The Christmas Light

Michael DeVitto, 1995
IMDb rating: 3.2/10

I don't really want to review the 1995 direct-to-video "movie" The Christmas Light; my mission will be accomplished if I draw a few people's attention to it.

This 22-minute picture straddles the line between low-budget short and amateur hobby project—they managed to recruit Dan Haggerty (of Grizzly Adams fame) to do the narration, which suggests at least some sort of actual commercial production that was intended to be viewed by real audiences, but the movie is so cheap, so lazy, and so bizarre that it may indeed have been someone's high-school project. I really don't know.

Since it's so short, I don't know if I should bother to describe the plot. You can just watch it for yourself:

But no, I can't help myself. I have to tell you what it's about.

In Santa's "compound"—that's the term used in the film, and a fitting one given its maximum-security appearance—his most trusted elf Isaac has devised a method of fabricating and painting ugly wooden trains in record time. Yes, that is strikingly similar to a plot point from Santa Claus: The Movie, and I doubt it's a coincidence, but let's let that go. The Christmas Light may have many flaws, but unoriginality is not one of them.

Isaac's chief competitor (and the only other elf we see in the film) is Burton, who Dan Haggerty assures us is disliked by all of his fellows. Burton has his own train-manufacturing system, but it has the downside that its products explode immediately after assembly. Santa expresses his disappointment about as gently as possible under the circumstances, but Burton doesn't take it well. He begins raving maniacally and in rhyme, and then he accidentally falls to his death off a walkway in his non-OSHA-compliant laboratory.

Seconds later, Burton rematerializes as a statue, disintegrates again, rematerializes again as a snowman, and flies away (he can fly, I guess) pledging horrible revenge.

At that moment, somewhere on planet earth, a snowstorm has kicked up—Dan Haggerty explicitly blames the snow on Burton, but on what evidence I have no idea—and a girl named Jennifer consoles her frightened younger brother with a dreadful song called "The Christmas Light".

Meanwhile, Santa and Isaac are braving the dangerous snowstorm in Isaac's new invention, a "sled" called Sled 2. (The script consistently refers to Santa's trademark conveyance as a "sled" instead of the usual "sleigh". Was it a mistake that no one caught? Probably.) Sled 2 is equipped with a robot called X that can penetrate the fog and perform surveillance, which enables it to find a single house illuminated by a seemingly supernatural light that Santa calls "the Christmas Light". It turns out to be none other than Jennifer's house, which is lucky, because the four characters I've mentioned so far are the film's entire cast.

Santa tells Jennifer about the Christmas Light (even though she just sang a song about it), and she joins their expedition to find Burton and thwart his sinister schemes. When they find Burton, his snowman body transforms into a flying buzz-saw that attempts to destroy Sled 2. Isaac defends the team by sending the robot X to blast Burton with a red laser beam, melting him. At the last minute, Jennifer prevails on Santa to abandon this use of deadly force, and Jennifer instead leaves the sled to confront Burton face-to-face in his icy lair.

Jennifer and Burton sing what seems to have been intended as a duet, but it's really just a reprise of Jennifer's "Christmas Light" song intercut with Burton intoning "Ain't no way" over and over again. It's quite a treat.

The power of the Christmas Light melts Burton into a puddle. Santa instantly writes him off as a casualty, but a miracle occurs (according to the narrator), and Burton once again reconstitutes himself in his old elfin form. He pledges to join Santa, Isaac, and Jennifer to work for good as "the Christmas Brigade". End of movie.

---

When I was in the fourth grade, I wrote a short story for a school project in which Santa Claus's nephew, Quilcer, has to rescue his uncle from an army of fire-breathing anthropomorphic bats. I wrote a sequel in fifth grade, involving a machine that gave the evil bat leader superhuman intelligence.

I freely admit that these stories were nonsensical. And, for what it's worth, no, it wasn't Christmas time when I wrote them.

The point is that this movie was made in 1995; my first Quilcer adventure was written the same year. If they wanted to make a movie that seemed like something a ten-year-old would have written, all they had to do was ask.

