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Tuesday, August 30, 2005 ( 8/30/2005 08:40:00 AM ) Bill S.  "OTHER CHILDREN MAKE ME FEEL SO SMALL!" – The other morning we were watching part of a PBS series on religion & ethics: a segment on the new software being marketed to conservative religious families that gives parents the ability to block "objectionable" content found in modern family fillums. Earlier that a.m., I'd viewed a flick from 1972 sent my way by obscuro movie buff Aaron Neathery – the wonderfully titled Santa And the Ice Cream Bunny – and as I watched the company of 21st century Bowdlers describe how their spiffy new software'd protect impressionable young minds from Jim Carrey fart jokes, I found myself thinking, "Wouldn't be a whole lot edited out of the Ice Cream Bunny movie!" Unless, that is, there was a button for blocking out Total Incompetence.Produced by Barry Mahon (who also gave us the inimitable teen pic, Musical Mutiny, as well as the nudist horror outing, The Beast that Killed Women), SATICB is really two flicks in one. A not-so-prime example of the kind of low-rent kiddy fare hacked out in the 60's and early 70's for weekend matinees, the feature is so laggardly paced that you can't help but feel for the poor ushers who had to clean up afterwards. I'm thinkin' a lotta Jujube fights broke out during the slow parts. The opening film stars Jay Clark as St. Nick, an unfortunate thespian forced to emote in the hot Florida sun in a beard and Santa suit (that grows progressively more pit-stained as the flick progresses.) Our hero has gotten stranded in his sleigh on the hot winter beach, stuck in the sand while his reindeer have dashed away to the North Pole. (Years of handling a sleigh, and the guy makes a rookie mistake like that!) Clark's Santa, who's prone to grand hand gestures, bemoans his fate in song while director "R. Winer" gives us shots of the hot sun and regularly aims his camera at the front of the sleigh to remind us that the reindeer ain't there. Exhausted from all his emoting, Santa sits back down and falls asleep, where he appears to telepathically call out to all the neighborhood children (played by members of Ruth Foreman's Pied Piper Playhouse). They dash across town to his aid, running through amusement parks and city dumps, passing Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer who are rafting on the Mississippi River, which now appears to be adjacent to the coast of Florida. Mssrs. Finn & Sawyer follow the gang, but never do anything further; they hide in the bushes to watch the proceedings from afar and are quickly forgotten by both moviemakers and kid audience. Our gang of neighborhood moppets attempt to help St. Nick by leading a series of animals (donkey, pig, sheep, cow, horse, man in a gorilla suit) to his sleigh, but none of the beasts are able to pull the sled out of the sand. The animal sequence drags for almost ten minutes and is so poorly structured that the man in the gorilla suit (perhaps a relative to the Beast that Killed Women?) is the first creature we see, not a wacky punch line. What to do now? Why, our sweaty Santa sits back down and tells the kids a story. . . At which point, the second of our two flicks commences: Thumbelina, directed by Mahon. We even get a second set of movie credits for this film-within-a-film, which opens at the Pirates World theme park (lots of shots of happy kids on rides – many of which I swear I'd already seen in Musical Mutiny!) and follows a Partridge Family-style hippie chick (mini-skirted Shay Gardner) as she ventures into the park's Hans Christian Anderson Playhouse. She enters a room with a series of cheesy dioramas and a speaker box recounting the story of Thumbelina. As she slowwwwwwly moves from display to display, our visiting hippie chick imagines herself in the role of the tiny little thing. So to recap: Santa is stranded on the Florida beach, and to while away the time, he tells a buncha kids a story about a girl who goes to an amusement park and hears the story of Thumbelina. How very Borges-ian. (And don't forget to ask yer parents to take you to Pirates World, kids!) Mahon's segment is marginally better than its framing sequence. If nothing else, its limited sets are more visually arresting than that dreary beach, and, besides, we get to see a lotta characters in outlandish animal suits. On the debit side, the Thumbelina