There are movies so incredible that one has to take a vacation just to recover from what they have seen. I’m not talking about spectacular things like Avatar: Fire and Ash or Zootopia 2, but rather about low-budget cinema, made with very little money and without any love for the seventh art. Abominations like Birdemic, Troll 2, or even The Room pale in comparison to what I bring you today: a movie from 1972 that makes no sense at any moment and whose budget was so low that they had to insert another previously filmed movie into it to stretch the runtime to over an hour. If you are always on the lookout for strong emotions, I welcome you to one of the films that will change your life: Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny.
Children and rabbits, come to me!
Normally, Christmas movies featuring Santa Claus show him soaring through the skies, delivering gifts and petting Rudolph, his red-nosed reindeer. However, in Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny we see him stranded on a Florida beach, dying of heat. In the first five minutes of the movie, there are already two songs recorded, possibly on a walkman (or at least that’s the sound it leaves). This is the best part of the movie, because from here on it becomes an increasingly absurd nonsense.
The reindeer go to the North Pole, to our protagonist’s toy workshop, and meanwhile, he telepathically calls a nearby group of children (nothing suspicious, nothing criminal, at all) to help him find a replacement for a reindeer. They bring him all kinds of animals in an extremely long sequence that culminates with -ah, the humor- a child putting the reins on a man dressed as a gorilla. In the 70s, they settled for little. As the children realize that things are going wrong, Santa decides to tell them a story, and this is where things get complicated.
It turns out that the producer of the movie (if we can call it that), Barry Mahon, had previously filmed, in 1970, two movies that adapted fairy tales: Thumbelina and Jack and the Beanstalk. They were medium-length films that did not have much significance, until Mahon saw the opportunity to reuse them: when Santa started telling a story, he would directly copy and paste (with credits included!) one of the two films. Depending on the version, you could get either Thumbelina or Jack and the Beanstalk, and nothing changed at all. In fact, this footage is the majority in the movie, leaving Santa’s misadventure with the sleigh aside. In short, it was a way to sell you a movie that was already stale. Ho, ho, ho.
In the end, who literally saves Santa in the last five minutes of the movie? Well, it’s the ice cream rabbit, which is a ridiculous and terrible costume, a true abomination that ends up taking our protagonist to the North Pole. No, it’s not a covert promotion, nor a character from American folklore (well, maybe a version of the Easter Bunny): the producers had a rabbit costume and an ice cream cart, so… Well, why not put him in the very title of the movie? He has earned it for doing absolutely nothing.
Although when it comes to talking about bad Christmas movies, everyone remembers Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (which is not, by any means, that bad), no one seems to recall the good old Ice Cream Bunny. It is one of the worst movies in history, a true disaster, an impossible absurdity that only a few will be able to enjoy as it deserves. I mean, laughing at each of its scenes. Isn’t that the true meaning of Christmas?
