Trollheart

And if you thought that was bad....


Title: Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny
Year: 1972
Writer: R. Winer
Director: R. Winer
Genre: Fantasy
Stars: Jay Ripley, Kim Nicholas (the rest are only credited by their first name, and are all kids)

Before I begin, I read in the Wiki and IMDB reviews that this contains a film within a film, that much of it was padded out with a version of Thumbelina or Jack and the Beanstalk, depending on which version of the movie you get. I have no intention of telling the story of either, since a) they neither of them have anything to do with Christmas and b) it’s clearly a cynical attempt by the director to get his other failed movie(s) some extra oxygen, and I’ll be fucked if I’m helping him. So when it comes to the internal story, I’ll just introduce it and then move on past it to where this film picks up again. I say “picks up” in the widest possible meaning of the word, of course.

Sadly, whoever decided to cast children as the main stars and do all the singing didn’t check to see if they were able to handle simple things like rhythm, harmony and, well, carrying a tune in a metal container with a handle. The result is a confused, out-of-tune, out of time cacophony as kids sing, or try to, and it’s not a good start. The basic premise seems to be that the kids (I assume these are meant to be elves, as they’re all dressed in blue - why not green, I don’t know - and wearing pointy hats) are watching for Santa but there’s no sign of him as yet. If he has any sense he’s probably down the local, which is where I should be, and where I may end up after this trainwreck.

The narrator’s voice (yes there’s a narrator in this one too) is provided by Dorothy Brown Green, and whoever she is, she sounds more like a wicked witch pretending to be nice than anything else. Anyhoo, turns out that Santa is mired in the Florida sand, his sleigh having crashed and the reindeer having fucked off back to the NP. Oh look! Santa can’t sing either - he sort of speaks the song and even that is out of tune. Lordy. He falls asleep - I know how he feels - and summons children to him by mind-melding with them or some fucking thing. At least this is the only time we are subjected to the ordeal of him mangling music with his tuneless voice, so there is that.

And for no reason I can discern, and completely flouting the laws of logic, time and reality, and just for good measure (or crippling lack of budget) dressed in contemporary clothes, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer come too, on a raft on the river to the strains of “Old Man River”. Played on a kazoo. I kid you not. And one of them has a cat. A cat that clearly and very definitely does not want to be there, as it keeps trying to escape. Again, I know how it feels.

Okay, now that all of the kids have gathered on the beach and Santa has explained his predicament, they run off to see what they can do to help. Now one of them is coming back with, um, a gorilla. No, you heard me right. A gorilla. Well, a guy in a gorilla costume, actually, making gorilla sounds. He tries to pull the sleigh out, but given that fat bastard Santa is still in it and does not get out he is doomed to failure. Two other kids drag a very reluctant donkey on to the beach to try but it fails too. Well, as they haven’t even scared up any kind of rein or halter or fucking anything to attach the donkey to the sleigh, it was a non-starter from the beginning, wasn’t it? I mean, what did they expect? Hardly future CEOs of major corporations, these kids, are they? Or wait: maybe they are.

And now a black pig, who is not happy, and who would be? Who ever heard of a pig pulling anything? This is followed by a sheep - at least this time the fat cunt gets out of the sleigh and tries to help. Well, it is a girl on her own, and she can hardly be expected to handle the animal all alone. Not that there was ever any chance of such a harebrained scheme working. Well, about as much as any of the others I suppose. Up next, a cow, then a horse (again without any harness of any sort) with similar results.

And then Santa starts telling the story of Thumbelina, at which point I hit the fast-forward button.

Thankfully, when we rejoin the actual movie there’s a mere ten minutes to go, as I don’t think I could take much more of this crap. So Santa is still stuck up the chimney sorry in the Florida sand, and the kids are all sitting around, having done nothing since the last attempt, when having complained constantly about how hot it is, Santa only now hits on the idea of actually taking off the big fucking coat and hat and jacket. Jesus H! What a gobshite.

