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Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)

Director: Jalmari Helander

Time Out rating

Average user rating

11 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

When you think about it, the idea of an overweight, bearded Laplander sneaking into the bedrooms of sleeping kids sounds like a horror movie set-up already. But, for his debut feature, writer-director Jalmari Helander has gone back to the source of Santa Claus and the ancient Finnish folk tales which depicted him as a bony-fingered ghoul coming to punish helpless children on cold winter nights.

In a remote Nordic mountain community, the locals, including ten-year-old Pietari (Onni Tommila), are intrigued by a mysterious mining operation which has sprung up on the nearby slopes. But when kids start to go missing – and a mysterious white-bearded figure is glimpsed lurking in the trees – Pietari soon figures out who the culprit is and enlists the aid of his reindeer-hunting father (Jorma Tommila) to lay a cunning trap.

Essentially a reimagining of John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’, but with Kurt Russell replaced by a scared kid and the shape-shifting starbeast by a soul-sucking Santa, ‘Rare Exports’ is an enormously entertaining and unpredictable Yuletide romp packed with sly wit, solid scares and naked geriatrics. At only 82 minutes, it is slight, with a superb set-up that never fully pays off. But the acting is strong (pairing a real-life father and son in the lead roles is a masterstroke), the low-rent special effects are inventive and judiciously employed and the pace never flags. A true Christmas treat for naughty children of all ages.

Author: Tom Huddleston

Time Out London Issue 2102: 2 – 8 December, 2010

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User reviews of this film

Tim S said...

Posted on Jan 30 2012 12:38 This has charm, jumps and laughs and it's blessedly short - unlike Seamus's review... what more could you want?

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joe said...

Posted on Dec 19 2010 18:21 Shallow and light-hearted but entertaining. However, the second half of the film is disapointing.

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liv said...

Posted on Dec 19 2010 18:10 This movie is okay. The mythology it plays with is fascinating and potentially very interesting but they don't use it very well- opting instead for a cheap feel good vibe that leaves the audience feeling a little cheated.

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Phil Ince said...

Posted on Dec 11 2010 22:05 I'm with Seamus. What is the point of this film? There's a good idea here that nothing is done with. Rare Export isn't scary or funny or interesting or - anything much. It just is. It seems to have started as a comic short with a touch of Monty Python about it and it's mildly, momentarily funny. It feels like a very deliberate and very unsuccessful attempt to make a film like Gremlins. It doesn’t succeed because it doesn’t tell a story. I saw it in a more or less full cinema and had the impression at the end that everyone felt they'd rather wasted their time. I think that the film lacks guts; it really needed to be crueller. Python cruel and instead it’s lily-livered – presumably thinking about the certificate. Oh! and the faux Yank needed to be much less unconvincing. Rather looked and felt like an episode of some wanky pap like Torchwood.

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Seamus Goodman said...

Posted on Dec 09 2010 17:45 Sure...Whatever you say.

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E-Thug said...

Posted on Dec 08 2010 18:50 And now back to your sad and lonely life as a projectionist and failed auteur.

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Seamus Goodman said...

Posted on Dec 04 2010 02:01 Oh dear me. Another film, like Monsters that fails on almost all levels as genuine drama or quality genre cinema and gets 4 stars from the Timeout team. I used to reach for Timeout reviews as my first port of call but I'm really going to need to rethink that policy. I'm tired of reading gushing reviews for absolute mediocrity. There is a ticket price involved in responding to a good review. And how does the star system work these days? A film can not deliver on its promising premise and still get 4 stars? Surely that's a major freakin' problem with a movie?
Rare Exports, just like Monsters, is a movie where almost all of the potentially exciting scenes are left out of the script enitrely. There's an absolute lack of genuine intelligence or any kind of real point to either movie. They're both flashy and utterly vacuous, appearing somehow important on the surface but actually completely empty if you stop and really think about them properly for ten seconds.
There's a scene in Rare Exports where we discover that that our young protagonist and his father have lost the mother of the family. Cue a lot of sad glances and teary-eyed looks. But this has NOTHING to do with anything else in the film. Because Rare Exports, like Monsters, isn't really about anything at all. Writing a script and creating drama is a craft. Who is green lighting projects with such a poor grip on this craft? They, too, are to blame.
The very worst thing about Rare Exports is that almost EVERY shot is either a tracking shot or crane shot of some type. It's so desperate to be a big movie, replete with a hideously overblown, Hollywood-esque string score. But, like Monsters, it's so crippled by its woeful, unfocused script that all this pomp and noise comes to absolutely nothing at all. It's not only rubbish, its attention grabbingly in a truly tiresome way.
The directors of Rare Exports and Monsters will be hotly tipped to make a move into the Hollywood mainstream. It's the best place for them, pithy as it currently is. Leave small, independent movies to directors with something to say, rather than simply to churn out what is essentially showreel cinema - bright, shiny and empty. I'm all for short, sharp psycho santa movies but this is simply guff dressed up in a fancy costume. Neither Rare Exports or Monsters has a genuinely successful horror set-piece between them...Nothing for Christmas this year then.

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Jhone said...

Posted on Dec 01 2010 15:47 Dam good film trailer.

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Mark said...

Posted on Nov 02 2010 03:05 "You better not cry"... great mad film. Check the original "Rare Export" short films on Youtube.

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Pippi said...

Posted on Oct 29 2010 07:30 Santa Claus is coming to town...gotta love those Finns, their recent and upcoming films are out of any boxes!

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Marius said...

Posted on Oct 16 2010 13:37 Awesome! Go see it

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