Monday, July 27, 2020

Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (1972)

A very strange film. Santa (Jay Ripley) is stuck in Florida, his sleigh embedded deeply in about 2cm of sand, just before Christmas Eve. To avoid a disaster for children everywhere Santa calls for help from some local kids, they bring their pets and various other animals to try and pull Santa's sleigh free. A man in a rather unconvincing gorilla outfit also has a go.

It doesn't work and Santa begins to tell the kids some fairy stories to cheer them up... Jack and the Bean Stalk in fact. Why? Well that doesn't make such sense really, though there was a lot of handy footage from an earlier film that could be recycled...

The film is incredibly cheaply made and shoddy and has endless awful songs. It is supposed to be a children's film though sometimes seems rather dark and surreal. You may wonder what it is exactly which has made a large dark stain on the back of Santa's trousers. The Christmas movie genre is not generally known for good films but this must rank as one of the worst? Amid the weirdness and awfulness is true joy for those inclined of course.