Debbie Macomber's Dashing Through the Snow

K.T. Donaldson [not his real name—C.], 2015
Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 45%

It took me 20 minutes of searching to figure out what the name of this movie was so I could look it up on Rotten Tomatoes. The reason it took so long is that all I knew about it was that it came on the Hallmark Channel at some point in the last month and a half and that it was a Christmas movie. And, let me tell you, that doesn't narrow it down much.

I commented once before that at Christmastime, the Hallmark Channel "produces at least 600 movies a day". That was an exaggeration, but I find myself overwhelmed by the proliferation of these things. They are all dreadful, and everyone knows that, but people keep watching them—including me, apparently.

I'm not going to try to review this movie in earnest, because I've already admitted that I don't remember anything about it. I know it was about a woman called Ashley Harrison who, for some reason that escaped me, is suspected of being a drug smuggler or something. And it turns out the handsome dream-hunk she's sharing a rental car with on her trip up Interstate 5 is actually a government agent trying to bust her. Do they fall in love at the end? Does he discover that she's not really a criminal? Does she turn out to actually be a criminal? Your guess is as good as or better than mine.

One thing that did stand out to me was that the entire movie is set on the I-5 corridor, the largest and busiest freeway on the West Coast, with the characters traveling from San Francisco to Seattle. And yet, the road they're traveling on is clearly a tiny, two-lane highway through the middle of nowhere in what is obviously British Columbia. The dialogue goes to almost surreal lengths to draw attention to the fact that they're driving on the 5 (including a scene where the two main characters pointlessly discuss the history of the Interstate Highway System), almost as if they're proud of the job they've done at simulating the setting. At one point, they wander through a snowy mountain forest in Sacramento. Here is a photograph of the landscape along I-5 outside Sacramento:

And it doesn't snow there.

The only thing that makes a thing like this watchable is the seeming sincerity of the effort. I had the impression while watching this movie that they were trying to make something worth watching. They weren't trying very hard, but I think they were trying. That's what distinguishes it from such fare as Netflix has recently been churning out, which has a hipsterish ironic quality about it, like Sharknado but on a much lesser scale. I prefer honest incompetence. (Hence my somewhat halfhearted review of a recent Netflix release.)

Who Cares?

Michael Rohl, 2018
Rotten Tomatoes score: 88%

It sucked.

The Flintstones

Brian Levant, 1994

Rotten Tomatoes score: 23%

The Flintstones may not be a work of art, but surely it deserves better than the ice-cold reception it got from critics.

...I can do better than that. Let me start over.

The Flintstones is a brilliant work of art, like Michelangelo’s David, Beethoven’s ninth symphony, or Megaman 2. There are so many layers to it: It's live action imitating animation, the 1990s imitating the 1960s, the 20th century imitating the stone age, and John Goodman imitating a cartoon character imitating Jackie Gleason.

I'm amazed at how many prehistory-themed jokes they manage to wring out of this thing. Not just the obvious ones, like using a "number-two chisel" to take an exam, but things like Dann Florek's line, "I can't endorse this modernization if it means laying off all these workers. Some of them have been here since the beginning of time!" Or Fred's boss's use of the expression "until the poles freeze over." Or Fred's comment that he doesn't need a friend like Barney because "There's four thousand other people in this world!"

Who would think of making a joke about the size of the human population during the stone age? Did they have jokes like that in the cartoon?

There's even an offhand reference to human sacrifice that kind of shocked me in a PG movie, but maybe they figured that would be over kids' heads.

The casting is pitch-perfect, even though Rick Moranis doesn't have tiny black dots for eyes, and John Goodman wanders in and out of Fred's New York accent. (Or I guess that's a Bedrock accent. I don't know.) I had never heard of Elizabeth Perkins, but she looks and sounds exactly like Wilma Flintstone. Halle Berry appears as a made-up character called Sharon Stone, which is weird, but I guess the real Sharon Stone wasn't available. Or else they just couldn't think of a rock-related name that sounded like Halle Berry.

