NoWo600Wo: Christmas Edition
I haven’t been racking in as many holiday movie and TV special reviews as I had hoped this month. Working extra hours, trying to knit a few gifts, and overall stress and stress-induced headaches has caused me to not to be up for watching movies as much lately. And with the exception of A Bullet for the General, which was a pretty good movie despite my having received a damaged DVD of it twice from Netflix, I’ve mostly been watching stinkers at home. It’s been making me a bit crankier, I think. I probably won’t be the same and won’t attempt to watch any good movies at home until either after Christmas or after New Year’s, when it’s expected that the full-effect of the writer’s strike will be felt (not that I watch much TV anyway, but there are a few shows I like). I may be upping the amount of Netflix I get next month.
I’m Not There, on the other hand, is an excellent film that’s in the theaters right now.
The other night I watched a double whammy. Feel my pain.
This may or may not be a slightly more positive film than the Silent Night Deadly Night movies. Its ending is wacky, that’s for sure. The story focuses on Harry, a man who learned at a very young age that Santa Claus either doesn’t exist, or that Santa Claus was going to feel up his mom, it’s not really clear. He works at a toy factory where he has recently been promoted as manager. But he misses working the line, and doesn’t like that his co-workers don’t care about the declining quality of toys and just treat it as a job. He keeps track of the “naughty” and “nice” children in his neighborhood. He becomes unhappy when his bosses are merely just saying that they will be donating toys to a mentally disabled children’s hospital as a publicity stunt, they don’t plan on following through. He snaps, dons a white beard and Santa suit and…gives presents to the mentally disabled children, visits a party where he is welcomed, kills three people in front of a church, murders a co-worker, destroys the cheap crap toys his factory makes, and gives presents to more children. He is then chased out of a neighborhood by parents with torches, Frankenstein-style. It’s about an hour in before any of this happens. It’s a slow movie, and the fact that the transfer on this DVD wasn’t so good didn’t help matters – sometimes you couldn’t see what was going on, and a lot of the male actors looked alike to me. I lost interest 15 minutes in, and started to figure out what ingredients I needed to buy for a couple of cookie recipes. I read a review at Cinematical yesterday that lightly compared it to Taxi Driver, and mentioned that there is another DVD version out that has commentary by the director and John Waters, who is a champion of sorts for this movie. It was produced by Lloyd Kaufman and released by Troma Pictures, so if you’re into their movies, you’ll probably want to see this although it’s relatively tame and quiet compared to some of their other films.
My boyfriend spent a week trying to download this piece of shit. Then I made him download the Rifftrax for it in hopes that we could get through it easier. I couldn’t, partially because there were discrepancies between the copy he downloaded and the copy that Mike Nelson and the gang had (theirs had commercials, ours didn’t, so there were a lot of syncing issues). By the time we had kind of figured how to work them out, it was time for me to go to bed. It was painful. The story focuses on Chewbacca’s family – his wife, his gross-looking son, and his nightmare-inducing grandfather whose lower jaw damn near touches the tip of his nose. Chewy is out on some mission with Han Solo and they haven’t gotten home yet due to danger, maybe. I dunno. Chewy’s family calls Luke Skywalker and R2D2, Princess Leia and C-3PO and they can’t help. There’s weird dance sequences, and Chewy’s dad is given some weird chair with virtual reality by Art Carney that has his favorite singer Diahann Carroll in a sequence that is really creepy cos Grandpa is getting kind of turned on by it. Then the storm troopers invade, Art Carney shows them a performance by Jefferson Starship on a TV…I went to the bathroom, and by the time I came back, Bea Arthur was singing. Then I made my boyfriend turn it off cos it was time for me to go to sleep. I blame this show for giving me a stomach ache that didn’t end until 3pm yesterday. I don’t think beer would help one watch this show, but maybe weed or mushrooms would. It’s that freaking bad and nonsensical. And yes, the entire original cast of Star Wars is in this. George Lucas tried to deny the existence of this TV show for years, but then BitTorrent and Youtube came along and fucked it up. I don’t know whether to be happy or sad. I think George Lucas deserves some comeuppance for the godawful-ness of the past three Star Wars movies, as well as this TV show. I’ve never really been all that into the series, but The Empire Strikes Back is a movie I watched over and over as a kid. I haven’t seen it in years since all those new characters or whatever were digitally added. I didn’t even see the original Star Wars movie until I was 15 – my mom and sister fell asleep in the theater.
Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2
One can say what they will about Troll 2 and similar bad films, but after watching Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2, you can at least say that those movies tried in some way to have an original story throughout the entire film. Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 however, the first 45 minutes or so consists of clips of the first Silent Night Deadly Night film. So in all actuality, you could just skip the first SNDN movie and just rent this one if you can find it. The first one is better paced when smooshed into 45 minutes anyway.
Billy’s little brother Ricky is all grown up and is in prison talking to a psychiatrist. It is Christmas Eve and he has decided to tell the umpteenth psychiatrist that has visited him the story of his life, including bits that weren’t in his files. He starts off with the murder of his parents – an event that happened when he had to have been no more than 9 months old, and big brother Billy’s experiences at the Catholic orphanage as well as his killing spree. Somehow Ricky was even privy to private conversations that were not within earshot of Billy.
Then we finally get to Ricky’s childhood. The orphanage was shut down after Billy’s killing spree, and all the children were adopted out. Does it really take a horrific set of murders, two of which the children were present for, to get orphans adopted? Sister Margaret made sure that Ricky was adopted out to a non-Christmas-celebrating couple (they never really say what religion this couple was). Everything is okay for Ricky other than he freaks out when he either sees nuns or the color red. While the couple still doesn’t get him therapy, they do spend more time with him, which is nice. But his adoptive father dies when Ricky is about 15, and it kind of goes downhill from there. His adoptive mother is sad, Ricky is sad. He goes on frequent solitary walks, and comes across a man in a Red Jeep who is trying to force himself on a girl in a field. Ricky kills him, and unlike the woman in the first movie, this lady thanks him for killing her attacker.
When Ricky turns 18, he becomes a buff guy in his mid-20s. He has rage issues, even more so when it involves the color red. He kills a bookie, then an annoying guy in the movie theater (where, haha, the movie showing is Silent Night Deadly Night – choke on the meta, bitches!) He meets a girl, but it doesn’t turn out well once her ex-boyfriend comes around. His eventual killing spree basically involves walking around a neighborhood and shooting innocent people, such as a guy who is just taking out his trash.
The guy who plays Ricky, Eric Freeman is the worst actor ever. I think he was hired because the makers of this film confused his eyebrow gymnastics with acting, and possibly his willingness to appear naked on camera as a second reason. During his killing spree, I kept thinking that back in the day, this would make a really good character that Bruce McCulloch could’ve played on Kids in the Hall. It was his type of deranged, over-the-top madness that was hilarious. I don’t how he’s looking now in his middle-age, but if the Kids in the Hall are still going to make another movie, maybe they should just remake this one.
Another weird thing about both movies is that while they show both Billy and Ricky as various ages, most of the actors look nothing alike. I guess having actors who at least look alike is also a luxury when you make these sorts of films.
I’m not sure whether I should tag these entries under “Catholic Horror”. Ricky blames Mother Superior from the orphanage as the cause for him and his brother snapping. While I can’t deny that she probably hurt these boys more than helped, I think Ricky may be a bit off, at least with his case – but if he’s just out to avenge his brother, then he’s right. Both these movies reek of Catholic guilt and the virgin/whore complex when it comes to the females that get involved or even just cross paths with Billy and Ricky.
There are at least two other Silent Night Deadly Night sequels that I know of. One was directed by Monte Hellman, and I’m a little sad that my boyfriend and I didn’t buy the VHS copy when our local video store was selling it off a few months ago. And I believe another was directed by Brian Yuzna. I’d like to assume that both of these sequels are better than the first two movies, but that’s a little dangerous.
Silent Night Deadly Night
This past Saturday night I got back at my boyfriend for Troll and Troll 2 with Silent Night Deadly Night and Silent Night Deadly Night 2. Sadly though, I think my boyfriend liked these movies, or was at least unfazed by them. He has a really sunny disposition. Having seen both of these movies a couple of years ago, I mostly sat and knitted through them while watching.
Silent Night Deadly Night starts with a family visiting their Grandpa who resides in a mental institution in Utah, which should tell you something right there. Grandpa is mostly catatonic, but when Mom and Dad leave the room to speak with the doctor and oldest son Billy is left alone with Grandpa, he snaps out of it and warns Billy that if he has been bad, Santa Claus will punish him tonight instead of bringing him presents, and that he better run if he sees Santa. Poor kid is reasonably frightened. On the way home, he questions his parents about Santa Claus’ motives, and scolds his mom when she calls Grandpa a “fool”. It is then and there they spot a guy in a Santa suit on the side of the road with a broken down station wagon. Santa approaches the car, and tries to steal it. The dad tries to drive off, but is shot. The mom is dragged out the car, sort of sexually assaulted, and killed. Billy has run off into the bushes to hide, and his baby brother Ricky I guess is still in the car. The guy in the Santa suit just robbed a convenience store and killed a clerk.
