Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (1972) R&S Film Enterprises Inc./Fantasy RT: 96 minutes Rated G (nothing offensive) Director: R. Winer and Barry Mahon Screenplay: N/A Music: Ralph Falco and George Linsenmann (both for “Thumbelina”) Cinematography: N/A Release date: 1972 Cast: Jay Clark, Shay Garner, “Kids” from Ruth Foreman’s Pied Piper Playhouse, Ruth McMahon, Heather Grinter, Pat Morrell, Bob O’Connell, Mike Yuenger, Sue Cable. Box Office: N/A
Rating: NO STARS!!!
There’s bad filmmaking and then there’s lazy filmmaking. Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is a perfect example of the latter. It’s actually both, but the laziness of the makers easily trumps the total lack of production values. It makes any given Ed Wood movie look like a big budget production by comparison. You think I’m exaggerating? Just read on.
In the first few minutes, one of Santa’s “elves” opens the workshop door to see if their boss has returned from his pre-Christmas test run around the world. Instead of the snowy landscape one expects to see at the North Pole, director R. Winer inserts stock footage of reindeer grazing on a grassy field. Either that or it prefigures Al Gore’s warnings about global warming. It just goes downhill from there.
Are you even surprised? What do you expect from a movie entitled Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny? In case you need a hint, you can watch it with a RiffTrax commentary. They don’t take on just any bad movie; it has to be a special kind of bad for Michael J. Nelson and team to even consider applying their heckling skills. It could be argued that Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is overqualified.
The “plot” is a total no-brainer. Santa’s (Clark) is stuck in the sand on a Florida beach and needs to get it unstuck or else there won’t be any Christmas at all that year. The reindeer have already flown back to the North Pole because Florida is too hot for them. Leaving the boss behind, isn’t that grounds for termination? Santa telepathically summons a group of kids to come to his aid. They literally drop whatever they’re doing (e.g. a couple of boys stop fighting) and run to help him.
Now for some reason, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn hide in some nearby bushes watching the whole thing play out. What do they have to do with anything that goes on in Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny? Not a damn thing! It doesn’t matter anyway; they disappear long before the end of the movie. The kids try in vain to pull Santa’s sleigh out of the sand with various animals. Okay, the mule, pig, sheep, cow and horse make sense. They could have come from a farm or petting zoo. The gorilla is another story. Where on earth did that little girl get a gorilla? They aren’t exactly house pets. It doesn’t really matter though because anybody over the age of 5 can tell it’s really a guy in a gorilla suit. If I saw this movie as a kid, I would have thought it was Paul the gorilla from The Electric Company.
All efforts exhausted, Santa attempts to boost the spirits of the discouraged kids with the story of Thumbelina. This is where Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny shows how lazy a movie it really is. It literally employs the movie-within-a-movie device with a previously made version of Thumbelina filmed at the now-closed Pirate’s World amusement park in Florida. It starts with a girl (Garner) walking through the park. She rides a few rides before visiting a hall where a production of Thumbelina is being staged. This section of the movie, directed by Barry Mahon, runs 62 minutes; it’s longer than the frame story. It even has opening and closing credits. I won’t bore you with the particulars of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale except to say it’s narrated by a woman with an annoying voice on a tinny loudspeaker. It’s as poorly made as the frame story. It looks like an elementary school production with the cheap sets and costumes, painted backdrops, terrible songs, bad acting and over-rehearsed line readings. It also seems to go on forever (like an elementary school play). When it’s finally over, the movie cuts back to Santa and the kids on the beach. He’s still stuck, but the kids have a renewed sense of confidence.
Now, can you tell me what’s missing from the above description? That’s right, no mention at all of the Ice Cream Bunny of the title. He doesn’t show up until the last ten minutes. He SLOWLY drives to Santa’s aid in an antique fire truck (with many children passengers) and offers to DRIVE him to the North Pole. Drive? Uh, okay, yeah, whatever. I have absolutely NO idea why he’s called the Ice Cream Bunny. I have a feeling he’s supposed to be the Easter Bunny which would actually make more sense. But R. Miner, who never made another movie after this dud, doesn’t appear concerned about trivial matters like narrative and coherence.
I don’t really know what he had in mind with Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny, a movie so bad it makes 1964’s Santa Claus Conquers the Martians look like It’s a Wonderful Life. It has to be one of the cheapest looking movies EVER! Santa’s sleigh looks more like a shoddily made holiday lawn ornament. The only thing missing is a plastic Santa that lights up when plugged in. Santa’s workshop, tended to by kids in elf costumes, is a small one-room workplace with a few toys (e.g. a Raggedy Ann doll, a stuffed Snoopy, a toy dump truck, etc.) scattered around. The elves/kids pound away with hammers while singing tunelessly about Santa being missing. In this respect, Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is consistent; ALL of the songs are BAD!
Does it come as any surprise that the acting in Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is awful as well? It shouldn’t. The only familiar face is Ms. Garner who was also in the low-budget 1982 horror flick Humongous. She plays both the girl at the park and Thumbelina. One look at her chest tells you that she’s well past being a kid. At least she can carry a tune which is more than I can say for anybody else in the movie. They could have cast any department store Santa in the title role and he’d be no better or worse than Clark. As for the “Kids”, the best thing I can say is that none of them are particularly annoying. I guess it helps that they don’t have a lot of dialogue (if any).
The costumes are of the dime-store variety. That creepy Ice Cream Bunny thing is sure to give kids nightmares. The cinematography is sloppy and amateurish; it’s no wonder nobody wants to take credit for it. The editing is just as bad. It has many continuity errors. When the kids are on the beach, they go from wearing shoes to being barefoot from scene-to-scene. When driving to save Santa (why he’s driving so slowly is beyond me!), the Ice Cream Bunny takes a longcut through Pirate’s World. The scene cuts to Santa waiting (he does a lot of that). Then it cuts back to the Ice Cream Bunny driving on a dirt road with the park nowhere in sight. I guess the director figured the target audience wouldn’t care. After all, they’re just little kids that love going to the movies and will watch anything.
Of course, the movie’s biggest plot hole is Santa being stuck in the sand. How does that even happen? It’s not wet sand. It’s the dry kind; the sleigh could easily be pulled out. The runners are covered with a few grains of the sand, just dig him out and send him on his merry way. How hard is that? GEEZ! But wait, it gets worse. After the Ice Cream Bunny drives off with Santa, the sleigh mysteriously vanishes, presumably back to the North Pole. Why didn’t this happen at the outset? It doesn’t work if Santa’s sitting in the sleigh? We, the audience, need answers.
All I can say is that Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny joins such esteemed cinematic classics as Manos: The Hands of Fate and Robot Monster with its sheer awfulness. It’s a kid’s movie, but showing them a movie this terrible surely constitutes a form of child abuse. I don’t know any kid that would watch more than ten minutes of this holiday drivel before asking to play Angry Birds on somebody’s iPhone. It’s easily one of the worst Christmas movies I’ve ever seen. I might even put it at number two (Christmas with the Kranks will always hold the top spot!). But number two seems appropriate for Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny, wouldn’t you say?
