The yuletide season has always been fertile ground for subversive-minded filmmakers, with results ranging from the coal-black satires of The Ref and Bad Santa to full-on grody horror movies like Silent Night, Deadly Night and Black Christmas. (Personal fave: Elves, in which a boozy department-store Santa [Dan Haggarty!] discovers bloodthirsty Nazi experiments lurking in the North Pole.) Despite the previous questionable advancements in its field, the Finnish film Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale may be the first to feature naked old men wrinkledly galumphing through the tundra while a little boy frantically begs for his dad to save his life by giving him a spanking. You can stand down, Phoebe Cates in Gremlins—a new level of ho-ho WTF? has been reached.
Writer/director Jalmari Helander’s feature-length debut cannily blends elements from classic folktales with The Thing: While working on a top-secret project in the mountains on the Finnish/Russian border, an American drilling team releases something from the ice, which begins leaving scads of partially devoured wildlife in its wake. As the reindeer carcasses pile up and December 25 draws closer, a village boy (the wonderfully deadpan Onni Tommila) begins to suspect that the original Santa Claus is on his way to spank naughty children into oblivion.
Expanding on a series of internet shorts, director Helander strikes a fine balance between creepy and darkly comic, delivering a sharply askew Home Alone riff goosed by brief bits of more traditional horror splatter (St. Nick has a thing for ears, apparently). While the pace does occasionally falter, even at 80 minutes, Rare Exports is ultimately a spooky, funny, weirdly heartwarming fable that—were it not for the aforementioned glimpses of non-CGIed geriatric bits—might actually be suitable for kids of all ages. Practice your eye-covering, parents. 
well since no one bothered to comment i will. the swedes and finns make weird films yes but this one i’ll skip, but i will reccomend one called “dead snow” i forget what exactly they called it in what ever language it was but it has been dubbed into english. the translations are a little off, i saw the sub titled version first then the dubbed and a few differences were there. anyway tag lines zombie nazis , stupid kids in woods , nazi zombie gold (lol) naked girls , (yay) , sex in an out house at -20 brrr, body parts flying every where, and a guy cuts off his own arm with a chain saw because he was bitten by a zombie ! if you cant find it on dvd at some cap hill hipster dvd rental place you can watch it on you tube in 10 to 15 minute chunks like i did ! woot !gotta love that copy right ingringment !
Saw it yesterday and was pleasantly surprised. I’m not a very festive person, so I enjoyed this fairly clever and darkly comic take on things.
Dead Snow is pretty fun too, although much stupider (not necessarily a bad thing) and not technically a zombie movie.
Dead Snow is available on Netflix streaming
My kid wouldn’t be bothered by a naked old man, but she’d have nightmares for months if she saw gore splatter. I’d expect The Stranger to have their priorities in the right place…
There’s no gore spatter in this movie. There’s threat of cutting a human body into pieces in a butcher shop, but it doesn’t happen. I think it’s fine for kids who won’t freak at a sinister Santa.
There’s also a pig being butchered, and a pig head used as bait for wolves.
@5 This line “delivering a sharply askew Home Alone riff goosed by brief bits of more traditional horror splatter (St. Nick has a thing for ears, apparently). ” had me thinking it had splatter for some reason.