"I wasn't sleeping, Chief. It's just that I haven't been able to sleep these last few months. I forgot how. So I was just practicing." - Dropo the Martian uttering the lamest excuse ever used for getting caught sleeping on the job in the immortal Christmas turkey we all know as SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS

MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY & I PAID TO SEE MR. MAGOO

Even though the year 2003 isn't quite over, I think it's safe to go ahead and do my annual top 10 list. For those who do not know, like most critics I end each year with a top 10 list but unlike others I don't list my 10 best or worst. No, I end each year by doing the list of the 10 movies that I just absolutely refused to go see. 10 movies whose trailers alone were enough to convince me that I'd rather gouge my eyeballs out with a spoon than gaze upon for any length of time and considering some of the movies I have sat through this past year, that's really saying something. I have looked into my crystal ball to see what is yet to come in the month of December and while I do spy two or three stink bombs, none of them appear to be a potential cinematic atrocity. So with that said it's now time for…

THE TOP 10 MOVIES I DIDN'T PAY TO SEE IN 2003 AND DAMMIT, I PLAN TO KEEP IT THAT WAY

10) Bringing Down the House
  9) Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
  8) Dumb and Dumberer
   7) Just Married
  6) Marci X
  5) Radio
  4) Uptown Girls
  3) The Real Cancun
  2) Boat Trip
   1) Cat in the Hat

I will not go see the CAT IN THE HAT
The book is a classic
But the film's pure crap
I will not watch this movie ever
Not in a theater
Not on TV
Not on home video
Or even DVD
I will not go see the CAT IN THE HAT
Let's just forget it ever existed
And that's all I have to say about that.

LUMPS OF COAL

 

By the time you read this Christmas will either be rapidly approaching or has already come and gone. Either way, my ass is covered. Regardless of the time of year it is when you read this, you may want to pause a few moments and cue up the appropriate holiday mood music before reading this particular column. Might I suggest either "The Night Santa Went Crazy" or "Christmas at Ground Zero" by Weird Al Yankovic or maybe "I'll Be Hating You For Christmas" by Everclear? Whatever music you choose or none at all, prepare to get a stocking full of charcoal because it's time for a look at the crappiest Christmas movies of all time. And just to clarify, I'm not talking about bad movies that opened at or around Christmas time or just use the holiday season as a backdrop, but movies in which the holiday itself plays a key role and gets soiled in the process. Bet you never realized just how many terrible ones there are and keep in mind that this column only deals with the most notorious? I will go into detail about some more than others and, to be honest, I haven't seen all of them, but the ones I haven't seen I know enough about which is why I've been smart enough to avoid them.

We begin in the genre of film that has produced more atrocious Christmas themed movies than any other - horror. Has there ever even been a good Christmas-themed horror movie? Well, if there has been it certainly wasn't any of the 5 movies in the SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT franchise. The 1984 original actually got banned in some parts of the country because parents believed the concept of a Santa slasher would give kids the wrong impression of St. Nick. As if the concept of a deranged, axe-wielding, homicidal maniac in a Santa suit could harm the spirit of Christmas more than the gross commercialization of the holiday at the local mall does on a yearly basis. The film opens with 5-year old Billy witnessing the brutal murder of his parents on Christmas Eve at the hands of a guy dressed as Santa. The emotionally traumatized boy, who develops an extreme phobia of Santa Claus and the Christmas holiday, gets sent to an abusive Catholic orphanage, as if there's any other kind in the movies, and grows up to get a job at a toy store. He hates Christmas yet takes a job at a toy store? That makes about as much sense as hating Valentine's Day and then going to work at a florist. When the store loses their Santa, young Billy gets forced into the position of playing the jolly old elf thus causing him to snap and become a bloodthirsty psychopath who brutally murders the naughty people and everyone else who he crosses paths with him. I guess the scene where he impales a topless girl on a set of deer antlers helped rent a lot of videos because four sequels were spawed from this Yuletide bloodbath.

