The Christmas Brigade

Michael DeVitto, 1997
IMDb rating: 2.3/10

The Christmas Brigade brings the magic of Christmas to every day of the year.

That’s not my opinion. I’m just quoting the theme song of this (sort of) feature-length sequel to 1995’s The Christmas Light, which I reviewed last year. To my amazement, this movie was produced by Good Housekeeping Kids and New Family Movies. I’ve never heard of either of those illustrious production houses (though I’m sure there was a run on the comic book store every month when Good Housekeeping Kids hit the rack), but my point is that this was not just some experimental thing but an actual commercial release of some sort.

Dan Haggerty, who narrated the original, does not return. Santa seems to have a different voice, too, and he now sounds like one of the Superfans. The other members of the Christmas Brigade—Jennifer, Isaac, and Captain Burton—sounded the same to me. Together they patrol the earth in their spaceship, still called “Sled 2”, for some purpose that is never clearly explained.

But they have a special mission this Christmas Eve, because another spaceship is going around shrinking and stealing world landmarks. It turns out the ship is captained by the sinister Dr. D, a formerly obese man who is so proud to have gotten his weight under control that he has decided to “bring misery to every day of the year.”

I’m not making any of this up. Just watch the movie.

Isaac, who as you may recall is a whiz with gadgets, has invented a utility belt that allows him to phase through solid objects, levitate, turn invisible, and do anything else that you can animate by clicking one of the toolbar icons on your late-1990s home-computer CGI software. The belt also has some features that Isaac doesn’t know about (which is weird since he invented it), and he accidentally shrinks Captain Burton.

Worse yet, when Isaac uses his gizmo to sneak aboard Dr. D’s spaceship, Dr. D puts a mind-control device on his head that looks like a transparent donut. Together, they go to Santa’s “complex” (it was called a “compound” in the other movie), shrink Santa, and abandon him on a plant in his office, while a device on the other side of the room ticks down to midnight, when it will “shrink the complex forever.”

Unable to communicate with Burton and Jennifer when they arrive, Santa commits himself to venturing across the office to turn off the transducer-reducer before it shrinks the complex. Luckily, he has the help of some friendly beetles, who assure him that their lifespan is too short to waste time on hurting people—but not, apparently, too short to waste time on a repetitious jazz number about how they only live for 21 days.

Despite a surprisingly well animated sequence in which Sled 2 and Dr. D’s ship (both miniaturized for some reason that I didn’t catch) chase each other around Santa’s office, the heroes are unable to stop the transducer-reducer from shrinking the complex.

Isaac’s mind-control device gets broken during the excitement, so he radios the shrunken Brigade to tip them off on how to overpower the transducer-reducer. Unfortunately, his information is bogus, and the advice he gives them (to fly towards an invisible force field at “Christmas Light speed high”) will cause their deaths. Fortunately, Dr. D couldn’t resist giving them the true secret (to fly at “Christmas Light speed medium”) in the form of a terrible hamburger-related pun.

Oh, I forgot to mention that Captain Burton favored us with several hamburger puns earlier in the film, so this was a throwback to that.

A few seconds later, the movie is over, but after a repetition of the theme song, Jennifer and her sister Amy (played by Jennifer D’Onofrio, presumably the real-life sister of Amy D’Onofrio, who plays Jennifer) perform a series of Christmas carols for five minutes. Then Santa narrates an abbreviated, silent version of the original The Christmas Light. Then Jennifer and Amy sing some more songs. Then the movie ends again.

---

This movie was dedicated to a high-school graduating class, a fact that reinforces my suspicion that both The Christmas Light and The Christmas Brigade are some kind of school project. If so, that explains and excuses a lot—though it doesn’t explain why the good people at Good Housekeeping Kids wanted a piece of the action. I guess they know a hit when they see one.

The acting is not very good, but Amy D’Onofrio as Jennifer impressed me with her unexpectedly jaded, world-weary characterization, especially her exhausted tone of voice when reacting to one of Burton’s hamburger puns.

The animation is slightly improved from The Christmas Light, but the sound design and editing seem to have gotten worse. Dialogue is interrupted by randomly placed pauses, sound effects are sporadic, and the movie occasionally becomes completely silent for several seconds at a time.

And speaking of dialogue, the screenwriter was in rare form this time out, cranking out one-liners that would make Henny Youngman turn over in his grave:

“I was so heavy I had to iron my clothes in the driveway!”

“I guess you have your standards. They’re just low!”

“You are a big success at being a complete failure.”

“Dr. D should be an acupuncturist, because he’s sure good at sticking it to people.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him that reincarnation wouldn’t fix.”

“I don’t think you talk too much. I just think when your mind goes blank you forget to turn down the volume.”

“I once had an attorney who helped me lose 120 pounds. He got me a divorce!”

