IMDb rating: 1.3/10
This bizarre "movie" was made in 2002 and apparently aired on a large number of local WB stations—though not on the national network, contrary to rumor—only to be forgotten for many years before being uploaded to YouTube. It has become somewhat notorious for it's appallingly bad animation and incomprehensible plot. But the really shocking thing is that the cast includes some first-rate voice actors like Nancy Cartwright from The Simpsons and even Mark Hamill (who, in addition to playing an elderly hobo in a recent series of flop space comedies, is a highly respected voice actor).
Bad animated Christmas movies are a dime a dozen, but this one sets its own standard. The computer animation in The Christmas Brigade was clunky and primitive, but this movie is grotesque. The characters have a hideous, uncanny appearance, and the backgrounds look like they were animated by a small child on a home computer running Windows 2000. It's abhorrent. It's disturbing to look at—especially the character Smithy, who has a scarf wrapped around most of his face all the time, so all you can see are his enormous, lifeless eyes.
The main character, whose name I believe was Ricky, looks only slightly better. His scalp is often visible between chunks of hair, giving the impression of a bad wig, or maybe the early stages of radiation poisoning. In the opening scene he walks, like a clumsy windup toy, through a field of snow without leaving footprints and without ever seeming to be physically in the same place as the rest of the scene. But the most important character by far is Ricky's great-grandmother:
The comments on that YouTube video contain various speculations about why great-grandma talks like that. One commenter claims that the voice data was corrupted, and they didn't bother to fix it. Another says that it's really the actress speaking, which is definitely not true. Well, you're not going to find the solution here. I certainly can't explain it. I'm pretty confident it was the result of incompetence rather than a deliberate choice, but who knows.
The plot of the film is that Ricky wants to give his classmate Nicole, who he fancies, a teddy bear that he received years earlier as a gift from his now-deceased mother. That's pretty weird, but let's not dwell on it. Nicole is a rich (?) snob who only likes gifts that were purchased at the mall, so she rejects the teddy bear. Ricky and Smithy then have to look through some garbage dumpsters to find it.
I know I'm not getting this exactly right, but I had some trouble understanding the plot, and I refuse to watch it again. It's very bad.
I think there were some songs.
I really don't know what else to say about this. It's on YouTube if you want to see it for yourself. If you watch to the end, you'll see that they tease an Easter-themed sequel, and it's almost heartbreaking that they thought that was going to happen. I don't know how you could watch this movie and think it might be worth making another one. Then again, it bears repeating that someone deemed this acceptable to show on television, so who's to say it didn't deserve a sequel.
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