Three years later, SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT PART 2 arrived. This time, Billy's deranged brother, Ricky, dons a Santa suit and sets out to avenge the death of his serial killer bro using everything from an axe to an umbrella as a murder weapon. Wait a minute I thought Billy was an orphan? Wait a minute, why am I looking for continuity in a crappy slasher series?

Fast-forward two more years and along comes SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY 3: BETTER WATCH OUT. This time, a blind girl with psychic powers makes contact with the comatose Ricky who is in a coma after being shot in the head at the end of the last sequel. Ricky wakes up and goes on another killing spree and only the psychic girl can stop him. Oh, there's also a mad scientist thrown in for good measure. Our mass murderer doesn't don a Santa outfit this time but he doesn't need it to win style points because he spends the duration of the movie running around with a futuristic Jello mold on his head that's supposed to protect his exposed brain. It's really as silly looking as it sounds. The killer is a guy with a salad bowl screwed over his head giving you a window to his brain and it also has a little antennae on top and a couple of blinking lights around the back. Also, Ricky has magically developed superhuman strength as he repeatedly does his Kool-Aid Man impression throughout the third act of the movie. Guess the brain trauma caused him to forget how to use a doorknob? The producers apparently had the money to pay Robert Culp to appear in the film as a police detective yet they didn't feel compelled to write him into any of the key scenes or give him much of anything to do. Culp just goes around asking questions but never gets in on the action or he shows up right after the action ends. Unless he put a clause in his contract stating he wouldn't do anything other than recite lines and walk a few steps at a time, this is a total waste on the filmmakers' part. Still, the sight of Ricky with the electronic salad bowl on his head is almost enough to make this film entertaining. Almost.

One year later, the franchise finally jumped the shark, assuming it was even good enough to warrant use of that analogy in the first place, with the release of SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 4: INITIATION. Like HALLOWEEN 3: SEASON OF THE WITCH, this entry in the series had nothing whatsoever to do with the previous films and instead focused on someone battling a witch's coven or something like that. Only thing worth noting about this one is that it starred Clint Howard and Maude Adams. One more year and the franchise would finally come to a merciful end with another name-only sequel, SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 5: THE TOY MAKER. In the final installment, a crazed toy maker played by Mickey Rooney (!) makes (What else?) killer toys. His name is Joe Petto and he has a child named Pino who is actually one of his toys. Yes, this awful franchise began by bastardizing Santa Claus and wraps up by sodomizing Pinnochio. Bah humbug!

More holly jolly mass murder comes in the form of 1980's CHRISTMAS EVIL, which actually attempted to be more of a psychological thriller than a slasher film. Imagine if the serial killer from RED DRAGON was actually a psychotic toy maker who believed he was slowly turning into Kris Kringle, a Kris Kringle with a nasty tendency to stab people in the eye with a toy soldier. Let's just move on to 1996 when the most recent psycho St. Nick movie took its place on the shelves of video stores dumb enough to think people would actually rent it. This one's called SANTA CLAWS and all you have to do is look at the stills on the back of the box to tell this is the kind of movie that had such a low budget that the actors most likely had to pack their own lunches. Scream queen (and my #1 fan) Debbie Rochon stretches her acting skills to the max playing (Surprise!) a scream queen. Unfortunately, her next-door neighbor is a total nutcase who murdered his mother when he caught her doing more than just kissing Santa Claus. Now the loon thinks he is Santa Claus and has become so obsessed with the nubile actress that he decides to prove his love for her by dressing up as Father Christmas and brutally murdering her enemies. Actually, I believe that's how Santa and Mrs. Claus met.

