SANTA ON THE BEACH

A review requested by Andrew Johnson, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny isn't an inexplicable movie. Hell, I'm about to explicate it here in just a moment. But it's exactly the kind of movie that feels inexplicable, colliding random nonsense in a matrix that we're obliged to call a narrative more out of habit than accuracy. The plot more resembles a transcription of a bad peyote experience than a motion picture, and its execution is at places so determinedly bereft of even the most limited, accidental filmmaking talent that it doesn't seem right to call the resultant object an actual work of cinema.

So with that to whet your appetite, let's go into the thing in proper chronological order, which naturally begins with the world of Florida roadside attractions. Here, we find among many such places an amusement park, Pirates World of Dania, near the southern tip of the Florida peninsula. The place opened in 1967, apparently built largely out of bits and pieces bought on the cheap from other parks that had picked up nicer, newer toys; some rides were salvaged from the wreck of the underperforming 1964-'65 New York World's Fair. It was, naturally enough, themed to piracy, with its signature ride a cruise on a full-scale pirate ship, but among its themed lands was a fairy tale exhibit.

Cursory research - undoubtedly there is such a thing as deep research full of footnotes and recovered historical documents, but there's also such a thing as wasting your goddamn time on a surreally terrible kids' movie - has not revealed to me who made the decision or when, but there came a point when the Pirates World powers that be decided to promote their park with a series of movies. Three of these came out in 1970: the documentary Musical Mutiny, about a concert held at the park, and the fantasies Jack and the Beanstalk and Thumbelina, all directed by Barry Mahon, who spent the '60s cranking out nudie flicks by the handful in the burgeoning Florida exploitation scene; his only film prior to his trilogy for Pirates World that wasn't smut was 1969's The Wonderful Land of Oz. Meanwhile, his Wikipedia page, at the time of this writing, almost exclusively focuses on his World War II record. Barry Mahon is a fascinating and slippery enigma, I mean to say.

Jack and Thumbelina were both aimed squarely at the kiddie matinee marketplace, and I do not know how well they did - cursory research, folks - but by the end of 1971, Pirates World had more to worry about than residuals from the cheap-ass films shot on their properties as a bit of feature-length advertising. For in October of that year, the Walt Disney Company cut the ribbon on Walt Disney World in Orlando, some 200 miles north of Dania, and the nature of Florida tourism was irrevocably changed forever. With the beefiest tourist trap ever devised by man or some dark angel serving as a black hole in the middle of the state, sucking in all the visitors to the state, a rinky-dink little amusement park had virtually no chance of surviving, and Pirates World didn't - its holding company declared bankruptcy in 1973 and the park was gone by the end of 1975. Before that happened, though, the Pirates World folks rolled the dice on one more movie. It visibly bears the scars of a production that had no budget for resources: got a cheap Santa suit and a hideous Easter Bunny costume? Then you have a movie starring Santa and the Easter Ice Cream Bunny, whatever the actual fuck an ice cream bunny is. Not one that gives out ice cream, that's for sure. And in the time-honored tradition of chiseling film producers throughout history, the minds behind Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny figured that you could surely save some money if, instead of building a whole feature from scratch, you take a feature that's already just sitting there and add crap to it. Which is why almost two-thirds of the alleged Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny is composed of the entirety of Mahon's 62-minute Thumbelina, presented so uncut that it even includes its original opening and closing credits, with a little more than a half hour of new movie directed by the shadowy R. Winer, apparently working without benefit of cinematographers, editors, or any other credited crew.

In the beginning of the movie, though, we know none of this. All we get is the in medias res spectacle of a workshop full of North Pole elves busying themselves while waiting for Santa to return from parts unknown. It takes, I'm not exaggerating in the slightest, less than 15 seconds to determine just how impossible Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is going to be. For that gives us enough time to gawk in dismal amazement at R. Winer's complete inability to do, like anything right: by that point, the camera has already visibly wobbled on its tripod, and the cluster of child actors playing the elves have sung enough of their shrill jingle that we can tell how none of them were rehearsed, or possibly even given a full set of lyrics. The most salient aspect of their song, in the early going, is that they're not all singing in time, or the same key, and it's nigh impossible to make out what the hell it is they're trying to communicate. Which is just as well, because as it becomes more audible, we find those lyrics consist of vile passages like:

Tra-la-la-la-la, oh where is Santa Claus?
Tra-la-la-la-la, Santa isn't here
Tra-la-la-la-la, we'll just have to work some more
Tra-la-la-la-la, Santa's never been late before

Complete with the inconsistent rhyme scheme and burst of arrhythmia in the last line, all shouted out to a gratingly tuneless melody. It's like beat poetry as improvised by preteens. Who are, incidentally, credited as "Kids" from Ruth Foreman's Pied Piper Playhouse, with "Kids" in exactly those scare quotes, and so I start to thinking, if they're not really "kids", then what the fuck are they? Eventually, one of the girl-elves peeks out the front door to see stock footage of caribou, and deduces from this that Santa's reindeer came back to the North Pole before. Where is Santa? Santa's nev'r been late b'fore! The film has not yet celebrated its 60th second at this point, but it has already mounted a compelling argument that it's the worst thing ever made with a motion picture camera.

Santa, anyway, got stuck on a beach in Florida. It's a few days before Christmas, and he was touring the States on his last-minute "Naughty or Nice" check, when something happened to I don't know what. But it left him without reindeer, and his sleigh mired intractably in the sand. Like, centimeters of sand. Since it is clearly impossible for the powers of a demigod to fight such a monstrous fate, Santa uses telepathic powers to summon local suburban children to his aid, and this is depicted with a vibrato post-production effect that makes him sound like the leader of a death cult. Oh, but before that happens, he gets a little song about how lonely, scared, and hot he is. And the outside footage was filmed without synchronised sound, so Jay Clark, in the role of Santa, isn't actually singing, he's just pantomiming. And, seemingly not pantomiming to the actual song, but just assured by R. Winer that he should wave his hands around like he's dancing, or conducting an orchestra of ghosts, and they'd make it work. They didn't make it work. Clark jerks his hands around without being more than incidentally in time with the music, while his or somebody else's voice floats above the film. If the idea was to communicate that Santa is about to drop dead from heat stroke, then mission accomplished.

