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Bonus Entry: Santa With Muscles

This stinking turd of a movie makes it onto the ass end of the list because it is truly disturbing that anybody ever scripted, paid for, directed or acted in it. When you consider the synopsis on its own – Hulk Hogan gets amnesia and becomes Santa, utilizing his body builder guns to physically assault a horde of bad guys in order to save an orphanage – it sounds as if at the very least it might be a nice slice of ironically bad cinematography to enjoy while smoking the last of your stash under the fairy lights on Christmas Eve. It isn’t. It is a pile of steamy, mushy, fly-covered proverbial. You would have to be under 6, or sufficiently lobotomized so as to induce the day-to-day characteristics of an under 6-year-old, to enjoy this movie. Actually, if you look at it like that, maybe stoners will like it after all…

The Muppet Christmas Carol

Okay, it may seem strange that we’re including this particular movie on a list of fucked up Christmas films. It is after all a classic. Who could resist the genuine comedy of the lovable Muppets juxtaposed with a genuinely excellent performance from screen legend Michael Caine? Add to this the thousands of little jokes (Fozziwig’s rubber chicken factory gets us every time) and the irritatingly catchy menagerie of songs. After Home Alone it could well be the best Christmas movie of all time. But if there were ever a better reason to dub a film ‘disturbing’ it’s the genuine terror that struck our little hearts when Scrooge meets the ghost of Christmas yet-to-come. Surely this bastard shouldn’t have been allowed in a film which was clearly labeled as suitable – nay, aimed at – children? It definitely wins the award for most terrifying Muppet ever, and still sends a chill down our spines when we recall his horrifying, shadowy hooded ass.

Silent Night, Deadly Night

Despite being yet another slightly generic ruin-Christmas-by-killing-stuff-a-thon, this movie isn’t too bad. For a start it features one of the most awesome and genuinely unsettling scenes in bad movie history, when little Billy gets told the truth about a deranged Santa by his mentally deteriorating grandfather (seemingly portrayed by a kind of post-stroke Ernest Hemingway figure). YouTube it. The soundtrack has that retro horror vibe which makes it perfect ironic viewing when cuddled up around the Christmas tree. Just don’t let your little cousin watch with you or you might end up inadvertently being the newspaper headline as the inspiration for a budget Christmas horror movie yourself in a few years time.

Black Christmas

Unlike Jack Frost, Black Christmas is not ‘so bad it’s good’ but so very, very bad it isn’t even campy and entertaining. But it certainly is gory. Incredibly gory. In fact, so gory it received complaints upon its release, which we didn’t even think happened any more in this age of YouTube bullying and visual desensitization. When re-watching this, we made a little collective gasping noise during one particularly grizzly scene where a young girl’s eye is popped out of its socket. Ask yourself honestly – when did you last have that reaction to cinema violence? The premise is actually quite cool, so it’s a shame it was so badly portrayed: a young boy kills his rapist mother and impotent stepfather at Christmas after pulling his sister’s eye out. Scroll forward ten years and he escapes dressed as Santa Claus to a sorority house with the eyeless sister and together they inflict increasingly brutal levels of violence upon the occupants. Merry fucking Christmas.

10 Most Disturbing Christmas Movies Ever

Christmas is great, and anyone who says it isn’t is trying to be cool, has a heart of inadequate charcoal or has probably been involved in a Christmas story akin to some of the ludicrously mood-killing movies mentioned below. Yes, that’s right, it’s that time of year and we’ve decided to go ahead and list for you our very own top ten list of the most messed up Christmas movies. (And before you go and giddily open our little present, try and imagine for a second how different our list might have looked if the Joe Pesci character in Home Alone could be swapped with the Joe Pesci character in Goodfellas.)

Lab scans bones that may belong to Amelia Earhart

NORMAN, Okla. (AP) — Three bone fragments found on a
deserted South Pacific island are being analyzed to determine if they belong to
Amelia
Earhart— tests that could finally prove she died as a castaway after failing
in her 1937 questto to become the first woman to fly around the world.

Scientists at the University
of Oklahoma hope to extract DNA from the bones, which were found earlier
this year by a Delaware group dedicated to the recovery of historic
aircraft.

"There's no guarantee," said Ric Gillespie, director of the
International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery in Delaware. "You only have
to say you have a bone that may be human and may be linked to Earhart and people
get excited. But it is true that, if they can get DNA, and if they can match it
to Amelia Earhart's DNA, that's pretty good."

Lab officials said results of the tests could take week or
months.

The remains turned up in May and June at what seemed to be
an abandoned campsite near where native work crews found skeletal remains in
1940. The pieces appear to be from a cervical bone, a neck bone and a
finger.

But Gillespie offered a word of caution: The fragments
could be from a turtle. They were found near a hollowed-out turtle shell that
might have been used to collect rain water, but there were no other turtle parts
nearby.