As much as I'd like to skip over the JACK FROST films, they must be dredged up once again for this particular column. For those of you who honestly no nothing about the two JACK FROST films, here it is in a nutshell - a serial killer named Jack Frost gets killed when the police transport truck he's in slams into a truck transporting experimental chemicals. Frost dies, but is somehow resurrected as a wise cracking, homicidal snowman and sets out to get revenge against the small town sheriff who caught him. Along the way, he kills various townspeople in what are supposed to be humorous means before meeting an anti-freeze demise at the hands of his sworn enemy. Unfortunately, none of this is even the least bit amusing. Despite going out of its way to be an intentionally campy horror comedy, JACK FROST is a total dud on every level. The film's only highpoint, even though it's still a low point, is the scene in which the killer snowman uses his carrot to rape and kill a young woman played by a pre-AMERICAN PIE Shannon Elizabeth. I understand she doesn't like people bringing up the subject of her appearance in this movie. I wonder is she feels the same way about TOMCATS and 13 GHOSTS? What does it say about Shannon Elizabeth's acting career so far when the only highpoints of it have been baring her breasts in a teen sex comedy and getting sexually assaulted by a big foam snowman?

A most unwanted sequel would come along a few years later entitled JACK FROST 2: REVENGE OF THE KILLER MUTANT SNOWMAN. That title was about as clever as that film got and that title is not clever in the least. In what I think must have been something of a spoof of I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, the psycho snowman comes back to life and heads to a tropical island to finally finish off that pesky sheriff who has gone on vacation there. Alleged hilarity ensues. This one is actually even cheaper looking than the first, which is an amazing thing to say since the first film was so cheap there wasn't even an ounce of real snow anywhere in the movie. Hard to believe the writer/director of these two films went on to write IDENTITY.

And, finally, we wrap up crappy Christmas horror with the Holy Grail of this genre, ELVES. How could I not include the movie that stars a chain-smoking Dan Haggerty as an alcoholic ex-cop turned department store Santa who unwittingly becomes the only one who can prevent Neo Nazis from completing their diabolical plan to spawn a murderous elf which must mate with a pure bred Aryan woman to procreate Adolf Hitler's half-human/half-elf master race that will conquer the world? Did you get all that? ELVES is an absolute must see movie! Don't get me wrong. It's cheap and it is atrocious, but my God! When I said Dan Haggerty's chain-smokes, good lord, the term chain-smoking doesn't do justice to what he does with sticks of tobacco in this film. There are all of about three scenes in the whole damn flick where he doesn't have a cigarette either in his mouth or in his hand. He smokes during shootouts. He smokes while chasing after bad guys. Hell, he actually smokes while brushing his teeth! You watch all this halfway expecting the man to keel over and die from lung cancer at any second.

The demonic elf, which came so close to making my list of The 20 Goofiest Movie Monsters of All Time, is a cheap looking puppet that comes across as even cheaper because it was made with it's mouth frozen open at all times. It walks the fine line between being grotesque and silly but spends almost all of its screen time on the silly side of the line. I won't even bother to say that the acting in ELVES is awful because to do so would be to acknowledge that I believe what the people were doing in this film is acting, which it is most certainly not. There's just so much badness in this movie that it's astonishing. ELVES came out on video in 1990 and may be hard to find nowadays but it's definitely worth seeking out if you love truly awful movies. I don't know of too many other Christmas movies that involve Nazis with really bad German accents, the occult, the Antichrist, incest, inbreeding, mommy dearest who likes drowning cats in the toilet, a virgin girl wielding an elfstone, Grizzly Adams' non-stop chain smoking, and a horny, knife-wielding, trigger-happy elf. Do you?

Now that I think about it, GREMLINS might be the only good Christmas horror movie ever made even though it isn't an outright horror movie. Also, BLACK CHRISTMAS, a decent Hitchcockian-style slasher film from 1974, is often overlooked for having inspired John Carpenter stylistically when making HALLOWEEN.

But if you think there isn't more Christmas horror crap to come, Hollywood has a new psycho Santa movie in the works for Christmas 2004. This one's called SANTA'S SLEIGH and will be about, what else, a homicidal maniac that dresses like St. Nick. What will most assuredly make this one special is that the murderous Kris Kringle will be portrayed by WWE wrestler Bill Goldberg! I really hope the poster for the movie features Goldberg in a Santa suit standing over a small child with an axe with a tagline that read "YOU'RE NEXT!"

