Cast Jay Clark (Santa Claus), Shay Garner (Thumbelina), Pat Morrell (Mrs Mole), Bob O'Connell (Mr Digger)
Ladies and gentlemen, we have discovered the entrance to Hell, and it’s an amusement park in Florida. And it’s here we’re spending Boxing Day – and the end of the current season of Schlock Treatment – in the torturous sands of Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny (1972). You’d assume, in this season of giving, that we’ve saved the best of Schlock for last, right? Well, our film tonight is not so much a movie as a kind of wretched wrapping paper around a not-so-wretched short. In fact, Santa’s mulligan stew of school play, tacky home movie footage and amusement park advert, could be a new genre: the panto-mercial, of which its single entry Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny is clearly its outstanding example. To rub salt into our bleeding eyes, it displays a common trait amongst the kiddie matinee films, and that’s naked contempt for its audience, whom the filmmakers believe will watch any old horseshit, so long as there’s a candy cane parked in the top. [sound of crickets…]
But hey kids, it’s Santa Claus! Wait…oh no! He’s stranded in the sand dunes of Florida and his sleigh is stuck without his reindeer. The kids from the neighbourhood heed his distress call, and empty what seems like the entire menagerie of a petting zoo to help pull the sleigh. There’s a cow, and a frightened sheep, a guy in a gorilla suit – this is all filmed, by the way, in excruciating detail – and even a donkey, but Santa’s clearly no Baby Jesus. Meanwhile, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn just happen to be floating down the Mississippi River (cue “Old Man River” on kazoos), and offer their angry raccoon from the safety of some bushes. From what we can gather from his litany of clichés, Santa’s frustrated with his lot, but the world’s children need their toys, greedy little selfish bastards that they are . Never give up, Santa tells the wilting kids, have faith and BELIEVE. And, since Santa’s footage is almost an hour short of feature length, here’s a story to hammer the point home…
And so we arrive at our film-within-a-film, which comes with an interesting legacy. How did the director of A Good Time With A Bad Girl (1967) come to make kiddie horrors? Barry Mahon is one interesting cat. An American World War 2 fighter pilot shot down over Europe, his POW experience later inspired the Steve McQueen movie The Great Escape, but it’s his adventures in Filmland that most interest us here at Schlock HQ. By sheer twist of fate Mahon became Errol Flynn’s manager and directed his rancid swansong Assault Of The Cubal Rebel Girls (1959) which, along with the ill-fated Flynn vehicle William Tell, scuttled any chance at a serious career in Hollywood A-films. Instead, White Slavery (late 50s), a movie he shot in Tangiers while he and Flynn were laying low, sealed his fate, and he began a series of nudie cutie films, some with Playboy bunnies sourced by glamour photographer Bunny (“I shot Bettie Page”) Yeager. As the Sixties progressed, the benign nudie antics of PaganIsland(1960) and Girls On Tiger Reef (1965) gave way to notorious “roughies” like The Beast That Killed Women (1965) and The Sex Killer (1967), and then POOF! Like a third-rate magic act the pornographer disappeared, and Mahon the Kiddie Matinee King took his place: six shortish films in rapid succession around 1969 and 1970, and mostly shot at a doomed Florida amusement park called Pirate’s World, a place remembered more for its rowdy concerts by The Doors and Iron Butterfly than any of the buccaneer-themed rides.
Thumbelina (1970) was Mahon’s cardboard rendition of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, a burnt-out fluro nightmare lit sparingly with dayglo splashes by a filmmaker who clearly didn’t have a clue what the word “psychedelic” meant. Its two inch heroine suffers all manner of ignomies – sleeping in a walnut, kidnapped by frogs, pimped by a widowed mole and railroaded into marrying her octogenarian neighbour – and all with customary good cheer and boundless optimism. Indeed, every human-sized creature, or man-sized anthropomorphic puppet with flapping yapping mouths, wants a piece of Thumbelina, or to at least feast on her innocence. That is, until a thawed out bird gives her a glimpse of freedom AND true happiness, prompting yet another ghastly unmusical musical number. It’s like the rock opera Hair before it hit puberty and was still high-pitched and hairless. Sure, Thumbelina is a step up in production values from the Santa footage, but when you’ve hit rock bottom, you’ve nowhere else to go. What ever you do, don’t drift off to sleep and let its hideous tune about “twelve pennies” soak into your brain-sponge.