Harvey Korman plays a bird.

The plot is of decidedly secondary importance. Barney wants to repay Fred for having loaned him the money he needed to adopt Bamm Bamm, so he helps Fred cheat on an IQ test that determines which low-level quarry employee will be promoted to an executive job. (Since when is Barney smart enough to help Fred cheat on an IQ test?) But it turns out that the promotion is part of a scam by Sharon Stone and her lover to loot the company. That’s about it.

Oh, and the bad guy gets encased in concrete at the end and is clearly dead, though no one says so. That came as a surprise. They don't usually kill nonviolent villains in these movies.

Critics complained that the plot was too adult-oriented—meaning that it will alienate kids, not that it’s X-rated—and that’s certainly true. Embezzlement and office politics are not major concerns of child moviegoers. But we can’t forget that the cartoon was always intended to appeal to adults as well as kids. Just be grateful John Goodman didn’t do any cigarette tie-ins.

---

Bruce Almighty

Tom Shadyac, 2003
Rotten Tomatoes score: 49%

Oh, God, where's John Denver when you need him?

This movie depicts what might fairly be described as a worst-case scenario for the universe. Almighty God (Morgan Freeman) temporarily cedes control of the world, including his infinite supernatural powers and the responsibility for answering prayers, to the most self-centered, self-pitying idiot on the planet. He does this, apparently, for no other reason than to teach him a valuable lesson about—something.

Bruce Nolan (Jim Carrey) is a moderately successful local TV newsman in Buffalo, who lives in a handsomely appointed townhome with his beautiful girlfriend Grace (Jennifer Aniston), who is a kindergarten teacher or something, and their dog. In the early scenes, we discover that Bruce is mildly frustrated with his inability to advance in his career beyond the level of fluff pieces about cookie shops. He is also frustrated by his dog's tendency to relieve himself in the living room.

And that's about the extent of Bruce's woes, as far as we can discern. Nevertheless, he rapidly descends into despair, culminating in his discovery that smarmy Evan Baxter (Steve Carell) has beaten him out for a seat at the anchor desk. In Bruce's defense, the station makes the conspicuously poor decision to announce this staffing change seconds before Bruce goes on the air for a live broadcast from Niagara Falls, but Bruce's response to it—on live television—is so explosive and unhinged that we instantly lose all respect for him.

After being bodily ejected from his place of work, Bruce goes home and pours out his rage against God for allowing him to come to such unspeakable, undeserved misery. Surely this upper-middle-class newscaster who has been justly fired is cursed among men.

In the Old Testament, when the undeserving sufferer Job poured out his indignation against God, the Lord appeared to him in a whirlwind and reminded him what a hassle it is to control the universe, so mere mortals should give him a break. Apparently, he's decided that a lecture wasn't good enough this time, so he decides to give Bruce first-hand experience at wielding cosmic powers.

Bruce of course takes selfish advantage of his new omnipotence—otherwise there wouldn't be a movie—by giving himself an expensive sports car, a new wardrobe, and super lovemaking skills, as well as returning to the network to oust Evan from the coveted anchorman job. But many of his petty miracles (like using a divine breeze to lift a lady's skirt, or materializing marijuana in a rival network's news van) are downright cruel. Aren't we supposed to find this character relatable? Look, I'm not pretending to be a saint, but if I had superpowers, I honestly don't think it would occur to me to frame somebody for drug possession.

Maybe the idea is that, if you were a godlike being, the morals of us lowly creatures just wouldn't matter to you anymore. But Bruce knows his omnipotence is temporary, so you'd think he'd have some residual human qualms—and anyway, the movie never suggests any deeper explanation of his behavior than the fact that he's an ass.

There's nothing inherently wrong with an unsympathetic comedy protagonist. George Costanza is proof enough of that. But if I'm not supposed to like this guy, what reaction am I supposed to have? The movie is obviously meant to be heartwarming on some level, so shouldn't the hero be someone the audience has a shred of sympathy for? After he uses his divine powers to aggrandize himself at the expense of his relationship, Jennifer Aniston leaves him, and his desire to win her back gives him a conventional goal for the final act of the movie. But why the hell should she go back to him? And why should we want her to? And what possessed God to leave the universe in the hands of this psychopath in the first place?

