Dear weirdo writing under a pseudonym: I am an imaginary eight-year-old girl. Some of my friends say 1985’s Santa Claus: The Movie isn’t a cynical piece of shit and a desperate cash grab, but is something they fondly remember from their own childhood. Is that true? Also, why am I hanging out with people older than even my parents, and to whom I am not even related? Please tell me the truth. Regards, Virginia
Virginia, your not-so-little friends are wrong. They have become delusional with the passage of time and are infected with an unfortunate strain of nostalgia. They likely have been watching YouTube videos where sad, sad men believe they are correcting past wrongs that were critical slaggings of the movie on its initial release. When they aren’t doing that, they’re still attacking movies like Barbie and the 2016 version of Ghostbusters. That, or they’re British, which I’ll circle back to near the close of this essay.
David Huddleston is Santa, and see first see him delivering toys to just one village house in the middle ages, He only has two reindeer at this point (Donner and Blitzer, in case you were curious) and they are entirely earthbound. Afterwards, he, Mrs. Claus and the reindeer appear to freeze to death in a storm. The end.
But wait—the North Star flares, and a beam of light is painted on the night sky background from the star down to the ground. The shape the light takes is even a bit like a Christmas tree. That the light is painted reminds me of Thomas Kinkade and how he trademarked the phrase “painter of light” instead of “shit painter of shit”. Also, a new home will magically appear at the base of that beam of light, and it looks like how I imagine a painting of a gingerbread house might look if painted by Kinkade.
The North Star has brought an additional gift, and that is forced labor. These are the elves, though local folklore has them as “vendegums”, which sound like something out of a folk horror movie. Something else that feels like an element of that genre is Burness Meredith, as the world’s oldest elf, telling Santa, “The prophesy has come to pass”, which makes me think they were about to set Huddleston on fire in a giant wicker man. Burgess also explains how Santa can deliver gifts all around the world in one night: “Time travels with you. The night of the world is a passage of endless night for you.” Not only does that sound creepy, but it scans like something out of the first season of True Detective. I expected Burgess to start droning on about how, “time is a flat circle…”
Anywho, these elves are an annoying bunch. IMDB informs me they largely have monikers like Puffy, Goober, Honka, Boog and Goobler because, of course, everything here will be whimsically Seussian and vaguely steampunkish in completely whamtoobular, shamshushular ways. Their leader is Dudley Moore as Patch, and he is not a Patch on that elf in the original Rudolph stop-motion special that just wanted to be a dentist. Moore’s character has a distinctively grating shtick of finding endless ways to use hyphenated words beginning with “self”, but trimming the “s” to make such words as “elf-esteem” and “elf-portrait”. Between his smugness and elf-satisfied performance, he is deeply punchable. Still, I have sworn I would never punch down.
Similar to Rudolph’s Herbie the Elf, he will eventually fall out of the fat man’s good graces and run away from home. You see, Moore had implemented assembly line production, resulting in shoddy toys. But, really, what kids in the 80’s would have been writing to Santa for the traditional wooden fare that is all the elves crank out? One of the strangest bits in the picture is a brief shot of an elf putting the finishing touches on a wooden cup. What kid sent a letter to Santa asking for a wooden cup?
Instead, kids wanted electronic gadgets, like dolls that talk. The kinds of dolls manufactured by John Lithgow’s manufacturer of toys that we see being introduced as evidence in a FTC hearing against him. I’ll admit one of the two times I chuckled during the runtime was a stuffed animal that is revealed to be full of nails and broken glass. For the record, the other moment also involved Lithgow, and that is when he is irritated by lawyer Jeffrey Kramer’s inability to get to the point: “Stop giving me the short sentences and making me say, ‘uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh’, like some sort of a damned moron.” That line feels improvised and, if it was, then kudos to Mr. Lithgow.
Moore develops a special product for Lithgow for that Christmas season. Lithgow offers this to the public for free, but only for the first Christmas, thinking it might buy some goodwill from government regulators. Note: only for the first Christmas, which is why his next big idea is Christmas II, scheduled for March 25th.
The product is a lollipop, which I can’t imagine would make most people go out of their way to acquire. A surprise element of it is the eater will find themselves briefly floating in the air, which is what happens to Dorothea Phillips, though the magic isn’t powerful enough to sync her dubbed voice with the shapes made by her mouth. Lithgow will be making the public pay for the next iteration of the production, a candy cane made with more magic, enough to make the consumer fly. Unfortunately, that amount of magic is dangerous, and the candy canes have the potential to explode.
The anti-gravity characteristic of these products is courtesy of some of the magic dust Moore helped himself to when leaving Santa’s employ. It is primarily used to make the reindeer fly, by way of it being put on their food. I wondered if their feed retained this magical properly through and beyond the digestion process, and I just imagine piles of reindeer shit floating in the skies around the world on December 25th.
There is a neat animated effect used to convey the magic radiating off of materials coated in the dust. Another bit of hand-drawn animation has the letters to Santa fly through the air and down into the chimney—where a fire is usually burning. Why have the letters come down the chimney? I don’t recall that being part of Santa folklore but, even if it was, why does there always seem to be roaring fire there?
The other effects don’t fare so well. There is a great deal of a flying sleigh against various backgrounds, usually of New York City. The quality of the effect is roughly that of the flying footage in the first Superman movie almost a decade earlier. It is no surprise the producer of this is Ilya Salkind, the producer of the Reeve series, as well as the largely reviled Supergirl. Jeannot Szwarc directed that picture, as well as this one, and I wondered whether Salkind thought he was doing Szwarc a favor by giving him this assignment after the beating everybody took on the earlier film. Alas, the direction is just as artless here as it was when the same person helmed Jaws 2.
