells Little Red, ‘Wolfy’ for short) while he is grabbing Little Red’s milk chocolate ass and tits, he decides to unload his service gun on them and soon discovers he killed about half a dozen female teenage tourists. After destroying the film in the dead tourists’ cameras, Wolfy states to Little Red, “If you haven’t seen anything tonight, I promise to stop bonking you in the ass,” but she reacts rather melodramatically like blacks tend to do in such precarious situations by threatening to send him to jail and hitting him, so he rationally responds by knocking her out and eating her, stating as he begins gorging on her fingers, “Well, I’m afraid I have to remove the last body of evidence.” Indeed, Wolfy is a sort of postmodern lycanthrope and he seems to have a special taste for dark meat, but unbeknownst to him, so does his wifey. Indeed, while Wolfy was eating Little Red Riding Hood in the hood, Black Santa was robbing his apartment in the white bourgeois side of town and in the middle of gathering up expensive stuff to steal, Mrs. Wolfy came out, saw the giant negro in the red suit, and got so hopelessly aroused that she decided to take off her robe and let the spade stranger do whatever he wanted to with her.  Naturally, as a proud black man, Black Santa isn't about to turn down a fully willing white woman, especially when she makes it so easy for him.  Unbeknownst to Mrs. Wolfy, Black Santa knocked out here prepubescent son when he had the gall to come out and ask Choco-Claus if he was Santa while the thieving soul brother was just getting started loading his sack with stolen merchandise.

 When Wolfy gets home, he happily shouts “honey, I’m home,” but when he notices his wife giving the big black buck in a Santa outfit a blowjob, he yells “oh my gut,” pulls out his service pistol, and begins unloading bullets everywhere, symbolically shooting his wedding portrait in the process. While attempting to run away from the flying bullets, unclad Mrs. Wolfy turns around and reveals ‘she’ is actually a he, a s/he curiously has a cock between her legs, though Wolfgang and Black Santa don't seem to mind. In an attempt to stop her homicidal hubby from killing her new black beau, Mrs. Wolfy jumps in front of Black Santa and is ultimately sprayed with a fatal storm of bullets. While Wolfy stares with a shocked look on his face at his beloved's bloody bare-skinned corpse, Black Santa decides to take decisive action, grabs an assault rifle that is conveniently hanging over the fireplace, and literally blows the cannibalistic cop’s head off after firing a single shot. Meanwhile, Black Santa’s wanton old wench wife calls a male whore service and ‘orders’ a swarthy fellow named ‘The Italian Stallion’, who soon rolls to her door on roller-skates sporting assless leather-chaps and proceeds to show her some Mediterranean carnal magic. After killing Wolfy, Black Santa hears the voice of his daughter coming from inside the corpse of the dead cop, so he rips open the fallen policeman’s mangled corpse and discovers his little girl Little Red inside. After telling Little Red, “I love you, darling” and groping her bloody breasts, the two head home and sing Christmas songs with Mrs. Black Santa under their Christmas tree where they have placed Wolfy’s star-shaped police badge at the top in a pseudo-sentimental scene mocking the idea of a traditional ‘white’ Christmas. In the end, God, who has two bitches by his side, gets tired of playing his Gameboy and declares, “you know there are still people that say I don’t do shit for poor people. Life is a bitch.” 

Personally, I have more sympathy for cannibalistic kraut cops than naughty negro robbers in ghettoized Santa Claus outfits, but I enjoyed Black XXX-Mas all the same, as it dares to depict the truly dystopian Europe of the near future and laugh about it in an ultra-cynical and culturally pessimistic fashion that lets the viewer know that auteur Pieter Van Hees has no doubt in his mind that technocracy, miscegenation, multiculturalism, and black ‘culture’ will not only lead to the death of the timeless European holiday of Christmas and fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood, but his nation in general. Of course, ‘death’ might be too extreme a word, as it seems more like a defilement and bastardization of Xmas and European culture, just as Black Santa’s daughter Little Red is the product of a mongrelization of Europid genetics and just as Black XXX-Mas is an ugly celluloid bastard that borrows cinematic ingredients from everything from old school blaxploitation flicks to the most superlatively soulless and artificial-looking action-packed CGI-ridden Hollywood blockbusters. Naturally, the difference between Van Hees’ film and the mostly worthless works that it pays (anti)homage to is that the auteur intentionally utilized (or ‘exploited,’ hence why it is truly “an exploitation tale” as advertised at the beginning) these conspicuously crappy conventions and clichés to such an excessive and exaggerated degree that there is no doubt that the director created the film as a sort of radical and even nihilistic reaction to what he sees as the degradation of the art of cinema and culture in general as a result of a largely American/globalist influence. Indeed, with his later feature film Left Bank, Van Hees proved that he not only had the capacity to create something serious and even beautiful, but that he has a true deep sense of Flemish identity as reflected in the film’s traditional European pagan themes that ultimately establish a link between the ancient past and the present in its depiction of rebirth and reincarnation, among other things. Of course, in its devilishly humorous depiction of a ruthless god who literally plays with human lives for entertainment and who less than sentimentally declares “life is a bitch,” Black XXX-Mas could also be described as a piece of atheistic pomo paganism of the post-Odinist sort that reminds the viewer that traditional Christian beliefs and merry Christmases have become obsolete in an increasingly globalized multicultural world.  Of course, whatever way you look at it, Van Hees' short is a fiercely funny antidote to that soulless consumerist joke that Christmas and the so-called ‘holiday season’ has become.

-Ty E