Ah, yes, it's the day after Christmas, which has to rank up there among the most emotionally confusing days of the year. On the one hand, there's the afterglow that follows what was hopefully a wonderful holiday; but, on the other, there's the need to clean-up all the mess and deal with the costs of the whole enterprise, not to mention the sad reality that the "days until Christmas" clock has been reset and we've got 365 days until next Christmas. The British have long celebrated the 26th of December as Boxing Day, which provides many folks with an extra day off from work. It's a custom I heartily applaud. The name comes from the traditional practice whereby families of means would box-up those things they no longer needed and give them to the less fortunate to make room for new gifts they'd received. I have no idea whether this practice is currently observed, but I hope it is. At the very least, everyone gets an extra day off of work, which makes good sense, especially when, as is the case this year, there would otherwise be a single working day between Christmas and the weekend.
In 2012, I seized on Boxing Day as an excuse to share a perfectly dreadful film from Mexico called Santa Claus. Effective today, I'd like to launch a new Boxing Day Tradition, such that every December 26 from now on we'll post another monstrously bad holiday-related movie to take our collective minds off how much we overspent, overate and/or overindulged this season. This year's feature isn't just a Christmas film, but a two-holiday blast of ill wind called Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny. If you watched any of the Santa Claus movie I posted two years ago, this one, believe it or not, is worse!
This is actually a movie within a movie, as the Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny storylines are featured on either side of a lengthy separate story that seems to have little to do with the footage that precedes and follows it. The story in the middle has something to do with Thumbelina. It starts at 20:46 and ends at 1:23:03, and, as several others have pointed out, has production values that are slightly higher than the holiday-related nightmare on either side.
With that as introduction, let's all take a look at this year's Boxing Day Holiday Horror Show: Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny:
Imagine hearing your favorite Christmas carols sung by a choir consisting of Johnny "Bowtie" Barstow, William Hung, Tiny Tim, Regis Philbin and Wing, and imagine they're all singing really loud, with a cameo appearance toward the end by Donald Trump (just like in Regis Philbin's version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). Well, I think I've found the cinematic equivalent of that train wreck, and it's called Santa Claus, a 1959 film noir by Mexican director Rene Cardona. Although it was apparently conceived as a children's movie, the plot involves a blood feud between Santa Claus and Satan— hardly the sort of thing I'd want my children watching, thanks. What's more, in a contest to determine which of these two characters is more terrifying, I'm inclined to give a slight edge to this film's version of Santa, who appears positively demonic, especially during the first few minutes. He does become slightly more sympathetic in time (with an emphasis on the pathetic), but only after he's chased up a tree by a small dog and appears almost too infirm to climb in and out of his sleigh. If your taste in films leans toward the bizarre and you've got time to kill on Boxing Day, you might give this film a look. But make sure there are no children around. (Thanks to Listener Mindwrecker on WFMU's Beware of the Blog.)