As Thumbelina draws to its depressing conclusion, it’s back to The Suck, and a sand-bound Santa still cursing his existential funk via a stream-of-consciousness gibberish issuing forth from his sweat-stained beard. I have absolutely no doubt there won’t be one single viewer left sitting by the end of the film, so I can safely give away the ending – Santa’s sleigh is saved by the Ice Cream Bunny, a pathetic seven foot threadbare creature even Jimmy Stewart in a percodin haze couldn’t have conjured. I can only assume it was the park’s mascot, as it drives the kids for a victory lap in a vintage fire engine past its numerous rides and attractions. It can perform only two functions, driving and winking like a dead, rotting, reanimated and fur-covered Marilyn Monroe. I swear, if anything screams Christmas more than the Ice Cream Bunny, I’ll happily choke on a homeless man’s sick, with the film’s “Jingle Bells” for kazoo playing as my funeral dirge. Happy Christmas everybody, and see you sometime in 2011 for the next season on Schlock Treatment as we leave you with the 1972 Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny.
The Ice Cream Bunny winks out in Morse Code "Happy Christmas, Schlockateers!"
Directors Roberto Rodríguez, [uncredited] Manuel San Fernando Writer Ernesto Giménez Caballero
Cast El Enano Santanon (El Gato), Antonio Raxel (El Rey Serio), Humberto Dupeyrón (Juanito), Edmundo Benitez (El Gallo)
There are a number of rules for a children's film to succeed as a miserable failure, and thus reaching the hallowed “schlock” status. For one, the movie must patently stink as entertainment for its (by now alienated) primary audience. Secondly, it must disturb and unnerve – not in an obvious manner, but in a creepy, not-good-touch fashion. And thirdly, it must be shoddily dubbed, thereby hammering home its “unworldliness”. Musical numbers, unable to match the mouth movements with musical syncopation, subsequently crash and burn, and are reduced in minutes to smouldering ash. The agony! The ecstacy! And remember, kids, don't ever take ecstacy if you're feeling depressed or not in the care of an irresponsible adult.
Once these three simple rules are in place, it's a joy to uncover an entire industry of psychedelic pseudo-kiddie horrorshows which sticks desperately to the rules like a drowning fat kid to his donut. It ain't a life raft, Tubs, and Puss 'n Boots from 1961 is clearly not for twinkywinks. Originally titled El Gato Con Botas, it's just one of a series of Mexican fairy tales from the early Sixties produced and directed by Roberto Rodriguez, and then reworked for an American audience by the dubbing factory of Florida-based K. Gordon Murray. His successes repackaging Mexican wrestling and/or horror pictures was matched by his Saturday Matinee circuit; Murray's fabled double bills of weirdly-reworded German and Mexican programmers were augmented with live appearances of “your favourite characters brought to life” - men in animal costumes representing Stinky the Skunk and the Big Bad Wolf. Plush memories, I'm sure, buried by an entire generation of post-Baby Boomers only now coming to terms with the deep psychological scars.