So the kids - beg pardon, the "kids" arrive to be given their instructions from this terrifying beast with the hollow voice emanating from underneath a fake beard that was not even a little bit up to the demands of south Florida humidity, and looks like Clark was carrying it around in his pocket before gluing it to his face. Those instructions involve rounding up animals to serve as surrogate reindeer, and for something like seven or eight hours we get to watch as Santa demands that the kids try to back the animals up to his sleigh to be hooked up, only to be stymied by the fact that most quadrupeds are not terribly keen on being forced to back up. So it doesn't even get as far as "Ho ho ho! This sheep can't fly!" (yes, sheep, the favored house pet of all suburban Florida children), because we're too busy watching Santa trying to bully animals and saying condescending things to kids while he just stands there like doing nothing at all. Also, the first animal is a gorilla, in a remarkably stupid misjudgment of comic pacing: you do a couple of more or less normal animals first, then you trot out the dude in the gorilla suit, as an absurd twist. But you sure as shit don't lead with the gorilla, because that promises zaniness, and the endless minutes that follow are the closest thing I can imagine to the polar opposite of zany.

Watching all of this unfold are none other than Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, classic boy heroes of Mark Twain's beloved novels. Tom at one point has a raccoon on a raft with him, and boy, I guarantee you've never seen an animal in a movie as monumentally freaked the fuck out as that raccoon is to be on that raft, getting thrown around by some idiot kid. Tom and Huck never interact with the rest of the characters, and eventually sort of drift away; I gather that they are the inspiration for the silent, Christ-like Watcher in Kieślowski's Dekalog.

Eventually, Santa gives up, gathers his clan around him, and decides to cheer them up by telling a story. Or by letting them get a peek at the foot-long patch of sweat blackening the seat of his pants, proudly showcased in a shot that R. Winer actually permitted to be included in his film. I get that films like this are shot fast and without a chance for re-takes, but seriously. If you accidentally get a shot of Santa gushing sweat out of his ass crack, you find way to fix it, even if it means that you don't have time for all 19 inserts of grass during his mopey song from earlier.

But anyway, storytime. And guess what, it's Thumbelina! Which we see in its entirety for the next hour, and I have to say, it's an enormous relief. By any imaginable yardstick, it's terrible, but it has this in its favor: the actors move their mouths and sound comes out in a way that generally matches their lips. And Shay Garner, playing Thumbelina, is a stilted, unnatural performer, but when she's not talking, she's actually in possession of a commanding screen presence. So anyway, Thumbelina takes place in Pirates World, at the Hans Christian Andersen hut, or whatever, where a teen girl (Garner) wanders around looking at dioramas while listening to Andersen's fairy tale being related over loudspeakers by a narrator (Dorothy Brown Green) who turns out to be playing a character in the story. And as she does this, the girl visualises herself as the tiny little human girl who was kidnapped from her home and almost raped by frogs before being almost shamed into marriage to an elderly mole.

Though he wasn't going around trying to burn the very notion of the cinema down to the ground, like R. Winer would two years later, Mahon directs the movie pretty much exactly the way that you'd expect from a pornographer in his second year making children's films. There's an awkward, tableau-like staging everywhere you turn, and the plot beats are all coaxed out with the same dull, unsurprised energy of a woman who accidentally just took a shower while the TV repairman was in her apartment. The sets could not possibly resemble plaster over a wire frame more than they do, except for the mole's tunnel, which looks like an enormous birth canal made out of plastic and the broken dreams of children. The costumes, at least, are a bit fancy, with all kinds of articulating parts, but they're at least a bit nightmare-inducing; the moles have long beak-shaped faces that make them look like a cross between a rat, a raven, and that one dream where the shadow men were chasing you through the cemetery in the forest.

But you know what? It's functional. Ugly, cheap, blandly-staged, and tone-deaf. But functional. The way scenes are cut together indicates some understanding of how we process visual relationships in cinema. This praise cannot be extended to the framing narrative of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny, which frequently jams in cutaways to nothing at all, while finding a way to make the physical position of a bunch of kids sitting still in front of an unmoving sleigh difficult to parse. And it always, always calls the most attention to how much Santa's voice has nothing to do with Santa's staring, unmoving face.

After a blissful hour of boring, unattractive kiddie crap, Thumbelina spits its girl back out into the wonderful land of Pirates World, full of fun rides and exciting adventures, and Santa stops narrating whatever the hell he's narrating - I get that it would have taken, like, an extra day to cut out all the parts of Thumbelina that suggest the whole thing takes place in a room full of dioramas in a threadbare theme park, but surely they could have spared one day? - to resign himself to the fate of dying in the hot Florida sun, and he chases all the kids away. There's a long passage in which he talks about removing his coat, and then removes it. But just in time, Santa's very good friend the Ice Cream Bunny shows up, riding his... vintage fire truck... through Pirates World. In something like real time - oh my, the nice, long attention paid to the Ice Cream Bunny's path through a wooded road and to the beach! Now you start caring about continuity, eh R. Winer? There's a shot of Santa just sitting there, waiting like he's just sat there waiting for everything in the whole movie, watching as the Ice Cream Bunny, and his truck full of children, drive in from all the way back on the Z-axis. As a study in the slowness of movement and the gradual development of time, it is the rival of Oleg Yankovsky carrying a lit candle from one of a pool to the other and back in Nostalghia.

Eventually, the Ice Cream Bunny arrives, and it is an eldritch abomination; there's a long shot of a dog jumping and barking at it frantically, and I think we're meant to take it as "oh, the happy dog, it wants to jump up and lick the Ice Cream Bunny!", but anyone who knows dogs will immediately understand it as the natural response of canine fury to something horrifying and wrong that needs to barked all the way back to hell. And it's not just the freaky design of the thing, though its coal-black eyes, the right one of which sags in a sorry approximation of a wink, would cause any dog or man to feel the chill grip of the abyss. Even worse, in a film that has to this point only evinced a rough relationship with the basics of editing, things collapse complete when the Ice Cream Bunny shows up; it's a flurry of dissociated shots hacked together in a rough arrhythmia that resembles a freak-out scene in a psychedelic movie. But Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is no head film. It's a bad enough trip while totally sober. There's nothing in it that makes any kind of linear sense, with its plot - such as it is - lazily meandering forward while the images only occasionally tie into that plot, and all of it frequently erupting in moments of the most repellent attempt to appeal to children with a sweaty, rumpled Santa and a Cthulhic humanoid rabbit.