Let's move on to a genre with a much better ratio of good-to-bad Christmas movies but the bad ones are extremely bad. I speak of the family Christmas film. This will also cover bad Christmas comedies since the majority of them were supposed to be funny. And if it's all right with you, I'm just going to zip through the majority of these because I'm fairly certain we're all somewhat familiar with most of them. Also, I just don't want to dwell too much on some of these for the sake of my own sanity.

Let's begin with a horrendous piece of Austrian fruitcake, Arnold Schwarzenegger's JINGLE ALL THE WAY. It's Christmas Eve and the future Governor of California has forgotten to buy his young son the Turbo Man action figure he wants more than anything. Arnold thinks he can buy it at the last minute, but unfortunately the Turbo Man doll is the hottest toy of the year and all sold out. Why is it so popular is anyone's guess. It looks like an unimaginative piece of generic plasticjunk you'd buy at the dollar store. Heck, they tried selling actual Turbo Man figures as a product tie-in with the movie but no real kids wanted one. Of course, that might have as much to do with nobody seeing the movie, but the toy was still very lame. Amazingly, the Turbo Man figures have become collectors items and now sell for anywhere from $80-$200. Look it up on ebay as see the insane prices it goes for. Why exactly is a mystery worthy of Scully and Mulder. It's crap, people!

Anyway, Arnold ends up on a madcap adventure across the city as he searches endlessly for a Turbo Man. Comedian Sinbad shows up as a Turbo Man seeking rival to Arnie and the two engage in a wacky battle over which one will get the toy first. Yes, the laughs are just circling the drain in this one. In the end, we all come to learn that the true meaning of Christmas can't be found in material goods but lies in knowing that you have a monosyllabic, European muscleman for a father. Not only can Arnold brag about starring in a terrible Christmas movie, he can also lay claim to having directed one too as his one and only directing gig was for an extremely lame 1992 made-for-cable romantic comedy called CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT. It starred Dyan Cannon and that alone should tell you all you need to know about the quality of this one.

Not long after the JACK FROST movie about the killer snowman hit video store shelves, Hollywood released a theatrical feature about a guy who dies and comes back as a snowman only this time they 86'd the killing spree. Too bad because a killing spree might have made 1998's heartwarming and mind numbing JACK FROST tolerable. Michael Keaton is another guy named Jack Frost who dies in an auto accident only to return to life as a snowman. Instead of vengeance, he wants to make things right with his family. Alas, nothing could make this movie right as it is downright painful to sit through. Ironically, the fatherly snowman in this movie is infinitely creepier looking than the psychopathic one in the other JACK FROST.

In the year 2000, a Christmas movie would come along that was so far into the realm of crapdom it would have made Jimmy Stewart jump off that bridge but not before punching Clarence in the face. I speak of DR. SEUSS' HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS. It should have been called "Ron Howard's How Hollywood Bastardized A Children's Literary Icon." Somehow the combined talents of Ron Howard and Jim Carrey merged to create one of the dreariest, dankest, dullest, and downright lamest holiday films of all time. The fact that it was based on a classic work of children's literature which itself had already been turned into a classic animated holiday special made the wretchedness of this movie all the more offensive. Despite being a cinematic atrocity for the ages it still made megabucks at the box office. Even more alarming is that there adults out there who actually think this is a really good movie. Then again, there are people out there who derive sexual gratification from someone else taking a crap on them and that's essentially what this movie does to its audience, so go figure.

There are a couple of Yuletide movies that unlike the previous abomination have some merit while still being mired in mediocrity. A perfect example would be 1985's SANTA CLAUS: THE MOVIE. Some people love this movie but the folks who hate it really, really, really, really, hate it. Either way, it's still a bloated spectacle trying way too hard to be the quintessential Christmas movie. The late Dudley Moore played an elf named Patch and frankly, I think Moore would have been perfect as the evil, horny elf in ELVES since most of his more high profile film roles essentially portrayed him as being just that. Well, horny and drunk as opposed to horny and homicidal.

