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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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!

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