Anyway, it's on YouTube, so I leave you now to your best judgment.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1988: In which the mindless destruction and brutality that have defined the 1980s in cinema attain artistic perfection

Speaking entirely personally, you understand, I'd be quick to identify the 1980s as the worst decade in the history of American filmmaking (though I recognise the strong argument in favor of giving that title to the 1960s, and frankly, the 2010s aren't heading in a very promising direction). It was a formulaic, money-driven, recklessly safe period in Hollywood, even conceding that Hollywood is always all of those things; and it certainly produced a smaller proportion of for-real masterpieces than any other time frame. But even here, in the pimpled ass-end of American cinema, there was one great shining beacon of light: the 1980s were maybe the single best period ever for English-language action film (and the "English-language" qualifier is possibly unnecessary, if the handful of '80s Hong Kong action films I've seen are representative). It was a perfect storm of things: the rejection by mainstream filmmakers of the philosophical and moral self-consciousness of the 1970s made it possible to tell simple stories of good guys fighting bad guys, the cultural conservatism that accompanied the Reagan Revolution provided fertile ground for telling stories of rugged all-American heroes triumphantly maintaining the status quo, the explosion of interest in special effects and visual effects in the wake of Star Wars allowed for more convincing and expansive explosions. Some of the action films of the day were great, and some of them were great while also being kind of lousy, and some were just unpleasant and terrible. But they had a sparkle that no action cinema before had possessed, and which action cinema since then has sought to replicate, to usually degraded effect. It was an age of exorbitant brutality and the finest hokey one-liners in the genre history; it was the greatest period of the Big, Dumb, Fun action movie.

And it produced its finest work near the end, in 1988, with one of the handful of movies that can be fairly said to have completely overshadowed the entirety of their genre: Die Hard, a tony production released by 20th Century Fox, directed by John McTiernan of the great Arnold Schwarzenegger flick Predator from the year prior, with a script by first-timer Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza, one of the key figures in the development of this particular strain of action cinema. Its influence can't be noted any more simply than by recalling that for a solid decade after, damn near every major action film released, whether it justified the comparison or not, was described as "Die Hard on a ____". Thus was not merely the impact of the film's terrifically effective, spare set-up, but also the degree to which it was already recognised as the exemplar of its form.

To begin with, Die Hard is a magnificent example of screenwriting discipline - I'm not exaggerating even a hair when I call it one of the most technically perfect screenplays of the whole decade. Everything that's in the film serves an extremely specific purpose, nothing is wasted, nothing is duplicated. If something is established in the first act, it will pay off later, even when it doesn't seem like it has to. There is, for example, the matter of a watch, introduced as symbol of the broken marriage at the heart of the film, and for a long time, it doesn't need to fill another purpose. And then, at the very end, it's called back for double duty: first to serve as a physical prop that fulfills a particular story need, second to round off the film's metaphorical reconstruction of that marriage. That's an obvious example, because it is foregrounded; but you cannot pick up any moment, even some of the most apparently tossed-off comic lines, that aren't there for a structural purpose. It's a miracle, like a building in which all of the ornate decoration is actually, upon closer inspection, revealed to be the raw girders, and what looks like garish Baroque messiness is in fact stripped-down Bauhaus severity. Which is a tremendously impressive feat for a film that was being re-written on the fly and frequently reliant on improvisation (see also: the equally flawless, equally jerry-rigged Casablanca)

Which is lovely for all the screenwriting students in the house, but mechanical perfection is only important if it's in service to anything else. And as a story, Die Hard is the most humane work of '80s action. Briefly (and befitting its high concept time, briefly is enough), the film tells of John McClane (Bruce Willis), a New York cop who arrives in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, in the hopes of reconciling with his estranged wife, Holly Gennaro (Bonnie Bedelia). This requires him to show up at her company party celebrating a major Japanese-American business collaboration - this was near the end of the era when American business actually thought that Japan would be taking over the economy at any moment - in the sleek glass monster of a skyscraper known as Nakatomi Plaza (played by Fox Plaza, the studio's corporate headquarters). And he's not the only guest who probably shouldn't be there: this party is about to be crashed by a group of international terrorists led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), whose radical political scheming is really just a blind for their actual goal, which is to still a gratuitous quantity of money. McClane is the only person who's not immediately caught by the terrorists' first strike, making him the only person who can do anything to stop them.

And we have here the ingredients for a typical action fantasy (and, in fact, the film was first pitched as a sequel to Schwarzenegger's Commando), with two key shifts, both made because McTiernan decided to make some tweaks to the script. One of these is the introduction of the terrorists' actual, wholly mercenary motives. The other - which suits extremely well the casting of Willis, after a great deal of effort to find a more established action star - was to make McClane a bit of a clod and fairly overtly a dick (there is not one line in the script to suggest that Holly shares anything like the same responsibility for fucking up their marriage as he does, with his passive-aggressive alpha male posturing), and entirely fragile and human. He's capable of action movie stunts, of course, more than even a well-trained NYC cop could plausibly handle, but it takes a lot out of him: he gets pummeled, worn down, and scarred, and over the course of the film's one night (another McTiernan suggestion, apparently), we see all of that activity dragging him down. Not for nothing is one of the film's most iconic scenes his painful trek in bare feet across broken glass - it's a painful, permanent moment like you'd never see Schwarzenegger or Stallone or Norris experience.

The entirely physical, destructible hero, and the reduction of the conflict to, quite literally a cops & robbers scenario make Die Hard one of the most narrow, relatable action films of its generation. The stakes are not the free world; they're a disintegrating marriage. The hero isn't a mumble-mouthed tank; he's the slovenly quipster from the TV comedy Moonlighting. Everything about the film is calculated to bring it down to a level where it's not fantasy about larger-than-life supermen on the Bond model; it's a fantasy about Guys Like Us (and it is, one should admit at some point, a film entirely committed to a male audience; the best American action film it may be, but still bound by the rules of the American action film marketplace).