The movie jumps 3 years later to Christmas time at a Catholic orphanage, where Billy and Ricky now reside. Billy is about 10 years old and has a bit of a mullet now and kind of looks like that kid from A Christmas Story who later became a porn star (not Ralphie, his friend who got his tongue stuck on a freezing flagpole…no pun intended). His class is drawing Christmas drawings, and he seems to have drawn one where Santa is getting killed. He is sent to Mother Superior, who looks to be in extreme denial over how sad and troubled this boy may be, since Sister Margaret tells him that his aversion to Santa Claus gets worse each passing Christmas. He is sent to his room, but Sister Margaret allows him to come out and play with the other children. She goes on, and Billy hears noises – it’s the obligatory naked teens having sex scene. He looks through the key hole of their room and has a flashback to his mom being killed. He doesn’t hear Mother Superior coming up behind him. She shoves him out of the way, busts into the room, and beats the teens with a belt. She later grills Billy about what he saw, and if he understood what they were doing, and he says no. Then he gets beaten with a paddle. Mother Superior also decides that this will be the year that he will get over his fear of Santa Claus. She drags Billy to sit in his lap when Santa Claus comes to visit the orphanage on Christmas Day. Billy serves Santa an uppercut. It’s pretty impressive. He then runs to his room and cowers in the corner and cries about not wanting to be punished. Seriously, it’s hard not to feel sorry for this kid, especially since they’re not being subtle about all the complexes he’s getting courtesy of Mother Superior.
Jump forward again to 7 or 8 years later. Billy is now 18 and Mother Superior has gotten him a job at a local toy store. Billy is now somehow blond, buff, and vaguely both River Phoenix-ish looking and in his mid-20s. Everything is cool for awhile in montage land, despite the fact that he is making the mistake of having a crush on a co-worker, then Christmastime rolls around and Billy is a crankypants. He’s not doing such a good job as a stockboy anymore. But then again, working retail during Christmas sucks no matter what sort of store you’re working for. Or maybe, he had to listen to the same Christmas songs over and over again over the loudspeakers and two of those songs were that “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time” by Paul McCartney and “Hey Santa” by The Bangles – I know that made me crankier the last time I worked in retail over the holidays. Then the regular guy who dons the Santa suit calls in sick and the store owner decides that Billy would be a good Santa. Raise your hand if you think this is a good idea and have no idea where this film is going.
If you know where this is going, well, the only odd thing I can point out is that when Linnea Quigley’s obligatory horny teen character gets up to answer the door, she is topless and puts on a pair of shorts that is maybe two notches below a pair of Daisy Dukes on the short-meter, over a pair of underwear. Seriously, why bother if you’re not going to put a shirt on? And if there is snow outside, it’s too fucking cold to wear anything that revealing or to answer the door topless, even for a minute. That and the soundtrack her boyfriend decides to put on for their makeout/sex time is yacht rock Christmas music. I’d ask who would get turned on by that music, but I don’t want to know the answer.
But yeah, murder spree, of course. The whole movie begs the question, “What would’ve happened if Billy and Ricky were placed with a nice Jewish or Jehovah’s Witness family?” or, “What if they had gotten therapy, or at least were hugged every once in awhile?” or, “Seriously, I’d be grateful if some guy beat up or killed some other guy that was trying to rape me.”
The first time I saw this movie, my general reaction was, “it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.” This time though, I actually found it more sad than anything. This isn’t exactly a fun movie, not even in a “so bad it’s good” sort of way, since you’re basically seeing how a mean nun fucks up a sad little boy that’s been through some rough times. It’s pretty depressing, actually, sort of in the way that Rob Zombie’s Halloween re-make is also depressing. If you seen the documentary Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, it briefly discusses the controversy around this movie when it came out. The fact that the advertising and the movie itself featured killers in Santa suits angered parents, and protests caused this movie to be removed from theaters for awhile.
