Santa's Summer House

Mary Crawford, 2012
Rotten Tomatoes score: 9% (audience rating)

I watched this movie with some friends via Zoom last night, and I decided it was something that my zero to four readers needed to hear about. (For those of you reading this in the distant future, Zoom was a popular video-chat program that people used to communicate with their long-lost friends and acquaintances during the Horrible Horrible Plague of 2020. You can tell all your friends about it using your futuristic cybernetic telepathic brain implants! Or you can go visit them at their houses, if that's still around.)

This is a wonderful movie. It's boring, has virtually no plot, doesn't actually take place at Christmas, and inexplicably features three former kickboxing champions, one of whom is Cynthia Rothrock, who crossed over into acting in the 80s and was moderately famous for a while. It also features Robert Mitchum's son as a clean-shaven Santa Claus—clean-shaven presumably because Chris Mitchum couldn't be bothered to put on a fake beard, but the movie tries to use it as an excuse to tease the audience about his true identity. He's Santa.

I'm a little shaky on the early stages of the plot, because—full disclosure—I was out of the room cleaning up a glass of eggnog that I knocked over in the kitchen. But I think I got the gist.

A group of summer travelers whose flights were cancelled due to fog have somehow turned up at an extraordinarily bland-looking beach house. The house is occupied by a kindly woman who calls herself Nanna. (That's how it's spelled in the credits. Don't try to hang this on me. I know how to spell nana.) Nanna's husband Pop is out of the house for no reason that's ever explained, but she invites the inconvenienced vacationers to stay a few nights for free.

The travelers—a mother and father with their teenage son, a pair of beautiful sisters, one of whom is an amateur photographer, and a sleazy-looking guy named Bryan—reluctantly agree.

So far this sounds like the set-up to either a horror film or a soft-core porno, but stick with me. It's much more boring than either of those things would be, I promise.

Pop returns in time for dinner to enjoy Nanna's specialty, plain pasta with a large glass bowl of red sauce on the side. During dinner, Nanna and Pop strong-arm the guests into playing a game of Secret Santa, despite the fact that it's not Christmas time in the movie and the fact that they have no opportunity to shop for gifts.

Nanna says the gift exchange will take place "after dinner", but apparently she means the following evening. Actually, it's more or less impossible to tell what time of day any scene is supposed to be taking place. We momentarily thought the pasta meal was supposed to be lunch, but in the next shot the teenager is waking up on the couch, so I think a night is supposed to have gone by.

Everyone gathers to play a thrilling game of croquet on the lawn. I have no idea how to play croquet, and I have absolutley no athletic talent, but I'm 100% positive that if you stuck a mallet in my hand, I would be able to do a better job of it than the characters in this movie. But, after Sadie (the teenager's mother) wins the game, she reveals that her husband confided to her that he let her win as a Secret Santa present.

Think of that. This is a man who has chosen to throw a pointless, no-stakes game of pick-up croquet as a gift for his loving wife. And then he told her about it, just to make sure she didn't accidentally feel good about herself. What a catch!

This is where the movie starts to become a gripping portrayal of alienation and marital dissatisfaction. Former kickfighter Kathy Long shows us a Sadie who is middle-aged but still vital, married to a man she once loved, a man whom she desperately wants to go on loving, but who no longer has the ability or the will to satisfy her needs. We look into her eyes and see the smouldering ember of a flame that yearns to burn as brightly as it once did, a flame that has been mercilessly smothered by a life of mediocrity. As we contemplate the crushed spirit of this beautiful and broken-down creature, we wonder, what is this life, this charade, this circle game, this tale told by an idiot? Can there be such a thing as fulfillment? Is it all, in the end, just vanity of vanities?

Then all the male characters sit in a hot tub together.

That night, we learn why Pop and Nanna have contrived to bring these travelers to them. It turns out that all of them once wrote letters to Santa Claus wishing for things that he could never find a way to give them. Pop shows them the letters for them to read aloud, helpfully adding a good 10 minutes to the film's running time.

So they all exchange crappy Secret-Santa gifts and learn to appreciate each other or something. I'm probably leaving some stuff out, but I was a few more eggnogs in by the end of this thing, and my powers of concentration were not at their acme.

But I'll say again that it was a wonderful movie, and everyone should watch it.

---

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.

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.

---