Also a lightning rod for controversy is the HOME ALONE franchise. Classics or crap, you decide. All I can say for sure is that the first in the series starring Macauley Culkin as a young boy accidentally left home alone on Christmas who ends up having to defend his humble abode from a home invasion by two incompetent thieves via the most sadistic PG rated violence ever seen in a children's movie was a box office blockbuster. Interestingly enough, a scientific study on media violence came out a year after the film opened that determined that HOME ALONE had more on-screen acts of violence than SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. How's that for irony?

ERNEST SAVES CHRISTMAS…is it a kiddie classic or another weapon in the late Jim Varney's vendetta against human intelligence? All I know is that I didn't see it. I had an opportunity to see it when it came out but in line at the theater I was able to talk my mom into letting me see CHILD'S PLAY instead. I still firmly believe I made the right choice. I saw ERNEST GOES TO CAMP when it first opened and that gave me my fill of the country bumpkin for the rest of my life. Sorry, not an Ernsest fan. Personally, it's a shame Jim Varney died before he could make the one Ernest movie that would have gotten me back in the theater - ERNEST SAVES KWANZAA. That I would have paid to see!

Now before I wrap up the family/comedy section of this article, I need to give you all a stern kick to the groin by unclogging your collective repressed memories and reminding you of one that most of you have probably hoped would never be mentioned again. Sorry, but I am going to briefly discuss A VERY BRADY CHRISTMAS. One of the many TV resurrections of the famous Brady Bunch, this 1988 entry just plain sucks and sucks hard. All the innocence and joy of the original show has been vacuumed out and replaced by the worst episode of Thirtysomething ever made. Everyone is either bitchy or angst ridden and then dad gets trapped in a building collapse and the whole family stages a vigil next to the rubble while praying, singing, and recounting the days when they actually took pride in their work. The entire cast returned, as if they were really getting better offers elsewhere, except for Susan Olsen, who wisely chose not to return to play Cindy. Miss Olsen is the only one who escaped this one with their dignity intact and believe me, there is no dignity to be found here.

Then there's the Christmas themed action film. To be honest, there really aren't all that many that I can think. Sure there's DIE HARD and LETHAL WEAPON that were both set at Christmas time but they're both modern action classics. 2000's REINDEER GAMES wasn't so much bad as it was just mediocre and since I haven't seen it for myself, I can't really comment on it. In fact, there's really on one Christmas themed action movie I can think of and that's CHRISTMAS RUSH, the 2002 TBS Original movie I covered in much more detail about two months ago in my column entitled "The Worst Movie Studio On Television" saluting the crap that station has consitantly turned out. To briefly re-cap the movie, Dean Cain is a good cop, Erika Eleniak is his good wife, and Eric Roberts is the not-so-good-but-not-all-that-bad ex-con looking to get the money his son needs for a life-saving operation by leading leading refugees from the Island of Misfit Movie Villain Henchmen in an attempt to rob the Christmas Eve earnings (i.e. million of dollars) from a Chicago mall. Eleniak gets taken hostage and Cain is forced to play DIE HARD in a shopping mall on Christmas Eve. Things get blown up and people shoot at each other a lot and almost all of it happens in slow motion. Gumball machine gets caught in the crossfire, expect to see gumball machine's glass shatter in slow motion followed by gumballs pouring out in slow motion. It all culminates in an undignified underground go-cart chase. In the end, Eric Roberts dies but the son still gets the life-saving operation while Dean Cain and Erika Eleniak pray for the souls of everyone Cain killed in the movie before eating a delicious Christmas dinner.

For whatever reason, they changed the movie's title to BREAKAWAY when it was released on video this past summer. CHRISTMAS RUSH was a much better title than BREAKAWAY, which doesn't even make a whole hell of a lot of sense in the context of the movie's plot. Were they breaking away from the mall they were robbing? I hate when movie's are given such illogical alternate titles.

Did I not mention that Dean Cain's character in the movie is named Cornelius Morgan? Yes, Cornelius Morgan! That's the kind of name you give a pirate and not a Chicago cop.

If anyone else knows of any bad Christmas-themed action movies then by all means drop me a line and let me know. Surely there must be more to this genre than just a recent Dean Cain cable movie?

