The Horrible Holiday Movie Marathon A comedy article
by Dan Seitz 919 12 12/16/2010 05:30 PM 2284 views
While Christmas has produced some of the most memorable films of all time (A Christmas Story, It's a Wonderful Life), it's also produced some of the worst. After barely surviving The Parody Movie Movie Marathon a few months ago, I proposed to my friends that we flirt with death a second time. This time, we would endure a marathon of the worst Christmas movies ever made.
The Prep
Needless to say, I'd learned the value of alcohol by now, so I stocked up: beer, coffee brandy, eggnog, and rum.
This is how I saw the world, fifteen minutes into the first movie.
Then I had to secure the movies. Scientifically calculating the lowest-rated Christmas movies on IMDB and RottenTomatoes.com yielded four movies guaranteed to ruin your holidays:
1) "Santa Claus" (Mexican version)
2) "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians"
3) "Reindeer Games"
4) "Silent Night, Deadly Night"
"Reindeer Games", sadly, is still available to the general public, so it was easy to rent. The rest were like pulling teeth. I found "Santa Claus" in a bargain bin for $4, and had to download "Santa Claus Versus the Martians." But, just like "Date Movie" was my plague in the last experiment, "Silent Night, Deadly Night" turned out to be offensively hard to find.
Apparently, this movie hasn't been available on disc in a decade. The video store, my long-suffering Hollywood Express, only had a copy on VHS, which somebody had stolen. This is a movie that goes for, believe it or not, $50 for a new copy on disc and $35 for a used VHS. But, I was in luck! Somebody was selling it for only $10! And they had good scores on eBay!
So that's how we wound up watching "Silent Night, Deadly Night Part III", since that's what I ended up getting shipped (damn you, eBay Power Sellers!). On the bright side, Part 3 was guaranteed to be even worse than the original.
The final process was securing something to measure these films against. I chose two criteria:
1) Liquor consumption (which would be copious)
2) My new Shih Tzu puppy, Linus (measuring how much attention people paid to Linus versus to the film)
We started with this one because, as bad as it is, at least it has some humor value. It pretty much combines the "Let's put on a show" aesthetic of the Andy Hardy movies, with what you see after huffing too much paint.
The plot's pretty straightforward: humorless Martians in ridiculous helmets with names like "Momar" and "Kimar" decide to cheer up their humorless offspring by kidnapping Santa Claus. It's entertainingly cheap and stupid, but there's one guy in particular who sticks out: a homicidal maniac who tries to kill Santa repeatedly, and fails miserably every time.
And then Santa mocks him.
It's a bit like Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, if the Road Runner could talk and the Coyote had a perv 'stache. This guy keeps trying to kill Santa in ways that bring new meaning to the term "nasty," like firing him out the airlock (yes, really, in a kids' movie). And, every time, Santa thwarts it and rubs this loser's incompetence right in his face by pretending to not even notice the death traps. "Ho ho ho, I guess you made a mistake there!"
Also of note are the costumes: the Martians are ridiculous, but passable. Not Torg the Robot, though, which is literally a dude in some silver-spraypainted cardboard, thumping around as if he were made of metal instead of shipping products. Then there's the polar bear, which we're pretty sure was just a local high school mascot they hired off the field for twenty bucks.
Then there's Chochim the Elder, played by an actor who was clearly near death, as he was unable or unwilling to deliver a line at anything more than half-speed in a wavery old-man tone, and he gets ten minutes to essentially explain the plot of the movie, in case there's a retarded five-year-old who couldn't figure it out.
One final note: whoever composed this movie's opening song should be shot without trial. I don't care how old he is.
Warning: this is the FULL MOVIE, watch the opening theme song at your own risk
Puppy Factor: Linus mostly slept adorably in people's laps. The movie mostly flop-sweated on stage trying to amuse us. Winner: Linus Alcohol Consumed: two beers, three eggnog and coffee brandies, and a rum and Coke. We were starting light.
Little did we know, the true holiday weirdness had yet to begin.
That is the worst song I have ever heard! And to top it off, there are children wailing it! Could the children be executed alongside the composer? I think that's only fair.
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