short is as turgidly paced as the Santa sequence, and whenever the story comes to a potentially exciting moment, Mahon takes us back to the Pirates World theater and has the speaker box tell us what happened next! Thus, when tiny Thumbelina gets kidnapped by a Frog Prince and his mama Queen Frog, we only see a couple of snippets of two actors in brightly spotted cloth costumes – and don't even get to watch our heroine escape her captors. Poor Shay Gardner is cute in an I'm-A-Pepper kinda way, but, unfortunately, that appears to be the limit of her talents – in one scene, she "sings" one of the movie's thoroughly forgettable ditties and dances around a walnut shell with even less grace than Lisa Simpson in tap class. Santa's inner movie follows Thumb as she is raised by spinstery mother (Ruth McMahon, sounding as incongruously Florida matronly as June Forey doin' a "Fractured Fairy Tales" fairy godmother), then gets lost in the woods and rescued by a kindly mole named Mrs. Digger (who, we learn in one of Mahon's cutaways back to Pirates World, is also the voice on the speaker box narrating this tale). Missus D. attempts to marry Thumb off to a rich elderly mole named, um, Mister Mole, but our proto-feminist heroine is having none of it. "It's a big and cruel world," the lady mole advises her, "unless you have a man to look after you, cruel things can happen to you!" One can only hope that every little girl in the audience tossed their popcorn at the screen at that moment. Thumb ultimately ditches the marriage-minded moles – after much time-filling hand wringing, of course – and with the aid of a once frozen blue bird flies away from that part of the forest. This time, amazingly, Mahon actually gives us a brief action scene: showing the two as they soar through the skies and the blue bird's wing casts a visible shadow on the white sky backdrop. As they fly, Mahon retells the whole story with filmclips and a voiceover from Thumb summarizing all that we've already seen. They land in a part of the forest populated by people just as tiny as our gal: turns out our girl is destined to become Queen of the Flower People, but instead of giving us, oh, Scott Mackenzie singin' "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair," we're treated to another of the movie's lame-ass original "cute" songs, as the camera pans from neat-cut Flower Child to neat-cut Flower Child. Then it's back to Pirates World where our visiting hippie chick takes us through another collage of rides, then meets someone we assume is supposed to be her boyfriend. He looks exactly like the Prince of the Flower Children. This digression over, we return to Santa, who is now apparently on the verge of heat stroke. With his story concluded, the seemingly ungrateful kids dash off, so Santa finally doffs his coat (apparently, he's been shy about letting the young 'uns see him in his skivvies) and collapses for what we suspect will be the final, fatal time onto his sleigh. Then, true help arrives! It's a guy in a giant bunny suit, driving an antique fire engine with the kids riding in the back. "The Ice Cream Bunny!" Santa tells us, though where the ice cream part of this comes from is anybody’s guess. (My own theory is he originally was meant to be the Easter Bunny, but they changed the name so as not to offend any Christian backers.) ICB rescues St. Nick by basically kicking all the kids off his fire truck and driving off into the sunset with Santa in the passenger seat. As the kids stand and dumbly stare at the now empty sleigh, it disappears "like magic" as a voiceover informs us that Santa has now returned to the North Pole. "Hey!" you can imagine some smart-ass punk in the theater audience shouting, "if Santa's able to transport his sleigh like that long-distance, what's he need his reindeer for?" All in all, a thoroughly mind-numbing movie experience, though, like I say, in terms of family friendly blandness, Santa And the Ice Cream Bunny strikes me as just the thing for today's concerned repressive moms and pops. If you have an overly imaginative tyke, this thing'll undoubtedly leech all the fantasy out of 'em. Perhaps that was the true pernicious intent behind this feature? . . . (Thanx . . . I think . . . to Aaron for sending me a tape of this flick. Next up: one of goremeister Herschell Gordon Lewis' kid flicks!) # | |
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