The story becomes so ludicrous, with Bruce causing impossible things to happen left and right, that it was necessary for the people of Buffalo to become oblivious cartoon characters. It reminds me of Pinky and the Brain, where they eventually gave up on offering any explanation for why people don't realize that the Brain is a mouse. But Pinky and the Brain never asked you to take it seriously, so it was OK. Here, we've got a movie about a jerk surrounded by clueless idiots who can't tell that the laws of the universe have been suspended, and we're apparently supposed to care what happens to any of them.

To give blame where it's due, I don't think Jim Carrey's performance is at fault. Carrey was definitely on his way down from the peak of stardom by 2003, and this was probably the first time most people realized it. A few years later, he would be starring in tiresome retreads like Yes Man and total nonsense like The Number 23, but he's fine here. After Bruce's climactic redemption, he becomes warmer and fuzzier than we're used to seeing him, and maybe they would have been better off just going the PG route for the whole film.

After all, isn't this thing supposed to appeal to religious people, or families? There's nothing in it to suggest that it was intended as subversive or antireligious, and it ends on a very aw-shucks note. But then what was with the creepy divinely-enhanced sex scene? It's nothing explicit, but you wouldn't want to watch it in front of your mother.

Overall, the movie reminds me of the 2000 version of Bedazzled, but I liked that movie a lot better. Maybe it was because Bedazzled kept the Sunday school schmaltz down to a much duller roar, or maybe it was because Brendan Fraser's character was more loser and less megalomaniac. Interestingly, that movie got exactly the same Rotten Tomatoes score as this one.

But as little good as I have to say about Bruce Almighty, I did find it watchable. I think what really sums this one up for me is that, when I first saw it, the only gag that made me laugh out loud was this:

(Okay, turn it off. Just the "Yahweh" part. Turn it off.)

It's a two-second reference to a TV ad campaign that was ubiquitous at the time but totally forgotten today. And you could criticize the movie for being so shallow and ephemeral, but you know, they didn't think they were making a classic. There are a lot of movies that didn't make me laugh even once. And there are movies (like the 2007 sequel to this film) that I couldn't even sit through.

I guess I have only myself to blame for rewatching movies that have earned their place in obscurity. Nobody put a gun to my head and made me watch Bruce Almighty, let alone write a long, detailed review of it on the internet. What am I doing with my life, anyway? What kind of fool watches fifteen-year-old bad movies and then writes about them?

Hey, I think I'll review the Flintstones movie next!

---

Bean

Mel Smith, 1997
Rotten Tomatoes: 41%

The 1990s were the era of "Preexisting Franchise: The Movie". Not only were they adapting every TV sitcom and cartoon that was even mildly popular in the 60s into a feature-length semi-parody movie, they were also cranking out movie versions of current TV shows that didn't quite call out for big-screen treatment.

Mr. Bean was, admittedly, a tremendously popular British comedy series that had attracted a large following on this side of the drink as well. I remember watching reruns on PBS as a kid, and I loved it. But when your main character is a misanthropic, mumbling, bumbling buffoon who never speaks in complete sentences and has no first name, let's just say the screenplay doesn't exactly write itself.

In the movie, Mr. Bean is a security guard at London's National Gallery whose incompetence and tendency to blow his nose loudly in front of colleagues has made him unpopular. Instead of firing him, the board of directors decides to fob him off on a Los Angeles art museum that needs a guest speaker to unveil its most valuable new acquisition, Whistler's Mother. It's a truly nonsensical setup that doesn't bother to try to justify itself in terms of plausibility or plot. But it accomplishes two things: it brings Mr. Bean to America, and it forces other characters to interact with him as if he were a normal person.