Moving on, we come to three Christmas movies that are so far off the deep end they are virtually impossible to classify. The first being quite possibly the most infamous bad Christmas movie of all time - 1964's SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS. I won't dwell on this one for very long because if you don't already know of this movie then what the hell are you doing reading an article on a bad movie site? Long story short, Martian children see Santa on Earth TV stations they pirate and are upset because there's nobody on Mars to bring them presents. This prompts a group of bumbling Martians to travel to Earth, kidnap two Earth children, and force them to take them to Santa's workshop at the North Pole where they commit a home invasion and kidnap St. Nick. They bring Santa and the two kids back to Mars in order to bring Christmas to the little green children of the little green men. However, one of the elder green men doesn't like this whole Christmas concept and plots to do away with Santa and the Earth kids. Fortunately, Santa, the Earth kids, and the Martian children thwart the Scrooge-like Martians and bring the holiday spirit to the angry red planet full of Great Kazoo wannabes. A very young Pia Zadora even appears as one of the Martian kids in what is arguably her best performance ever. If you must see SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS, best to see the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version as Joel and the Bots had a field day with this one. As hard as it is to believe, Hollywood was actually considering a remaking the movie a few years back but the project has since fallen apart. Maybe they've should have tried casting Will Smith as Santa and re-title it CD25?

Another that defies all logic is 1959's SANTA CLAUS, a Mexican children's Christmas movie brought to the United States by the immortal K. Gordan Murray. One of these days I'm going to have to get around to doing a write-up on Mr. Murray, but in the meantime I suggest you just check out Rob Craig's outstanding K. Gordon Murray website. Anyway, this one was also a standout episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and it should come as no surprise as this movie simply defies any and all human logic. Santa lives in a castle in the sky above the North Pole where he constantly spies on the children of the world with his surveillance equipment. Also, his workshop isn't filled with elves but with children from different parts of the world who all dress like the ethnic stereotypes of the country they represent. As Santa prepares for Christmas, Satan plots to put an end to Christmas once and for all by sending one of his henchmen, a rather effeminate devil named "Pitch" who comes across as what Lucifer would be like if he was a gay dance choreographer high on Crystal Meth, to sabotage Santa's Christmas Eve plans once and for all. That's about all that can be said about this one. You just have to see it for yourself and even then you probably won't believe what it is that you're watching.

Which brings us to a movie so abysmal that it would make Peter Billingsley want to shoot his own eyes out with a Red Ryder BB gun. The movie I speak of is SANTA AND THE ICE CREAM BUNNY and it would probably qualify as the worst movie ever made if it actually qualified as an actual movie and that it certainly does not. Why will become apparent soon enough. Even more amazing is that the director of this 1972 kiddie abomination is a fellow named Barry Mahon. You may be familiar with some of Mahon's other directorial efforts like PAGAN ISLAND and ROCKET ATTACK, U.S.A. However, after those two notables and before he would dive headfirst into the kiddie movie market, Mahon would make over 30 nudie exploitation films. Perhaps that would explain why SANTA AND THE ICE CREAM BUNNY is virtually plotless since the man was used to making movies where the story was the least essential element. Chances are you're never going to see this movie and God willing you never will. So let me tell you of my pain watching it.

As the eternal agony that is SANTA AND THE ICE CREAM BUNNY begins, small kids dressed like Robin Hood's merry men are singing some "tra-la-la" song while working on toys in a sweatshop. Santa has apparently never heard of child labor laws. The elves stop singing long enough to wonder where Santa is. Where Santa is at is a beach in Florida where we see him sitting in his sleigh, stuck in the sand. We also know that the reindeer tried to help but were unable to do so andso they abandoned Santa when it got too hot. This info comes courtesy of a voiceover narrator who sounds as if her voice was being filtered through a baby monitor that's 50 feet away from you. Actually, all the sound in this film is garbled but the narrator's voice and the singing are the most unintelligable. Santa stands up and begins singing this "Woe Is Me" song explaining once again how his sleigh got stuck in the sand on a Florida beach just in case you weren't paying attention when the narrator told you moments earlier. Apparently Santa is also a narcoleptic because as soon as he finishes singing he sits down and takes a nap. The combined power of Santa's vocal stylings and his spur-of-the-moment napping ability sends a psychic message to the local children who all immediately stop what they were doing and come running down to the beach to gather around Santa's sleigh. If none of this was odd enough for you, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are real and river rafting on the Florida waterways in the 1970s. Tom and Huck wonder where all the kids are running too and proceed to come ashore to follow them covertly and not do much of anything at all.

