Whoa nelly, this movie is a real doozie!
Yes, I have returned, mainly because I believe this movie deserves a review. I mean, holy hell, this movie is great for all the wrong reason! I see it as a bit of a surrealist masterpiece, because of its absurd "Storyline", its somewhat underwhelming performances from the cast, and its eerie atmosphere. So, lets start by summarizing the plot.
The movie starts with the elves singing, or should I say screeching about how Santa isn't at the workshop, and that they should resume swinging around hammers, kissing dolls, and continue to scream at the top of their lungs, most likely scaring the shit out of the poor stock footage reindeer. It then cuts to Santa "stuck" in like 2 cm of sand on a beach in Florida, which could easily escape if he actually got his fat ass out the sleigh. We then get a high budget and truly enthralling musical number about Santa feeling sorry about himself and wondering if his friends can get him out of this predicament. During this, we got footage of children doing rather questionable things, including and not limited to a child jumping off a roof with an umbrella, and two kids beating the crap out of each other.
After this song number, Santa decides its time to snooze his sadness away, but at the same time he is calling the kids one by one telepathically (I guess?). And yes, you have to sit through all the kids getting their names called. Its without a doubt a gripping moment. Once all the children get there, they decide they want to help Santa by running away, and grabbing their pets so they can try to pull the sleigh. Some of these pets include a GROWN MAN in a gorilla suit, a pig, a cow, a horse, and a sheep, to which Santa comments "Oh, this just ISN'T going to work!". Santa then tells a inspirational story, that depending on what copy of the film the viewer has, is either "Thumbelina" or "Jack and the Beanstalk". Both of these go on for about an hour, so they take up basically all the movie.
I've only seen the version with "Thumbelina", but as expected, it is a disappointment. It starts with a lonely lady asking a witch to make her a daughter, and she does, but shes tiny. She lives a happy life until she gets kidnapped by some filthy fuckin' frogs, who force her to marry one of them. She fortunately runs away, and spends the winter of Ms. Mole, who also makes her marry another mole named Mr. Driller. She then flies away on a bird she nursed back to help, to a land with other people her size, where she is - you guessed it- forced to get married. Wow, I summarized this whole hour segment in 4 sentences, which proves that they drag it for too long and in all honestly, it shouldn't exist.
After the excruciating Thumbelina segment, we cut back to the Florida beach Santa is stuck on. The kids then run away again, and Santa just kind of loafs around for awhile, making great observations and developing his character with such remarks as "Wow, look at that Sun!" (That line was repeated three times in the movie!). The kids then return with the Ice Cream Bunny, who is coming to save the day in his little fire engine. Also, you can tell that the kids are supposed to be singing, but the crew probably lost the audio, so they just replaced it with a fire engine alarm and a dog barking. And nothing else. Stellar.
So, after like 5 minutes of driving footage, they finally arrive, and at that point the movie loses its mind at a visual level. It sounds like they added the audio after they shot the scenes, so there's dialogue of Santa talking about how happy he is to see his old friend, random and downright frightening closeups of the fluffy abomination, and weird footage of the kids nodding their head ferociously and moving their mouths like goldfish. It ends on that note.
In all honestly, I highly recommend this movie to anyone looking for some ridiculously bad obscure movies. It's a great movie to have the family watch together! If you hate your family!
My rating: 1/10