All this is what gives the film its surprisingly effective heart and emotional weight; it falls to the skills of McTiernan and his outstanding crew to express that heart in the context of one of the most exciting action thrillers ever made. Just as much as Die Hard has a perfectly constructed script, so is it perfectly made in all other ways; crisply edited by Frank J. Urioste and John F. Link with shots that communicate exactly what they have to in exactly the time it takes to communicate that (particularly in the marvelous, unshowy four-way crosscutting finale), punctuated by relentless, noisy, rousing sound design, buoyed by Michael Kamen's score, mixing generic action clichés with witty, playful insertions of snatches from traditional Christmas music, and nods to Beethoven's 9th symphony (yet another point insisted upon by McTiernan, who wanted to evoke Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange). The film has kineticism to spare, and a driving, building sense of space constricting and tension between characters escalating, enough so that its 132-minute running time, which by all rights should be offensively out-of-bounds for escapist genre fare like this, is over before it even begins to register (reliably, every time I watch the film, I'm dumbfounded that it's already 24 minutes in before the terrorists start to enact their plot, and the first hour especially seems over before the film is even done lacing its running shoes).

It's fluid, entirely momentum-based audio-visual storytelling at its very finest; there's not an ounce of fat on the movie, and the character-based material and the strictly action-oriented stunt and effects work are balanced so perfectly that it's hard to say whether this is a light drama about a man trying to be a better husband, incidentally punctuated by enormously loud gunshots; or if it's an action thriller that gets an unusual amount of mileage from the broad but insightful character sketches living inside of it. Either way, it's a masterpiece of populist filmmaking: every foot set right in order to make the most entertaining, immediately accessible film that the genius of McTiernan and company could manage to scrounge up. It's shallow in its goals, sure, but if every shallow film were this confident in the execution of all details from the smallest grace notes in lighting to the broadest scope of design and setting, and this rich in the iconic, almost mythic simplicity of its characters, I don't suppose that "shallow" would have much bite as a complaint.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1988
-Producer Steven Spielberg, director Robert Zemeckis, and the Walt Disney Company join forces to make the technically magnificent live-action/animation hybrid Who Framed Roger Rabbit
-Penny Marshall's fantasy Big is the first film directed by a woman to break $100 million at the U.S. box office
-Once upon a time, Mike Nichols's Working Girl is what mainstream feminism looked like

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1988
-Japan's Studio Ghibli releases a double feature to make your heart rise, with My Neighbor Totoro, and then crash into a thousand tear-stained fragments, with Grave of the Fireflies
-Pedro Almodóvar hits the international mainstream with the zany black comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
-George Sluizer's Dutch-French thriller The Vanishing pushes the psycho-thriller to new heights at the art house

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE LATE '90s, or: SNOWMAN'S LAND

Those of you who've been around for a while have undoubtedly picked up on my certain disdain for movies that play the "we know we're making a bad movie, so it's actually funny that our movie is bad" card. And oh my Lord, does the 1997 direct-to-video Jack Frost lean on that conceit as unrelentingly as it possibly can. I'd say that it's just the usual post-Scream meta-horror nonsense, except that based on the dates involved, I'm pretty certain that there was no time for Jack Frost to have been influenced by that slasher satire. So nope, the filmmakers managed to come up with this one all on their own, bless their hearts.

I am not, of course, claiming that Jack Frost should have been made with a great deal of sincerity and seriousess. It's a film about a serial killer cannibal whose body merges with snow and leaves him a murderous, psychopathic snowman. I am among those who subscribes to the philosophy that there are no poor ideas for movies, only poor execution, but "psycho snowman slasher" is an idea that's close enough to objectively poor that a deliberate self-parody is probably the only approach that might have been acceptable even a little bit. The film is comedy as much as it is horror; I think it's important to acknowledge that, because the last thing one ever wants to do is to arrive in the position that others might accuse him of not "getting" Jack Frost, of all damn movies. For I understand it has quite the appreciative cult following these days.

But it's one thing to get the movie, and another to enjoy the experience on any level whatsoever, and this is where Jack Frost loses me. Indeed, it's largely because it's so open about its own conceptual badness, and the poverty of its execution, and the general stupidity of all the things onscreen that I found it rather enervating to watch. When you're confronted with something so obviously unacceptable as Jack Frost, the best thing to do is to mock it; this is the crux of bad movie fandom. But there's simply no fun at all in mocking a movie that comes as pre-digested as this, making all of its own jokes at its own expense, insisting on its own insincerity, flaunting the shabbiness of its effects work. Jack Frost is a movie that doesn't require a viewer, in essence. And there's something intensely alienating about dealing with such a prospect.

But deal with it we shall. Things open promisingly enough, with some genuinely creative opening credits that showcase all the actors and crew heads' names on ornaments on a Christmas tree, as an unseen and uncredited Uncle Henry tells a holiday story to his niece, who has asked for something both happy and scary. And things cease to be promising, because the (obviously adult) actor voicing the niece elected to pitch her voice at such a squeaky whine that it takes all of five or six syllables before listening to her has become completely, absolutely intolerable. Thankfully, this narrative framework never reappears, and nobody in the actual cast is half as obnoxious, but it's a quick, easy way for the movie to earn itself some enemies even before it has shown the first human being.

The story Uncle Henry tells is, he claims, set in more or less real time, as a famous killer named Jack Frost (Scott MacDonald) - his actual birth name, we are led to believe, which speaks ill of his parents - is being trucked from prison to the execution site, which isn't how executions work. But movies need beginnings, and there are plenty of other reasons to be mad at the plot later on. What happens, in a nutshell, is that Frost manages to kill one of his guards, and in the confusion the execution truck plows into a tanker from a genetic research company, allowing Jack to escape just long enough to get doused in a jet of some kind of outrageously caustic acid that melts his flesh and bone down to nothing, and the liquid that used to be the killer merges with snow. And then starts throbbing.

The action then cuts to Snowmonton, the snowman capital of the world, as it pretty much would have to be. Here, it is time for the annual snowman contest, which is apparently such a big deal that every molecule of frozen water has been swept from the city streets to form the snowmen being carved in the town square, because Snowmonton is, in virtually every shot we see throughout the film, totally devoid of snow. In fairness, that was just a freak accident - among the man one-liners peppering the end credits, we see references to freak weather that left Big Bear Lake, California totally devoid of winter during the period that Jack Frost's producers had arranged to shoot there. Such are the vicissitudes of no-budget filmmaking.