Santa wakes up and explains to the kids the story of how the sleigh got stuck in the sand and the reindeer headed back to the North Pole making it the third time in five minutes that we've had that explained to us. After listening to Santa's sad story, the kids, afraid they won't get any presents this year, leave to get animals to pull Santa's sleigh. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, who have opted to remain in the bushes and spy on the proceedings, begin wondering aloud about what exactly is going on. I got a better question. Where the hell did you two come from and what the hell do characters from a Mark Twain novel have to do with Santa and Christmas?

Santa's prepares for another nap when he's startled by monkey noises and sees one of the neighborhood kids leading a gorilla by the hand. Actually, it's a guy in a monkey suit, but still. The gorilla is unable to budge the sleigh. From there, individual kids show up with a donkey, a pig, a sheep, a cow, and a horse in failed attempts to replace Santa's reindeer. Some of the animals are so uncooperative that the guy playing Santa has to stay in character as he gets off the sleigh and helps the child actors maneuver the animal into place. In fact, one of the only two funny moments of the movie, albeit untintentionally so, occurs when one little girl is leading a sheep on a leash. She's trying to go one way and the sheep is going another way and the sheep ends up winning this particular tug-of-war. It's also never explained where exactly the kids got these animals from so I'm left to assume that gorillas and cows were common house pets in 1970's Florida.

After Santa unsuccessfully attempts to dig his sleigh out of the sand with his bare hands, he once again complains about the heat while the kids give up hope. To help them keep the faith, he tells them the heartwarming story of Thumbelina. As he begins telling the story, there's a very awkward fade to black. You see in the original version of this film there was a movie within a movie in which a reproduction of Hans Christian Anderson's Thumbelina was shown. Oddly enough, the video company who put out this copy of the film separated it into two segments so you have one 35-minute short film about Santa's sleigh stuck in the sand in Florida followed by a 45-minute Thumbelina production. Why they did this is anyone's guess but it's not like it makes that big of a difference. Let's just finish off the Santa portion of the film first.

After Santa finishes the Thumbelina story, the kid's decide that their dog Rebel will, in Lassie-like fashion, lead them to someone or something that will save Santa. After they take off behind the dog, Santa yet again complains about the heat and begins to strip, and believe me when I say that Santa stripping is not something you want to see, when suddenly his narcolepsy kicks in again. I think Santa must experience reverse hibernation because he keeps falling asleep when it gets hot. If this is all supposed to be happening in Florida just days before Christmas then so why is it so damn hot? Even in the Deep South it still freezes in the winter and those mud puddles all over the place appear to be the result of summer rain. That would have also explained the massive sweat stains on Santa's undershirt when he took off his coat. Coatless Santa is not a pretty sight.

Suddenly, a siren sounds and a startled Santa awakens wondering what that is. Then the source of the siren is revealed and what a sight it is - a guy in the worst bunny costume you've ever seen driving an antique fire engine overloaded with kids driving down a muddy road! As Santa puts his coat back on, we see them now driving through an amusement park. Where the hell did that come from? Even worse, as the bunny driven fire engine comes to Santa's rescue, the kids begin singing the "Woe Is Me" song with new happy lyrics about rescuing Santa and saving Christmas.

Just for the record, the only reason I don't bother to transcribe the lyrics to either version of the song here is because not only would it be totally redundant but the sound is so poor there are entire verses you can't understand.

