Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny

I saw this when I was a kid and remember it being one of the worst movies ever. Many year later, someone I knew found a copy on a VHS tape and we watched. It confirmed what I knew as a child, this is a very bad movie. Why this thing was ever made to begin with is one question left to be answered? Why it was put on video is another. ALL copies should be destroyed to save the world from this travesty.

I had heard a lot about this movie before. I heard more about this movie than anyone deserves to hear. Still, I had no idea what I was in for when I finally got to see Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny. (Sitting here, I realize it's hard to articulate my true reaction to this movie). Obviously, from the comments above, it's an awful movie. Yet it has a strange draw. Like a really, really bad car accident, you can't quite turn away. And just when you think it can't get any worse, the Ice Cream Bunny actually reaches up to hold the head of his costume on while nodding vigorously at Santa's ramblings. Sad thing is, that's just a SMALL problem with this movie. My friend loves this movie. He actually recites the lines along with Santa and the gang. When I first left my initial viewing, I thought about calling the cops on him...but the more I think about it, there is a strange appeal to SICB. If you have any appreciation of the absurd and surreal then you really must see this movie. (Assuming you head doesn't explode during one of the musical numbers.)

I just watched this movie online... Wow!! It's so hideously bad it makes some notoriously bad movies by Edward D. Wood look like Citizen Kane, the only motivation I could think that this abomination was produced in the first place was simply because some guys had a couple of tacky-looking fancy dress outfits laying around in the loft and decided to make a movie with them.

The plot (or lack of) consists of a particularly creepy Santa stranded on a beach in Florida because his sleigh is trapped beneath two grains of sand (we learn that his reindeer have already flown back to the North Pole courtesy of some grainy-looking stock footage). Santa sings a song and waves his hand around a lot and telepathically enlists the help of some neighbourhood kids to bring their household pets to help him out of this pickle. One girl turns up with a guy in a Gorilla suit, while others with a variety of farmyard animals. Even Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer join Santa's helpers, but this is all to no avail, so he decides to tell the story of Thumbelina to some REALLY bored looking children...

Now, the version I watched didn't have the story of Thumbelina at this point (like the original release) and it simply fades to black and then back to Santa being creepy.

For no reason whatsoever, some other guy in a white rabbit costume drives a Fire Truck with an awful lot of children passengers towards the beach only to detour through an amusement park and finally get to the beach while the children sing songs. Santa and the rabbit character mumble to each other and then they take off. The kids run back to Santa's sleigh and it mysteriously vanishes.

Then comes the Thumbelina adaptation, which, in a nutshell is a fairly pretty girl singing songs around the same amusement park Mr. Rabbit took an inane detour through. The narration of the story sounds like it's coming through a PA system and the sets look like something in the average 4th graders Christmas nativity. However, this is the best part of SC&TICB simply because the girl who plays Thumbelina can carry a tune when she sings.

I can only imagine that the intention of this movie was to advertise "Pirate World", the amusement park where most of it is based, quite the way Santa Claus (1985) advertised a certain fast food restaurant and soft drink brand.

As a movie, this is the poorest you could ever find. Everything about it is amateur, from the acting to the set design to the photography, editing and direction. Even the songs are akin to the type a 6-year-old could come up with. The kazoo-heavy score is also inferior. This could surpass for entertainment as a movie, and if it's intended to be a 90-minute advert, it fails at that too. Pirate World shut down around 1975. With this movie to advertise it... I'm expecting Santa's wake very soon...

Yes, this is among the very worst films ever made--even worse than MANOS HANDS OF FATE and light-years worse than anything made by Ed Wood, Jr.--it's that bad! Incompetent, stupid and saccharine--you just can't imagine how terrible this film is! It only avoids mention on IMDb's bottom 100 because so far there aren't enough votes to make the minimum needed for this infamous list.

The film begins with Santa and his sleigh (minus the reindeer) stuck in the sand in Florida and Christmas is just around the corner. Some kids discover him and try to help--at which point, you notice just how creepy and untalented this Santa is--and you wonder what kids would be fooled into thinking this is the genuine Saint Nick. Plus, he talks and talks and talks--he simply won't shut up--yet amazingly the kids don't run home and call the cops or walk away in boredom. Instead, they do what any kids would do--get some guy in a gorilla suit to try to dislodge the sleigh. They also try using sheep and several other half-hearted ideas. When these don't work, Santa decides to take his anger out on the kids and tells them an irrelevant story. This becomes the film "Thumbelina" (1970) and this prior film (made by the same director) consists of most of the film! Talk about a crappy way to reuse old footage. There's more to it than this, but frankly after a while I simply didn't care.

Let's face it, this film looks like a production by a local community theater--a very bad one at that. To save money, they filmed this anywhere they could locally--on the beach and at a now defunct amusement park (perhaps this film killed it). The acting, direction, production values and every aspect of the film is as poor as you can find. To make it all much worse, the film is filled with original songs--the most god-awful and annoying songs as sung by people who often couldn't carry a tune. The total effect is to make what is probably the worst Santa movie ever made--much, much worse than "Santa Claus vs. the Martians" and it's craptastic tunes. I am not exaggerating with this comparison! Aside from showing closeup footage of roadkill being eaten by vultures, I can't think of anything less entertaining for the kids. This film is likely to make parents to commit self-harm or beat the kiddies, so avoid it at all costs unless you are a genuine bad film junkie!

By the way, schlock-meister Barry Mahon made a ton of porno films before switching to saccharine kids' films late in his career. Perhaps that is why I got such creepy vibes from his Santa.

SANTA AND THE ICE CREAM BUNNY - first thought: What the ????

Found this video for rental at Family Video at 76th & National in Milwaukee this week and it sounded so atrociously awful and ridiculous I just HAD to rent it. Never heard of this movie before... It indeed was interesting viewing of one of the worst movies EVER.

For those who are seeking this video, the copy I picked up says: copyright United Entertainment, Inc. United Home Video - 1987. Product #4006

So apparently this company acquired the rights to release this on tape.

Now the video box description mentions that Santa tells the children the story of Thumbelina, and segues into that movie...

But in the video on the tape, the structure of the film has been changed.

This video does contain THUMBELINA, but not as a "movie within a movie" as in the original version. Instead THUMBELINA and all the theme-park sequences that go with it are tacked on to the end of the "Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny" story.

So in this video, Santa begins to tell the story, and the picture fades to black. Then comes back from black and now Santa has finished telling the story... wrapping up with a an incoherent moral that sounds quite nonsensical considering the Thumbelina story had been excised from the body of the SICB film. Incidentally, the Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny portion of the film clocks in at about 30 minutes.

In watching the THUMBELINA film on the video at the end of the SICB story I was interested in finding out more about the Pirate's World Amusement Park in Dania, Florida. There is considerable footage of the theme park rides in the film, and this movie could be looked at as a historical film/video document of one of Florida's Lost Roadside Attractions. Perhaps it is one of the only motion-picture visual records remaining of what that park was like. I thought the Steeplechase Ride looked cool but would not pass muster today considering safety regulations.

Pirate's World was successful enough in its early days, but the opening of Walt Disney World in 1971 was the beginning of the end for that theme park. By 1973 it was in bankruptcy and in 1975 it was closed.

I would not be surprised if SANTA AND THE ICE CREAM BUNNY, released in 1972, in some way contributed to the demise of Pirate's World.

This movie is so awful, it probably scared potential theme-park visitors away!!!