But seriously, folks.

Dante's Peak

Roger Donaldson, 1997
Rotten Tomatoes score: 24%

The mid-90s ushered in a second wave of disaster movies, after the genre's 1970s Classical Period had faded from memory. They were longer on visual effects and shorter on just about everything else. It was at the peak of that second wave, in 1997, that two volcano-themed films were released within two months of each other. Dante's Peak was the more commercially successful of the two, but Volcano fared better with critics. Neither movie is a work of art, but this one is impressive in its downright religious obedience to formula. It's not a bad movie, but—well, yes it is.

It's watchable though.

Looking at the title card and reading the description on Netflix, I knew that one of the leads (Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton) is a volcanologist. I guessed Pierce because he was holding a camera in the picture, and I was right. I then deduced that Linda Hamilton must be the mayor of the small town that gets blown up by the volcano, and sure enough. The question is, will she be a heroic authority figure who tries her best to save the town, or will she be a venal obstructionist like the mayor in Jaws? Well, you don't hire Linda Hamilton to play Murray Hamilton, so she must be a hero mayor. Again, sure enough.

Ace USGS volcanologist Harry arrives in Dante's Peak, Washington, to investigate seismic disturbances in its eponymous dormant volcano. He and Mayor Wando discover the bodies of two bathers who were parboiled in a hot spring due to a sudden spike in water temperature. Still haunted by the memory of the South American eruption that killed his wife, Harry calls in colleagues for a consult. There are two ways the script could go from here. The geologists can either be a bunch of stubborn naysayers, or they can be a lovable gang of oddballs with funny quirks. They decided to split the difference. The boss does all the naysaying while the rest of the team are zany and wacky.

They try to be, anyway. One guy has a pathological obsession with coffee, which he manifests in about three lines of dialogue and then abandons. The others mostly stand around and look at computer screens from time to time. The movie did surprise me once, during a scene when one of the zany scientists accompanies Harry and a remote-controlled rover to the caldera to take samples. The other scientist descends the slope to readjust the rover and gets caught in a rock slide. That's not a surprise, but the fact that he doesn't die is.

Anyway, the boss goes on pooh-poohing Harry's concerns, and Mayor Wando can't convince the town council to take action because a panic might drive away a big-time investor who is mentioned for the first time in response to the stodgy boss scientist's recollection of another small town that was once bankrupted by a false alarm. ("Is your town in desperate need of investments by any chance? Because, if so, it would be a good excuse to refuse to warn people about this volcano, and that would really move the plot along.")

Finally, the shocking sight of brownish drinking water finally convinces the USGS people that calamity is imminent. But, instead of ordering an evacuation straight away, they call everyone in town into the high-school gymnasium for a meeting just in time for the volcano to blow. All the bridges out of town obligingly collapse, but fortunately Harry has an SUV that can drive underwater, so he and the mayor make it out of immediate danger.

They then discover that her two children, who are no more than ten, have stolen her car and driven it to grandma's house to save her from the volcano. It's not quite as funny as watching Ernest's dog drive a truck, but I don't think it was supposed to be funny at all. Harry and the mayor catch up with grandma and the kids and escape across the lake in a boat.

It's then that we discover that the volcano has somehow transmuted the entire lake into high-grade battery acid, so the boat begins to dissolve. (My hypothesis is that the script called for them to be rowing through hot lava, but someone told them that was impossible, so they came up with something even stupider.) A situation like this calls for a heroic sacrifice, and grandma rises to the occasion, wading through the deadly acid to pull the boat the last few yards to the shore.

And that just about brings us home. Harry fetches a NASA radio beacon from the team's equipment, then drives an SUV over a lava flow, which causes its tires to burst into flame but has no effect on his ability to drive it. (This is not the underwater SUV from before, by the way.) Meanwhile, the geologists are on their way out of town when a dam bursts and washes away the boss, drawing no perceptible emotional response from his coworkers or from the audience. In case you're keeping score, the grandma and the geology boss are the only two main characters who buy the farm in this pulse-pounding disaster film.

Actually, I can't rule out that someone might have died while I wasn't looking.

All that remains is for Harry, the mayor, and the two kids to drive away from a second eruption, crash through the doors of an abandoned mine shaft without damaging their car or injuring themselves, and escape the super-heated pyroclastic cloud—which, like the fireball in the infamous tunnel scene of Independence Day, apparently can't go through doors. Inside the mine, they activate the radio beacon and are eventually rescued by the other scientists.

---

I'm not going to stick up for this one. I could take or leave it, but I'm not going to pretend to think it was genius. Volcano was a little better, and I appreciated that they weren't kidding themselves with the title. If you have to watch a movie from 1997 about volcanoes, I would go with that one, but if you can't find it (and still have to watch a movie from 1997 about volcanoes), this one is your other option.