Anyway, in this sleepy little town, we find the local sheriff Sam Tiler (Christopher Allport), who happens to have been the exact law enforcement agent to take down Frost in the first place. He has these many months been plagued by doubts concerning a threat the killer left that he would take his revenge, and apparently has been worried all along that Frost would find a way to escape. He probably didn't assume that way would involve becoming a sentient matrix of H₂O who can melt or freeze at will, and spends most of his time in the form of a snowman completed by Sam's son Ryan (Zack Eginton), with his coal eyes and carrot nose following along as he morphs, despite neither coal nor carrots being subject to the same freezing point as water.

Sam's laconic presence and his friendly relationship with the Snowmontonians having put us squarely in Twin Peaks territory (an impression solidified by the scenes set in the cutesily ineffectual sheriff's office), it only makes sense when the film starts copying from The X-Files as well, in the form of a secret government conspiracy to retrieve Frost. And so we have FBI Agent Manners (Stephen Mendel) and a scientist named Stone (Rob LaBelle) onhand to be mysterious and get in Sam's way, and not tell him any of the things he might need to ensure that his community doesn't end up entirely dead. Though they have no way of guessing at the scope of Frost's abilities to manipulate his form, which includes being able to shoot dagger-sharp icicles on top of everything else.

There's no point in harping on how stupid this is, since the film already knows that - since the film, in fact, prides itself on being stupid. But it's still not very entertaining to watch. "Bad on purpose" goes only as far as the filmmakers' sense of humor and irony, and the creators of Jack Frost - who are largely just Michael Cooney (director and writer) and Jeremy Paige (producer and co-scenarist) - have some pretty lead-footed jokes up their sleeve. Frost is a quipster killer: he has to be, since the budget permitted only a really dodgy snowman puppet whose mouth barely moves, and which is otherwise not articulated. So we get a lot of one-liners, most of which aren't funny at all, and some of which don't even make sense. At one point, for example, Frost has taken over a victim's body, but gives up and allows himself to be vomited out. Having thus reformed, he snarks "Don't eat yellow snow!", à propos of nothing happening in that moment. I suppose there are only so many thematically tight puns a snowman killer can make, but some semblance of a relationship between ideas would have been appreciated.

That relationship holds true for essentially everything in the movie. The plot, at its most basic, is a "killer comes back for revenge" situation, but most of Frost's actions have no motivation at all. He kills an old man with absolutely no connection to anything in the rest of the movie; he then merciless hunts down all the members of a family who happen to live in Snowmonton, but are otherwise quite uninvolved in Sam's life. Although the last surviving member of that family, Jill (Shannon Elizabeth), is preparing to have sex with her boyfriend (Darren Campbell) in Sam's house when Frost catches up with her and kills her, so that's kind of a thing that is in any way part of the story. This is after Frost goes all the way out of town to kill a deputy (Brian Leckner) and still his police cruiser.

It feels like one thing only: an attempt to inflate a running time by adding in a bunch of spurious deaths, pure slasher movie boilerplate. It's funny only in that it's insincere, and because Frost can't help but say zany things; I feel like it's a movie for people who absolutely adored the later Nightmare on Elm Street movies, the ones where Freddy Krueger had largely turned into a murdering stand-up comedian; it shares their disregard for cohesion and absolutely ghastly wordplay. So it's much too jokey to work for even a single scene as horror (though I can imagine the more squeamish being thrown for a loop by Frost's initial disintegration, or by his ultimate demise), with its crap one-liners and its straitlaced absurdity, and its electronic keyboard score borrowing heavily and ironically from traditional Christmas carols. And it's much too shouty, snotty, and mean to be effect as comedy. Perhaps with more tastelessness, as in the early work of Peter Jackson, this could have been something; but the filmmakers couldn't afford to be tasteless. The scene where Frost rapes Jill to death is tasteless, I suppose, but not in the right way, not at all. I was mostly glad that the filmmakers refrained from having that rape come in the form of him penetrating her with his carrot nose, as the blocking seemed eager to foreshadow at one point; but the point where we arrive at "it was such a relief when it didn't include the most objectionable possible rape scene", we have scraped through the bottom of the barrel and dug a rather comfortably-sized hole in the ground beneath it.

I will concede that there are things about I liked. Allport's plain, taciturn performance actually works pretty well - it's the only thing in the entire movie that feels like it actually falls in the "played straight for laughs" register that the film's fanbase sees in every detail. And I greatly admired the hammy sassiness of Marsha Clark as the sheriff's office secretary. Cooney also did a surprisingly good job placing the camera, considering the scale of the production: both in his cleverness in hiding the snow-free locations, and in stagins some genuinely inventive visual jokes, something for which I was deeply grateful amidst all the arch irony.

Anyway, it is the most perfect late-'90s horror film imaginable: gimmicky to the point of idiocy, and post-modern in the most irritating conceivable way, an equal failure of both horror and comedy. If it at least came by its badness honestly, its ineptitude and styrofoam-covered-in-felt snowman suit might have at least been charming; but as it is, the film's self-awareness just makes it tediously smug.

Body Count: 12, though one is more implied than shown, and also the 38 murders Frost committed prior to the film's opening, which is a massively cheap way to make your killer seem more dangerous than we ever see him onscreen.

* * * * *

But wait! What about that OTHER terrifying movie from the late '90s called Jack Frost?

It says everything that the titular character character from the 1997 Jack Frost is the soul of a serial killer, who turned his victims into meat pies, inhabiting a snowman who murders people, including one whose face he bites off with his icicle teeth, and he can't be compared even a little bit to the visceral, Lovecraftian horror of the titular character from the 1998 Jack Frost, which is a fantasy movie for children.