If you are in L.A., there is going to be a double-feature movie night with this movie and Black Christmas soon. Check out the Final Girl blog for details. Anchor Bay also just released this movie on remastered DVD last week. But alas, I watched both movies on VHS from the local video store, so I can’t say how the DVD looks. Netflix doesn’t have it yet.
And I just checked Wikipedia. This movie is up for a re-make now too, and may be coming out next year. I really can’t say I’m looking forward to it.
Mystery Science Theater 3000, Experiment # 321: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
“What do you want for Christmas Crow?”
“I want to decide who lives and who dies.”
This is one of the few MST3K episodes that can be found on one DVD instead of in a boxed set. It’s on the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Essentials DVD with the Manos: Hands of Fate episode. Be forewarned, some fans consider these two episodes graduate-level, so they probably shouldn’t be the first episodes you watch. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is easier to get through than Manos.
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians stars Pia Zadora, then a child, as a sad Martian. Martian children are expected to be little adults, much like some American children these days. They watch a lot of “Earth TV”, where they are first exposed to Santa Claus. Their Father goes to visit what I guess the Martian equivalent to an Oracle is and he says that they should get Santa Claus to visit Mars. So some of the men of the planet go to Earth, and kidnap two Earth children named Billy and Betty, as well as the real Santa Claus. There is a mustaschioed angry Martian man who thinks all this is nonsense and tries to kill the children and Santa, and a Martian named Droppo who is supposed to serve as comic relief, but instead induces cringing. It’s a pretty bad movie.
It’s a pretty funny episode, with some of the cuter host segments of the series, this time all Christmas-oriented. If anything, this episode is remembered for the introduction of the song “Let’s Have a Patrick Swayze Christmas,” written by Crow T. Robot. This episode makes frequent references to Roadhouse.
Fact: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is Pat Sajak’s second favorite Christmas movie.
A Charlie Brown Christmas
I don’t really look forward to very many classic Christmas specials on TV every year and I don’t really watch much TV at all lately, but A Charlie Brown Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer are always the ones I try look out for in early December. ABC has already aired A Charlie Brown Christmas twice – once last week, when it was still, uh, November, and this past Monday. I ordered “Linus Loves Lucy” for my cell phone ringer for December, although I’ll probably keep it after Christmas since that song makes me happy whenever I hear it.
Since I don’t know if this show airs outside the US, I’ll give a brief synopsis:
Charlie Brown, despondent over his quest to find the true meaning of Christmas, is brought on to direct the local Christmas play and finds that his friends aren’t willing to do the work or listen to his directions or ideas. They want to dance or worry about the parts they’ve been given to play instead. It gave me flashbacks to both the play direction class I took during my first year of college and every organizing experience I’ve had in Richmond. He is given another task of finding a Christmas tree (his friends want an aluminum one), but instead brings back a small pine tree that is dying that he thinks could just use some love. His friends get mad at him, and he walks home. There is a lovely speech about the true meaning of Christmas by Linus, and eventually Charlie Brown’s friends fix up the tree and they sing together.
I think the older I get, the more I relate to Charlie Brown. My blond younger sister just wants gift cards this year, for example. I don’t really plan on getting her any.
For a Christmas special that is now 41 years old, it holds up well. It’ll probably be on forever at this rate, since the subversive tone of Charlie Brown’s complaints of “Christmas going commercial” still rings true today, what with the term “Christmas Creep” becoming more common as each year passes and as more department stores open earlier and earlier each Black Friday (Kohl’s opened at 4am this year, and they don’t even sell electronics really). The flip side to this is that now one can buy a replica of the tiny dying pine tree from A Charlie Brown Christmas for $24 at Urban Outfitters. Replicas of Linus’ blanket is also sold with $5 going to Project Linus, which gives handmade blankets to sick children, as well as a plush Snoopy with $5 going to the Humane Society of the United States. I recently watched a special on Charles Schultz for the American Masters series on PBS. He did have control over the toys and memorabilia of the Peanuts characters, although it made no mention who takes care of it now since his death a couple of years ago.
There is a joke on I believe the Santa Claus Conquers the Martians episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 where Joel states that A Charlie Brown Christmas is only 2 minutes long after you take out all the Dolly Madison Cakes commercials. When shown on TV, I can kind of believe it, although it’s not Dolly Madison Cakes commercials now. Are Dolly Madison Cakes still around? The commercial breaks are cut in awkwardly sometimes. I haven’t watched this special on DVD yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it clocks in at 15 minutes or less.
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