Puss 'n Boots is set in a magical kingdom under the spell of a terrible ogre, the genetic result of Genghis Khan being raped by Vikings, who has bled the Royal Treasury dry and now demands the hand of the King's daughter for his oafish son. The Kingdom, it has been foretold, can only be saved by one who is pure of heart: into the forest prances Randy the Sheep Herder (thank you K. Gordon Murray for showing such restraint), and into the hidden sugar-cave of kindly old Mother Time. She hands Randy a miniature hat and boots, which fit his pet cat like a charm. Before you can say “aye chihuahua”, the puss is transformed into El Gato, a midget in a cat costume (and if you dig below the furline you'll find the hunchbacked dwarf from our previous film Santo & Blue Demon vs The Monsters!), an amphetamine howl on legs whose demented stream-of-consciousness babble is punctuated with a stabbing series of “mrow's” and “meowmeowmeow's”. The Prints (as in “Paw Prints”) and the Pauper team up with a talking chicken who claims to be of royal lineage – both Cat and Chicken become locked in a battle to see who has the most grating voice, and I suspect it's the same one! - and together they set out to save the kingdom AND the chastity of Princess Jane with cunning, lies, a pure (if somewhat deceitful) heart, and a full load of catnip.
“The mercy and charity of God is infinite,” says Mother Time, echoing the film's Catholic overtones and Inquisition-like intensity. For us, however, Puss 'n Boots offers no mercy, and is proof that God has left the cinema, leaving us perpetual five year olds trapped in an existential filmic Hell. For one we're subjected to one of the most excruciating musical scores in the K. Gordon Murray catalogue, a caterwaul of cat's claws on blackboards (“Who dares raise his voice in song?” asks the King, and no-one's willing to own up!). Then there's the scene of the Chicken pleading to the court not to be eaten, echoing the undercurrent of sadism in both Puss In Boots the fairy tale, and Puss 'n Boots the Mexican torture show. There are dwarves dressed as clowns, fat kids in puffy pants, and El Gato attempting to seduce a real-life pussy... “This pretending is grotesque”, the King so accurately puts it, and the sum effect is like having an injection – it stings like a motherfucker and the sight of steel penetrating the skin chills us to the soul, but we can't look away. Watching Puss 'n Boots from one set of credits to the other is like a whole series of injections that have perforated the skin all the way around your arm so you can tear it off like a postage stamp. Now take that arm and beat yourself to death with it.
Feeling better? Thought you might. Or, just record tonight's movie and watch it twice. Please enjoy the 1961 Puss 'n Boots.
DRIVE-IN CLASSICS INTRODUCED BY ANDREW LEAVOLD... From B-Grade to Z-Grade classics and anti-classics, from sci fi, horror and kung fu flicks to dwarfsploitation and Christian gore movies, ONLY on Sunday nights at 9.30pm, Brisbane's Channel 31 - your Community TV
Ladies and gentlemen, we have discovered the entrance to Hell, and it’s an amusement park in 
But hey kids, it’s Santa Claus! Wait…oh no! He’s stranded in the sand dunes of 
And so we arrive at our film-within-a-film, which comes with an interesting legacy. How did the director of A Good Time With A Bad Girl (1967) come to make kiddie horrors? Barry Mahon is one interesting cat. An American World War 2 fighter pilot shot down over 
Thumbelina (1970) was 
As Thumbelina draws to its depressing conclusion, it’s back to The Suck, and a sand-bound Santa still cursing his existential funk via a stream-of-consciousness gibberish issuing forth from his sweat-stained beard. I have absolutely no doubt there won’t be one single viewer left sitting by the end of the film, so I can safely give away the ending – Santa’s sleigh is saved by the Ice Cream Bunny, a pathetic seven foot threadbare creature even Jimmy Stewart in a percodin haze couldn’t have conjured. I can only assume it was the park’s mascot, as it drives the kids for a victory lap in a vintage fire engine past its numerous rides and attractions. It can perform only two functions, driving and winking like a dead, rotting, reanimated and fur-covered Marilyn Monroe. I swear, if anything screams Christmas more than the Ice Cream Bunny, I’ll happily choke on a homeless man’s sick, with the film’s “Jingle Bells” for kazoo playing as my funeral dirge. Happy Christmas everybody, and see you sometime in 2011 for the next season on Schlock Treatment as we leave you with the 1972 Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny.
The Ice Cream Bunny winks out in Morse Code "Happy Christmas, Schlockateers!"