Basically, it's a horrible Christmas-themed version of the musical Carousel (or, if you want to be snooty, the play Liliom, upon which Carousel was based), in which a middle-aged man on the cusp of his big break as a rock star ignores his son, dies, is reincarnated as a snowman, and learns how to be a better father. It's entirely possible that this would work, somewhat, if the snowman wasn't voiced by Michael Keaton, an actor who is frequently capable of greatness, but whose line deliveries tend towards an edgy, tightly-coiled energy that suggest somebody ready to blow just underneath the words; and given Jack Frost's tendency to speak largely in snow-related quips (seriously, the two Jack Frost pictures are fucking indistinguishable, except that in one of them the bully loses a snowball fight, and in the other the bully is decapitated with a sled), this makes him seem like a bent rage addict funneling all his anger into caustic humor (it's way too reminiscent of the performance he gave in Beetlejuice, actually, and that's just not okay). There's one particularly grim moment of soul-sucking wordplay where the snowman and his son are celebrating a shared triumph, and Jack says, "You da man!", because remember, this was made in the late '90s, and his son Charlie (Joseph Cross) replies, "No, you da man!", and Jack quips back, "Nope! I'm the snowman! HAH HAH HAH". And as lamentable as that pun is, and emblematic of how dire and insulting the bulk of Mark Steven Johnson's screenplay is, the part that really goes from, "oh, what a routinely lousy children's movie", to "GOD GET IT OFF ME IT'S BURNING" is that fake, forced laugh, Keaton coughing out the sounds of mirth so unnaturally that if he had immediately turned around and ripped the boy's head off with his eerie branch arms with their floppy, flat little mitten hands, it would have been infinitely more understandable than the filmmakers' desire that we find this cute.

So Keaton's a problem. But even he is only the second-biggest liability in the film, for he is but the voice and briefly-human precursor of Jack the Snowman, an eldritch abomination if I ever did see one. It's a singularly persuasive piece of machinery built by the Jim Henson Creature Shop (there are a few shots in which it is played by a glossy CGI effect, as well), but "persuasive" means here only that it is convincing in its movements as something living, not that it actually convinces as an animated snowman. And it fails even more at seeming even slightly appealing or friendly - it looks like a perversity of nature, moving its horrible, rubbery mouth and flexing its horrible, overly expressive facial features, and staring with its unpleasantly small eyes that look pitch black (black as coal, you might say) in all but bright, direct light, in which case you can see the glue-grey irises around the edges of those eyes. And begad, if the deep black eyes with nothing behind them but the infinity of death are freaky, the eyes with just enough detail to look vaguely human are much, much worse.

Other than the fact that its protagonist was issued from a rank pit of Hell to torment the godly, Jack Frost is actually pretty blandly generic kiddie filmmaking, with no story really deserving of the name: Jack was so busy with his career that he almost missed Christmas, but decided just in the nick of time to head to be with his son and wife Gabby (Kelly Preston). But a freak snowstorm hit, and he crashed his car and died. He died on Christmas Day. If nothing else, I admire it for having the balls to go there. The snowballs, I would say, except that the movie already makes, like, five puns about snow balls, and I don't want to relive them.

So anyway, Jack comes back and life lessons, though the stakes of the film are so ungodly low that I couldn't really tell you why the universe would bother bending its rules to make this miracle happen. And Charlie himself seems largely unmoved; the emotional beats, at least as they are played by the actors and director Troy Miller, would be entirely unchanged if Jack had simply disappeared for months after a boring, run-of-the-mill divorce (an impression strengthened by how very little Preston gets to do, mostly just looking alarmed in reaction shots and never interacting with the snowman until the film's penultimate scene). There's absolutely no overarching plot, simply scenes during which the snowman thaws Charlie's resentment, and eventually teaches him some hockey tips, and then when enough scenes have transpired to make a feature, there's a brief race against time leading arbitrarily into a desultory wrap-up, suggesting that Johnson understood that copying E.T. was a safe bet, but didn't care why.

It is, unsurprisingly, not very good cinema. Miller and the hilariously overqualified cinematographer László Kovács (the things that happened to that man's career after the 1980s started up are indescribably depressing) are hellbent on close-ups that use the anamorphic frame in the most artless way: a lot of heads just kind of bobbing around in oppressive widescreen space. There are some clumsy attempts at kinetic editing, and the most aesthetically distinctive thing about the film is its unusually brutish soundtrack, beginning with a hard-rock cover of "Frosty the Snowman" played by Jack's band, moving on past a dumbfounding use of Fleetwood Mac's melancholic and not at all child-appropriate "Landslide", apparently because it has the words "snow-covered" in the lyrics, and arriving at a singularly unforgivable cover of "Gimme Some Lovin'" by Hanson, because remember, this was made in the late '90s.

Basically, it is everything I have ever hated about children's entertainment combined in one place: canned emotions and deadening plot points of the utmost predictability crammed together with shrill, sardonic anti-humor and a lazy reliance on musical montages to paper over the sucking holes in the conflict. Add the viscerally unappealing central character, and the whole thing is just the absolute pits. It took a lot to be the worst reincarnation fantasy titled Jack Frost from the second half of the 1990s, but by golly, they found a way.

Body Count: Just the one.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1934: In which a charismatic child lifts a society's Depression

It is not possible to talk about the Hollywood star system or film culture or really mass media in general as those things existed in the 1930s without talking about Shirley Temple. She defines her era in a way that very few movie performers have: she was the most popular movie star in the world for four consecutive years, 1935-'38, enough to make her among the most internationally-recognisable human women of the decade, reaching a level of fame and ubiquity that only a tiny handful of movie stars could ever conceive of. And she did all of it before celebrating her 11th birthday.

The reason for Temple's appeal is and was obvious (and has nothing to do with Graham Greene's insane postulations about a cult of middle-aged pedophiles): little kids are adorable, and little kids who can sing and dance and sell a joke doubly so. The actress's later crack attributing her fame to audiences in the Depression cheering themselves up with a dog, Rin Tin Tin, and a little girl, is obviously reductive, but obvious explanations don't have to be wrong explanations, and you'd have to be deliberately ignoring the whole history of pop culture to deny that in rough economic times, people generally prefer easy, escapist fare (consider the explosion in America of nihilistic crime dramas and biting, sarcastic comedy in the economic heyday of the '50s, contrasted with the rise in popularity of simplistic adventure movies in the late '70s, perfectly overlapping with the debilitating spike in gas prices. Or, hell, the plethora of superhero movies in our own current downturn, offering straightforward answers to bluntly delineated problems that resemble modern life not at all). Watching Temple mug and charm her way through a field of cooing adults is soothing, and the fact that all of her movies tended to espouse a hugely optimistic worldview (any problem can be solved by smiling at it, and maybe throwing a corny song its way) certainly couldn't have hurt audiences' enthusiasm. The calculated innocence on display is appealing because it requires very little energy to engage with it, in exchange for a pretty hefty payout of momentary pleasure.