Bean's foil for most of the film is David Langley (Peter MacNicol, one of our most underrated actors), the L.A. gallery curator who has been foolish enough to vouch for "Dr." Bean's stature in the world of art scholarship. David's wife Alison (Pamela Reed) and daughter (Tricia Vessey) for some reason despise Mr. Bean before they even meet him, which seems unfair, but their reaction is retroactively justified when he arrives. Only the Langley's son (Andrew Lawrence of the Lawrence Brothers) seems to like him.

Bean makes an ass of himself in front of David's coworkers (Harris Yulin, Sandra Oh, and Pat from Heavyweights) and creeps out his family, but David keeps his faith until Bean ruins a dinner engagement by blowing up a turkey in the microwave. (In the American version, this scene is preceded by a gag borrowed from a TV episode, where Mr. Bean gets his head stuck inside the turkey, but the sequence was removed from the UK release for whatever reason. The UK version is currently appearing on Netflix as of this writing, so if you watch it, don't be surprised that the turkey gag is missing.)

Forty-five minutes into the picture, the slapstick sequence that provides the movie's main plot point finally occurs, in which Mr. Bean sneezes on Whistler's Mother, then accidentally dissolves her face while trying to clean the canvas. If you like physical comedy, this is a funny bit—especially when you see his attempt to restore the face with a ballpoint pen—but it's not much to hang a feature film on.

After some encouragement from Andy Lawrence, Bean hits upon the brilliant idea of disguising a life-sized poster of the painting as the real thing. As a twelve-year-old, I found this ridiculous resolution very satisfying, and I still do. It plays out as a well-executed slapstick heist sequence, and it's set to a weirdly uplifting music track. The poster is a call-back to a throwaway joke earlier in the movie, and it's an example of the surprisingly rich setup/payoff structure of the otherwise paper-thin plot.

When called upon to give his big speech at the unveiling, hosted by Burt Reynolds of all people, Mr. Bean breaks his ten-year mumbling streak and delivers an entire monologue in clearly audible English. We're about 70 minutes into the movie at this point, and they might as well have called it a day. Unfortunately, they decided to stick it out for the full hour and half.

To fill time and for no other possible reason, a police detective (Richard Gant) shows up at the gallery and tells David that his daughter has been in a motorcycle accident. To fill even more time, the detective is shot on the way to the hospital. Then, at the hospital, the nursing staff mistakes Mr. Bean (who has picked up a dropped stethoscope) for a surgeon—I guess anyone carrying a stethoscope will do—and rushes him into the operating theater to treat the injured detective.

Bean successfully saves the cop's life by accidentally dropping an M&M into his open wound, which is mildly funny but also very uncomfortable to watch. (It would be funnier if they hadn't already done it on Seinfeld, using a Junior Mint.) Then, in an even less inspired bit of surgical comedy, Bean also brings the Langleys' daughter out of her coma by accidentally shocking himself with a defibrillator.

Now that the day is saved, after a montage of Mr. Bean doing stupid things while Randy Newman sings "I Love L.A.", the movie finally fizzles out.

---

It was predictable that a Mr. Bean movie would end up being a series of slapstick set-pieces strung together by a flimsy plot, but they more or less made it work up until the denouement with the Whistler's Mother poster. If only they had quit while they were ahead. A lot of people disliked that Bean was allowed to speak so much in this movie, but I think we can allow the film that liberty. If they'd put their minds to it, they probably could have told the same story around Bean without giving him any of the dialogue, but at least he doesn't speak during the physical-comedy scenes.

Aside from Mr. Bean and David, the characters contribute nothing to the plot or humor, and that goes especially for the Langley family. Why do they hate Mr. Bean so much? I know he's annoying, but at one point Alison threatens to leave her husband if he doesn't throw the man out of the house. The dialogue suggests that their marriage is under a terrible strain, but the only apparent reason for it is the presence of Mr. Bean in the home. Couldn't they have included one scene before Bean shows up, where we learn that Alison thinks David is obsessing over his work too much or something?

Anyway, I shouldn't complain about the plot. If you're watching Bean: The Movie for the plot, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

---