It seemed for a while as though Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) was going to be the worst Santa Claus film ever made. And then this monstrosity surfaced. Credited to one “R. Winer”, it’s very likely the work of Florida low budget auteur Barry Mahon as his 1970 film Thumbelina turns up right in the middle – not all 72 minutes of it, though they somehow manage to include the opening and closing credits. This maddening oddity begins with Santa, played by an obviously very young man in the cheapest Santa suit that “Winer” could find, setting out in his sleigh a few days before Christmas to judge who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. For reasons that aren’t adequately explained his sleigh gets stuck in the sand of a Floridian beach and rather than roll his sleeves up and start digging it out, our sun-baked Santa telepathically lures a gang of local kids to come to his aid. They try out a series of animals – including, bizarrely, a man in a gorilla suit – in an attempt to drag the sleigh free but nothing works. Taking a break from their exertions, the kids gather round to hear Santa tell them a story. Enter Thumbelina which rumbles on for the bulk of the film, all lousy songs, dreadful acting and impoverished production values. None of it makes any sense in the context of it being a story told by Santa (why does he include Thumbelina‘s own extraneous wraparound sequences set in pre-Disneyland theme park Pirate’s World? How do the credits fit in with his story telling? Why does he tell the story of Thumbelina as imagined by a mini-skirted visitor to the theme park? So many questions…).
Unbelievably odd, this often seems like just a random assemblage of whatever footage Winer/Mahon/whoever could lay their hands on. The lengthy Thumbelina interlude is given a half-arsed justification (Thumbelina didn’t give up so nor should the kids) but really it’s just an excuse for Mahon to fob off his rotten fairy tale for a second go around the cinemas. A former exploitation filmmaker, in his dotage Mahon started making films for children that were every bit as inept as his adult films (The Beast That Killed Women (1965), Sex Club International (1967), Fanny Hill Meets Lady Chatterly (1967) and many more too awful to mention). 1970 was his big year in this arena, with no fewer than five such films in release, including another outing for Father Christmas, Santa and the Three Bears (1970) which he co-directed with Tony Benedict. He also made a version of Jack and the Beanstalk which, it has been suggested, was included in some prints of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny in place of Thumbelina.
Whatever the “feature attraction”, the wraparound footage is extraordinarily bad in every respect. It look likes it was shot on a hot afternoon using whatever local kids and livestock they could find. It goes on forever with animal after animal being reluctantly dragged out for failed attempts to shift the sleigh while someone – he sensibly remains uncredited – ad libs Santa’s terrible monologue. He even inadvisedly bursts into song at one point and proves to be as tone deaf as he is useless at getting sleigh’s free of a few inches of sand. His words are run through a slap-back echo, presumably to indicate that this is all internal monologue or maybe because no-one knew how to use the recording desk properly.
The Ice Cream Bunny – whatever it might be; no-one ever explains it – turns up after Thumbelina is finally done. We get a bit more nonsense with the children and their menagerie of animals before they understandably get bored with Santa and run away. They return aboard the Bunny’s fire engine which travels painfully s-l-o-w-l-y accompanied by what sounds like a World War II air raid siren. The journey takes us through the “highlights” of Pirates World and seems to drag on even longer than the nonsense at the start of the film. The kids try to liven things up with another tuneless song which is mostly drowned out by that bloody siren but of course it doesn’t work. Eventually Santa – and the audience – are freed from their torment by the Bunny, another man in another terrible suit, but not before he does a pathetic little dance. In the end he just drives of with Santa, leaving the sleigh to be retrieved a few moments later by magical means. So why the hell didn’t he just do that at the start and spare us all this rubbish?
A truly exasperating experience, it’s hard to imagine this ever seeing the light of a projector bulb but 1-sheet posters exist suggesting that it did indeed get shown at matinee screenings. It was certainly seen by the MPAA by November 1972 when they awarded it a G rating. One can only imagine what the youthful audiences, driven to a frenzy by the approach of Christmas, made of all this. There are probably middle-aged Americans out there still going through therapy to get over the childhood trauma of sitting through this most bizarre experience. The best one can say is that there’s genuinely nothing else like it anywhere. And for that we truly should be very thankful indeed…
The EOFFTV Review 