As the truck pulls up next to the sleigh, Santa is filmed standing in an upshot with the sun in the background that looks more appropriate to an Ultraman transformation scene than a lousy holiday movie. It turns out this crappy looking rabbit is named "The Ice Cream Bunny" and he's an old friend of Santa's. Exactly what this Ice Cream Bunny is or where he came from or how the kids found him is never explained. In the only other funny moment of the film, again unintentionally so, Santa thanks Rebel for getting his old friend in the cheap bunny suit to come help him but the dog is growling like the guy in the bunny costume is a Terminator. That mutt seems ready to tear out somebody's jugular. The bunny begins dancing a jig while the children play "Jingle Bells" with their kazoos. Santa climbs onto the fire truck and drives off with the Ice Cream Bunny, who is apparently going to drive him all the way to the North Pole from South Florida, while the children run after it waving goodbye. Meanwhile, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn look on in stunned disbelief. I know how they feel. The children then gather around Santa's sleigh just moments before it magically disappears. The narrator tells us that when Santa arrived at the North Pole his sleigh was waiting for him there. After the words "MERRY CHRISTMAS" appear on-screen, the movie mercifully ends.

If Santa's sleigh could just magically teleport, then why couldn't he have just magically transported himself to the North Pole? Why were Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn real and what exactly was the point of including them since they didn't do anything? What exactly is the connection between this bunny and ice cream? Was the Ice Cream Bunny supposed to be the Easter Bunny? Why did the Ice Cream Bunny drive a fire truck? What was the point of any of this? These and other questions will never be answered. I can only imagine what kids must have been thinking when they sat in a theater watching this thing. They probably had the same reaction to it that the kids on The Simpsons had watching Principal Skinner's Christmas hobgoblins movie in that episode where snow trapped them all inside the school on Christmas Eve. SANTA AND THE ICE CREAM BUNNY may have only clocked in at just 35 minutes in length but it is a miserable 35 minutes. Five minutes worth of horrible material stretched out to over a half hour.

But wait, there's more!

As I said, the Thumbelina short film which was supposed to be in the middle of SANTA AND THE ICE CREAM BUNNY runs in its entirety following the actual movie it should have appeared during. There really isn't much to say about it because it isn't so much bad as it is just not good. Envision a production of Thumbelina with all the production values of an early 70's PBS kid's show with public access level acting and you get the idea. It looks like a film strip that would be shown to first graders. Only thing really worth noting is that the lead actress is this cute hippie chick in a mini-skirt that's way too short for such wholesame family fare and she has this gleam in her eyes making her look as if she's feeling very "wavy gravy" if you catch my drift. Considering the abundance of psychedelic colors used in the sets, she and everyone else on the crew may very well have been stoned while making it. If that wasn't bad enough, this retelling of Thumbelina is itself a movie within a movie as the hippie chick is at this amusement park called Pirate's World, which I suspect is the same park the Ice Cream Bunny was driving through, where she goes to watch a theater presentation of Thumbelina and begins imagining herself in the production. Think about this for just a moment. Had this been properly placed within SANTA AND THE ICE CREAM BUNNY, there would have been a movie within a movie which itself was a movie within a movie. Sheesh!

Personally, my pick for the single worst Christmas movie of all time would be SANTA WITH MUSCLES starring Hulk Hogan. I refuse to uncork my memory banks and allow the horrors of this film to flowfreely through my subconscious once again. I wrote about this film once already in my "Wilford Brimley On Steroids" NOWFF column about Hulk Hogan's acting career and refuse to relive the horror yet again. If you must know what I thought of that film then you're just going to have to read it in the Hulk Hogan column for yourself because I'll be damned if I'm going there again! This I vow!

And here's one last bit of Christmas schlock to amuse you. The three films widely considered by many to be the best Christmas movies ever made are the original MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, and A CHRISTMAS STORY. The writer/director of one of those movies is also responsible for such cinematic abominations as PORKY'S, PORKY'S 2: THE NEXT DAY, LOOSE CANNONS, BABY GENIUSES, and RHINESTONE. Can you guess which one it is? If you answered either of the first two then you are incorrect and your punishment is to watch every movie I have detailed in this article.

Happy Holidays!

MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY & I PAID TO SEE SPECIES 2