"This site tells the story of how someone or some people
attempted to live as castaways," Gillespie said Friday in an interview with The
Associated Press. Bird and fish carcasses nearby suggested they were prepared
and eaten by Westerners.

"These fish weren't eaten like Pacific Islanders" eat
fish.

Gillespie, author of "Finding Amelia: The True Story of the
Earhart Disappearance," has been traveling to the site since 1989. But he
acknowledges there's been little progress toward solving the Earhart
mystery.

"It's like science. You take the information you have and
formulate a hypothesis, but 9 times out of 10 you turn out wrong, then you go
through the whole thing again — but you're closer," Gillespie said.

Millions have been spent to figure out what happened to
Earhart, who was legally declared dead by a California court in early 1939.
Theories have ranged from the official version — that her twin-engine Electra
ran out of gas and crashed at sea — to the absurd, including abduction by
aliens, or Earhart living in New Jersey under an alias.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Reporter's
diary adds new clue in Earhart mystery

PHOTOS: Mystery of
Amelia Earhart

Gillespie's book, along with "Amelia Earhart's Shoes," a
2001 book written by four other volunteers from the aircraft group, offers a
reasoned thesis that Earhart and Noonan crash-landed on a flat reef near
Nikumaroro Island, 1,800 miles south of Hawaii, and survived, perhaps for
months, on scant food and rainwater.

The island is on the course Earhart planned to follow from
Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, which had a landing strip and fuel. Over the
last seven decades, searches of the remote atoll have produced tantalizing, if
inconclusive, clues, including human bones and a sextant found just three years
after Earhart vanished. The remains themselves later were lost.

Gillespie, a pilot, said she would have needed only about
700 feet of unobstructed space to land because her Lockheed Electra would have
been traveling only about 55 mph at touchdown.

"It looks like she could have landed successfully on the
reef surrounding the island. It's very flat and smooth," Gillespie said. "At low
tide, it looks like this place is surrounded by a parking lot."

However, Gillespie said, the plane, even if it landed
safely, would have been slowly dragged into the sea by the tides. Water is 1,000
to 2,000 feet deep off the reef. His group needs $3 million to $5 million for a
deep-sea dive.

After the latest find, anthropologists who had previously
worked with Gillespie's group suggested that he ask the University of Oklahoma's
Molecular Anthropology Laboratory to try to extract DNA from the fragments for
comparison to genetic material donated by an Earhart family member.

Cecil Lewis, an assistant professor of anthropology at the
lab, said the university received a little more than a gram of bone fragments
about two weeks ago. He preferred not to speculate about the pieces until more
tests were done.

"Think how disheartened people will be if it's just a
turtle bone," Lewis said.

Under the best circumstances, the analysis would take two
weeks. If scientists have trouble with the sample, that time frame could stretch
into months, Lewis said.

"Ancient DNA is incredibly unpredictable," he said.

Gillespie said the group had tried to test possible genetic
material recovered during a 2007 expedition, but a Canadian lab was unable to
extract DNA from dried excrement.

Other material recovered this year also suggested the
presence of Westerners at the remote island site:

— Someone carried shells ashore before cutting them open
and slicing out the meat. Islanders cut the meat out at sea.

— Bottoms of bottles found nearby were melted on the
bottom, suggesting they had been put into a fire, possibly to boil water. (A
Coast Guard unit on the island during World War II would have had no need to
boil water.)

— Bits of makeup were found at the scene. The group is
checking to see which products Earhart endorsed and whether an inventory lists
specific types of makeup carried on her final trip.

— A glass bottle with remnants of lanolin and oil, possibly
hand lotion.

In 1940, a British overseer on the island recovered a
partial human skeleton, a woman's shoe and an empty sextant box at what appeared
to be a former campsite, littered with turtle, clamshell and bird remains.

Thinking of Earhart, the overseer sent the items to Fiji,
where a British doctor decided they belonged to a stocky European or mixed-blood
male, ruling out any Earhart connection.

The bones later vanished, but in 1998, Gillespie's group
located the doctor's notes in London. Two other forensic specialists reviewed
the doctor's bone measurements and agreed they were more "consistent with" a
female of northern European descent, about Earhart's age and height.

On their own visits to the island, volunteers recovered an
aluminum panel that could be from an Electra, another piece of a woman's shoe
and a "Cat's Paw" heel dating from the 1930s; another shoe heel, possibly a
man's, and an oddly cut piece of clear Plexiglas.

The sextant box might have been Noonan's. The woman's shoe
and heel resemble a blucher-style oxford seen in a pre-takeoff photo of Earhart.
The plastic shard is the exact thickness and curvature of an Electra's side
window.

The body of evidence is intriguing, but Gillespie insists
the team is "constantly agonizing over whether we are being dragged down a path
that isn't right."

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