Finally, for no reason at all and with no explanation, an old fire engine appears, driven by a big white rabbit (presumably the Ice Cream Bunny who shares the title with Santa). Driving at about a mile an hour it takes about five minutes on screen to arrive, driving, for some reason, though a carnival and attracting some odd glances as it goes, full of children and driven, as mentioned, by a large white rabbit. Why it has to take so long is beyond me. Couldn’t they have time lapsed it, or cut the scenes together? Oh right: the kids have to sing again. Do they? They do, unfortunately.

Now, I assumed old mister icy cream face was going to use his fire engine to pull out the sleigh. I mean, why else did he come here, right? But no. Santa climbs on board and off they go on a road trip. And at the end of it all, the fucking sleigh, left behind, vanishes, and we’re told that it went back to the North Pole, leaving the very reasonable question of if this was possible then why the hell did Santa not just do this in the first place, instead of trying to physically drag the thing out?

Kind of a metaphor for the whole movie really.

Notes

Hard to make any, but I will of course take issue with the fact that this movie, which runs for just short of two hours, is actually about a half hour long, the rest of it taken up with the unrelated and complete (including credits) movie of Thumbelina, which has fuck-all to do with Christmas and was obviously this guy’s attempt to show his stupid poxy movie again to people who, most likely again did not want to see it. I will thank him though, because at least it saved me from having to suffer through a longer piece of garbage than I could have comfortably stood.

Nevertheless, questions raise their heads, other than the obvious two: why would someone waste their time, energy, and presumably very little money filming this? And why did I have to suffer through it?

Was there anything good about this movie?

In a word: no. The most basic logic goes to hell in the storyline. We’re not told how Santa crashed in Florida - because of course that would require some thinking, some creative input, and this movie doesn’t work that way. He just crashes. I mean, he’s clearly expert in handling his sleigh, has been for hundreds of years. What happened? Was it a hurricane? Did he get buzzed by a fighter plane? Did he get drunk at the wheel?

The idea of using animals to haul the sleigh out holds a certain amount of water, as long as you’re familiar with the simple mechanics of how harnessed animals work! You can’t just put a horse in front of a cart and expect it to pull it. You have to lock it into the mechanism, hook it up, just as you can’t back a cab up to a trailer and pull away with a container of goods. You have to secure the container to the cab first, link the two. So putting a variety of animals in or around or near the sleigh doesn’t even make the slightest sense if you’re not going to harness them to it.

In actual fact, stupid and out of place though it was (who sees one in Florida?) the gorilla - guy in the gorilla suit - at least made a proper effort. Everything else was just nonsense. To say nothing of the fact that the fat fucker doesn’t even get out of the sleigh the first few tries, lamenting “it’s no use”. Well, yeah, it’s no use with you sitting in the poxy thing, you stupid fuck. What are you? 300 pounds? Think it might have been helpful had you moved your fat talentless arse out of the sleigh and tried to help the children pull the thing out of the sand? Might have been a plan? No?

And who or what the blue jumping fuck is the ice cream bunny? Santa welcomes him as his old friend, but there’s no explanation as to where he came from or what he is. He’s the worst possible deus ex machina; a way to resolve the plot without justifying his presence in any way. Might as well have had God’s hand reach down and pull the sleigh out of the sand. And crushed the writer, while He was at it.

Why did it take Santa so fucking long to realise that if you’re wearing a big red suit in the Florida heat, you’re gonna sweat buckets, and the best thing to do is take it off? But no: he sits there complaining (sometimes in song, lord help us) about how hot it is. Is he an idiot?

No, there is nothing about this movie I can recommend, other than not to watch it, even under pain of death. Dying would be preferable. The singing is awful (especially from Santa, but the kids come a close second), the story is ludicrous, the inserting of an entire other unconnected movie just shows how wafer-thin the plot is and how the writer had to pad it out, the effects are non-existent and the direction is at best chaotic, with kids running everywhere, appearing, disappearing, but Santa basically staying in the one shot for the entire fucking film, until he finally fucks off at the end of it. The acting is awful - and since Santa is the main character, most of that has to be on Jay Clark, who can neither sing nor act - and the ending is so bizarre you would think it had been written by a three-year old. I take it back: a three-year old would have written a more coherent plot.

Avoid, at all costs.

Oh, and what the fuck was the point of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer? Answers on a used fifty euro note please...

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018