One effect which stands out as especially bad is the animatronic reindeer. While, in general, I would prefer these physical effects to CGI, these things occupy a weird space shared by the robot band that would “perform” on stage at Chuck E. Cheese. The expressions of the reindeer are largely limited to eye rolls, which looked to me like nothing less than them being in pain and crying out for a merciful death. One of them is scared of heights (har har) and so tends to cover their eyes with their ears while airborne. They especially do this when attempting a pointless loop-de-loop Santa keeps trying to force them to do. I was wondering if the bag o’ toys would plummet to the earth should they succeed. Then the reindeer finally accomplish this in a climatic scene where doing this somehow puts the sleigh in front of another vehicle they were pursuing.
Not even the exceptionally loose physics of action movies can account for that. But an even a bigger issue for me is a conversation on the first night the Clauses spend in their new gingerbread McMansion at the North Pole which didn’t exist prior to that very day. Unable to sleep, Santa finds Moore awake and showing his plans for various apparatuses he has been working on for a very long time though, once again, his workshop and everything in it did not exist until a few hours ago. Moore also starts to tell Santa about the magical event that is “Seasons Greetings”, but then doesn’t want to spoil the surprise. When has there ever been this event? Once again, THIS PLACE, HIS JOB, NONE OF THIS SHIT EXISTED UNTIL A FEW HOURS AGO. And, when we finally do see that particular spectacle, it is just the North Star growing brighter and a brief flurry of snow coming down through the open skylight. Big whoop.
The performances range largely from serviceable to terrible. What is weird is how various characters in the shots, especially some of the elves, look pretty pissed off for no apparent. Judy Cornwell, as Mrs. Claus, seems to oscillate between expressions ranging from bemused to patronizing to the kind of faces I’ve only seen on those who have recently changed their psychological medications and have yet to acclimate. Moore actually isn’t bad, and he does appear to be giving it his all, but the script does him no favors with all those lines about elf-preservation and elf-awareness making me want to lose my elf-control, go all nutcracker, and punch him in the crotch clear into the next holiday season. Of all the performers, Lithgow has the best understanding of the film he’s in, and he maximizes his role’s potential for camp.
But suffer the little children, as the kids in this have the absolute worst roles. The ones in the most minor parts frequently look bored. The two who have the leading child actor roles are stuck being a cynical homeless boy (Christian Fitzpatrick) and an orphaned rich girl (Carrie Kei Heim). In a subplot that would been regarded as creaky fifty years before this made, she sees him on the street and their friendship begins with her leaving him a heaping plate of leftovers and an obligatory product-placement can of Coke. Given the plate looks like museum-quality china, I like to think he just hocked it for cash when he was done eating.
Something I find especially odd about Fitzpatrick’s character is this kid is literally starving but, instead of taking care of that concern, Santa takes the lad on a ride in the sleigh. We will see the kid one year later and he is in the same situation. Still, damned if he isn’t just happy to see Santa again. This time, Fitzpatrick is gifted a carved wooden figure of Moore’s character, somebody the boy never even met. That seemed very strange to me. I know that, in the same situation, I would have far more preferred anything I could eat.
Also, it seems weird the boy looks exactly the same from one Christmas to the next. I swear the smudges of dirt on his face are even the same. And he looked to be on the cusp of puberty that first Christmas, so I was disappointed he didn’t have a deeper voice, a pathetic little mustache and a surly demeanor the next year. Ideally, he would try to jack Santa’s sleigh.
Even the music is lacking, as it ranges from barely tolerable to deeply awful. That the score was composed by Henry Mancini is baffling. His contributions aren’t so much bad as they are bland. There is a workmanlike quality akin to the output of any number of lesser composers, but without the spark that brought to life his best scores. A nadir of the soundtrack is the number “Thank You, Santa”, which feels like it was cut from the same cloth as “We Are the World” and is almost as bad.
That song has me thinking about how weirdly useless Santa is in his own movie. At one point, Mrs. Claus says how proud she is of him, but he had done nothing by that point. The elves make the toys, the house and factory were gifted to the Clauses and the reindeer do all the work on Christmas Eve. For that matter, time actually stops during the global toy delivery operation, giving him literally all the time he needs to finish each year. And, given time stops, how is he able to interact with the kids while that is happening? Shouldn’t they be frozen in place like statues?
As somebody who loves a great deal of garbage, I cannot slight anybody for enjoying Santa Claus: The Movie, though I found it to be a hollow and cynical experience. Inexplicably, it is especially beloved by a certain generation of Brits, in one of those rare lapses in taste which puts the lie to their choice of entertainment being more sophisticated than that of the Yanks. The worst element of this film is it is also hypocritical, as it throws weak punches at the targets of crass commercialism and opportunism, while having almost as many product placements for McDonalds and Coke as Mac & Me. Something among the very last of the end credits completely subverts those satirical jabs at commerce: trade mark declarations for the movie’s logo and even “Elfmade” the logo the elves stamp upon their lovingly hand-carved output.
Anyway, in answer to your letter (which came down my chimney, was set alight by the fire actively burning in the fireplace and which then caught my curtains on fire): Yes, Virginia, it was a completely shit movie.
Dir: Jeannot Szwarc
Starring Dudley Moore, John Lithgow, David Huddleston