The limitation of that line of thinking is also pretty obvious: like her contemporary Frank Capra, the idea that Temple was some kind of dispensary of simplistic sugary-sweet nonsense unendurable to sophisticated and/or contemporary tastes hold up only as long as you don't watch any of her films. It's the case, sure, that most of the films in that '35-'38 window are saccharine tosh, but Temple herself is always, eerily talented in everything she does. Even at the height of the studios system, you couldn't become a triple-A box office draw without any skills, and Temple was a better than solid dancer, singer, and comic performer, limited only by the material she was handed.

Which is why, all things considered, I generally prefer her work from 1934, the year she broke out of the novelty short ghetto, to all of her subsequent starring vehicles combined. In '34, the "Temple Formula" wasn't in place yet, and she could be called upon to provide things other than dewy-eyed charm to the movies she appeared in. Particularly in Little Miss Marker, for which Fox Film loaned her out to Paramount, Temple provides surprisingly able, surprisingly knowing (or just magnificently well-directed) in a register of acerbic sarcasm that's startling in any tiny girl, but especially one who is best known ethereal innocence.

All of which ultimately brings us to the subject at hand - for we've had a subject at hand all along, y'see - the Christmas release Bright Eyes, which looks now and was designed initially as the first "Shirley Temple film", instead of merely a film in which Shirley Temple appears. It was the first project expressly designed for her, and is the first to introduce one of the key elements of her later vehicles, the crabby old man who is turned into a bleeding-heart humanist by the kindness and preternatural wisdom of the innocent girlchild. At the same time, it avoids the godawful sentimentality that mars all but the absolute best of her later pictures, and still allows her to play a relatively normal little girl, with none of the over-written attempts to play to her persona. Neither the film nor Temple match Little Miss Marker, and William M. Conselman's script is unashamed to be bathetic; but it's easy enough to see what audiences responded to in '34. It is full of cute behavior by children, and everything works out well without it being too easy on the characters; that stuff sells, yesterday, today, and forever.

The meat of the story, anyway: little Shirley Blake (Temple) is the daughter of a maid, Mary (Lois Wilson), in the household of a wealthy pair of dreadful Californian snobs, the Smythes (Theodor von Eltz and Dorothy Christy). Shirley's father was an airman who died years ago - "cracked up", she says, in the assured tones of a child reciting by rote a concept she doesn't quite understand - and since then, she's been taken up as something between a mascot and a group adoptee by his buddies at the airfield, but especially "Loop" Merritt (James Dunn). All the pleasure she receives in life comes from visiting these friendly faces, the Smythe home is a depraved hole, with the snobby family having birthed an indescribably wretched daughter slightly older than Shirley, Joy (Jane Withers), and hosting at present the openly resentful Ned Smith (Charles Sellon), a wheelchair-bound uncle who despises the young folks who clearly only tolerate his crankiness in the hope of receiving a nice chunk of his estate when he dies, which they also clearly hope will happen really soon. Ned starts to be nice to Shirley, for no obvious reason other than because he knows it will piss Joy off; that's one ally on her side, which she'll need when her mother dies. On Christmas Day.

That's a lot of weepiness for a family comedy, but Bright Eyes doesn't really want to commit to any kind of glum emotion for too long: the point, after all, is to dramatise little Shirley's durability, not her trauma. So even after this jagged interruption in the film's "the dogged poor find ways to enjoy their lives, regardless" scheme, it pretty much immediately shifts into a second half that proposes the tragedy of too many people wanting to love and care for this little orphan: Loop (her godfather), Ned, and the Smythes' cousin, Adele Martin (Judith Allen), who was also Loop's fiancée long ago, before abruptly calling it off. This would be, arguably, the exact opposite of an intractable, unsolvable conundrum, especially given the Hollywood convention that you always still love the person you loved that one time, but the characters spend enough time not arriving at that solution until the story has hauled itself over the 80-minute mark.

I snark, but in truth, Bright Eyes goes down easy. Temple is an enormously appealing performer, for one thing, and in Withers she is wonderfully matched with a kind of negative-image of herself: a brunette with a foul attitude and a penchant for violent fantasies (sample playtime: emergency surgery to cut off a doll's legs). There's an unmistakable pre-WWII cant to Joy's characterisation, with its airy dismissal of psychiatry as so obviously bunk that we don't need to do more than name it to prove what idiot hippies her parents are; that and the unspoken notion that hangs over every one of the bad little girl's fetishistic descriptions of punishing her dolls that if only her parents would give her a good wallop, she'd turn out halfway decent. Still, Joy is a delightfully acerbic character, and Withers's performance is stellar; I don't quite know what to make with a movie whose two best performances are both given by child actors, but that's what we've got here. The brittle patter between the girls is easily the most engaging, funny part of the whole affair.

Outside of those two, it's stock filmmaking of an overly sensational narrative, one that the modestly-talented director David Butler (I can't entirely dismiss anybody whose later career included Road to Morocco) is content to present in fairly obvious broad strokes: the close-up of a cake for Shirley with a frosting airplane that has been shattered as the punchline to the scene where her mother dies is one of those moments where the filmmaker's terror of the audience not Getting It shades into outright contempt for our intelligence. And he's a little too free with close-ups of Temple doing nothing but grinning, but hell, that might have been a contract thing, or who knows. Mostly, the film provides a satisfactory neutral canvas for Temple to filigree with all her talents: the usual not-too-short takes that, in '30s cinema, signify a willingness to let us soak in the mere charisma of a star, with just enough sense to cut before things feel static. The only moment he really muffs is the film's sole musical number "On the Good Ship Lollipop", which somehow became Temple's signature tune despite being introduced in a bizarrely-staged, claustrophobic bit where she simply walks from one end of an airplane cabin to the other, as manly airmen hum along and occasionally spit out one or two words of the chorus when not waving around highly improbable candy props (a moment where one of the airmen takes an enormous powder puff to dabble some faux-powdered sugar on her face - in a really conspicuous cutaway shot, no less - is one of the most inscrutable things that I think I have seen in a '30s musical number).

