Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (Dir: R Winer & B Mahon, 1972).
If you are looking for alternative Christmas viewing it doesn’t get much more alternative than this, frankly weird, no-budget effort from indie production company R & S Films, Inc.
Santa (Jay Clark) touches down in sunny Florida and gets his sleigh stuck in the sand. Using his powers of telepathy(!), Ol’ Saint Nick summons the help of some local kids including, for reasons unexplained, Mark Twain’s literary Tom and Huck. The kids employe an assortment of animals, gorilla included, to shift the sleigh to no avail, until the appearance of the titular rabbit who, despite co-star billing, doesn’t appear until the final moments of the movie. When he does finally make an entrance he is inexplicably driving a fire truck, not an ice cream van as you might expect. Really this Santa and Bunny business is just a framing device as Santa settles down to tell the kids the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk, which takes up the bulk of the movie’s runtime.
Portions of a movie’s musical score being played on kazoo is generally a good indicator that it was made on a low budget. Actually there are many indicators that Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny was made on a low budget: amateurish performances and camerawork, shoddy sets and witless songs are just a few.
With a disjointed and often nonsensical narrative the movie has a hazy, dreamlike quality that may leave you wondering if you actually watched it or imagined it. Yet, for all that, it does have a certain slapdash charm.
I seriously doubt if Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny ever appealed to kids, even back in ‘72. It is difficult to see it appealing to young’uns today, unless they have a particular penchant for kitsch movies.
In the public domain and easy to access via streaming, by all means give it a watch, as there is little else like it around. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it as much as endured it. But it was weirdly watchable and cheaper than drugs.
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