Great cinema it's not, but great cinema it doesn't want to be. At heart, this is just one of the many star vehicles of the 1930s that all mostly resemble each other: basic staging of scenes that linger lovingly on the top-billed performer. In this case, that performer happens to be one of the most singular headlining individuals in Hollywood history. This early, more flexible Temple is, I'd say, a lot easy to handle than the increasingly ritualised one of later years, and Bright Eyes has enough glumness (including a well-staged storm scene) that it feels like it has some weight to it. Still, if you're looking for that one single Temple film to watch, I'd push for Little Miss Marker; Bright Eyes is charming as all fuck, but it's not really anything else.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1934
-Columbia's release of the Frank Capra-directed It Happened One Night crystallises the rules of the emerging screwball comedy genre
-At MGM, Director Ernst Lubitsch and stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald make the finest of all their various collaborations, The Merry Widow
-A year after their first onscreen pairing, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers debut as co-leads in RKO's The Gay Divorcee

Elsewehere in world cinema in 1934
-French director Jean Vigo makes the second and last narrative film of his bitterly short career, L'Atalante
-Wu Yonggang directs Ruan Lingyu in The Goddess, arguably the best-known Chinese silent film
-Basil Wright's The Song of Ceylon, from Britain, represents a new level of aesthetic sophistication (if not in overcoming cultural bias) in documentary filmmaking

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GETTING THE GANG BACK TOGETHER

The Best Man Holiday - which possesses a truly awful title, I hope we can all agree; even a simple apostrophe-s after "Man" would have helped - is the weirdest sequel of the year, greeted with some awfully hostile "why on earth are you bothering?" criticisms. I wish more films would do exactly the same thing, because it's a terrific idea.

Basically, it's pulling a page from the Before Sunset playbook: many years ago, we left these characters in a place where they were pretty good, but there's no reason to assume that their lives have stopped, and why not drop in to see how their lives are now that they had some years to mature and become fuller adults? In this case, it's been 14 years since The Best Man, which was a not completely successful ensemble film about the emotional tightrope of transitioning from the freedom and irresponsibility of college to the more more constrained world of early adulthood, and that's surely been enough time for these people to have kids, marital problems, big houses, careers, career problems, goes the logic. So it is, enough so that The Best Man Holiday, I'd argue, is an improvement on its predecessor, for at least two reasons: it's more tonally flexible (that is, the comic moments don't feel so badly taped on to a dramatic spine), and it has a lot more for people to do that aren't frustrated novelist Harper Stewart (Taye Diggs).

Fleshing out the situation from the earlier movie doesn't really matter much for the new one, but suffice to say that in '99, Harper was the best man at the wedding of Lance Sullivan (Morris Chestnut), presently a New York Giants running back approaching retirement, and at that wedding, it came out that Harper and Lance's bride Mia (Monica Calhoun) had slept together some time earlier. This, we understand, has left a rift between the two former best friends, that Mia hopes to mend with her unusually insistent invitations to the Sullivan Christmas celebrations, not just for Harper and his pregnant wife Robyn (Sanaa Lathan), but the whole gang from last time: Jordan (Nia Long who, not to be lookist, might be the most gorgeous 42-year-old actress in America right now), now a successful TV executive building a new paradigm for African-American media, while dating the absurdly white white dude Brian(Eddie Cibrian); Julian (Harold Perrineau) and his ex-stripper wife Candace (Regina Hall), operating a private school coming into financial difficulties since evidence of Candace's past life surfaced on YouTube, scaring off a moralising old investor; Quentin (Terrence Howard), still a huge pothead and schmoozer, but now using those skills to succeed as the head of a consulting firm; and Shelby (Melissa De Sousa), venal and nasty and starring on Real Housewives spin-off.

All sorts of plotlines attach to all of these characters, but they're all building up to the same theme, which is that we all have difficult, unpleasant things to deal with in our lives, and the whole entire point of having friends is to have somebody to help you get through those rough patches; so for the love of God, don't try to muscle your way through setbacks alone. Also, I gather that writer-director Malcolm D. Lee has the love of God particularly in mind as the bestest buddy you'll ever have to stand by you, though I appreciate that The Best Man Holiday doesn't go for nearly as much proselytising as a movie could when it's set during Christmas, and its only wholly decent character is also its most emphatically Christian. Heck, it's not even as messagey and aware of a "you need religion if you're going to make it" message as The Best Man was.

But anyway, this is basically a film about people attempting to reconnect, finding it difficult, and doing it anyway, because that's the sort of thing that you damn well do with friends who matter. It is marvelously generous film, more generous than the first (shrill bitch Shelby is given a completely natural-feeling opportunity to be more pleasant and she takes it, something that never came close to happening in 1999), and very much fond of the characters it walks through some helliciously brutal melodrama (in which one person's very obvious even before the surprise reveal cancer isn't even all that much darker than some of the things happening to other characters). Perhaps even too generous, as it becomes a little sleepy and stretched out long before its indulgent two hours and three minutes have wrapped up; when it's this clear that nobody is going to be a major fuckup, because they're all basically okay human beings, there's just not that much room to build conflict, which leads to a lot of ginned-up misunderstandings in the last 40 minutes, just to keep the thing moving along.

Plot and conflict aren't the driving forces here, though. This is a quintessential hang out movie, and it knows it: dropping the characters into a pornishly large house, and letting them meet in pairs and threes, and just talk and share thoughts on life (meanwhile, their assorted kids are being totally ignored and forgotten about, except when it is time to be cute, tearful, or both). Cinematically, there's not a lot here, and Lee and editor Paul Millspaugh manage to get themselves into real trouble with some shot-reverse shot sequences that follow the rhythm of dialogue too literally, and end up creating a feeling rather akin to motion sickness. Really, though, this is a film only interested in characters and actors, and though sometimes the lack of aesthetic flattens those two elements out more than they should be, for the most part it works on that level: generally speaking, the best actors are given the most to do, with Lathan, Hall, and Long forming a Murderesses' Row of absolutely terrific women etched clearly and with great warmth and personality, and Howard giving the easiest, most likable performance he's had in years. There's nothing great about it, but there's a whole lot of good enough, and I'm not sure that there's any sane argument that can be made against a movie where the whole point is watching likable people learning to heal their wounds. It's comfort food and not art; but it is about the holidays, after all.

6/10

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