12 Days of Christmas Movies #5: Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (1972)

Happy Holidays everyone! To celebrate the most wonderful time of the year, I've decided to complete a daily review series of 12 Christmas movies leading up to the big 12/25. To qualify, the movies have to be tied to Christmas in some way and also something I've never seen before. I'll be going in chronological order. So, without further ado, if you got chestnuts, roast 'em - and enjoy my 12 Days of Christmas Movies!

Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny
Dir. R. Winer & Barry Mahon

NOTE: Apparently there are multiple versions of this movie floating around, one of which features a "Jack in the Beanstalk" segment, another with "Thumbelina." I saw the "Beanstalk" version (Amazon Streaming), and that is what I will be reviewing here!

Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is one of the worst movies I have seen in my entire life. It's right up there with Plan 9 from Outer Space, The Room, and Birdemic. But before I talk about the movie itself, I feel a little history lesson is required:

In the 60s and early 70s, before the ribbon was first cut for Disney World, one of the more popular theme parks in Florida was "Pirates World." It was a bit of a piecemeal operation, taking discarded rides and parts from here and there to make up their park, which had "lands" dedicated to fairy tales, and of course pirates. There came a point where the heads of the park wanted to produce a series of films to promote it - including "Jack and the Beanstalk" and "Thumbelina," both directed by Barry Mahon, who was previously best known for directing softcore "nudie" movies.

In its heyday, Pirates World hosted some of the biggest musical acts
of all time, like Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, etc. No joke!

I believe things were going OK for Pirates World at least until 1971, when Orlando opened the big D 200 miles north. Ever after, Florida tourism completely changed and it was just a matter of 2 years before the rinky dink "Pirates World" declared bankruptcy. As a last-ditch gamble to promote the park in 1972, the wise folks at Pirates World cobbled together one last movie, Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny, piecing together scraps from their fairy tale shorts and a cheaply-produced Christmas story of Santa trapped on the beach. With practically no budget, it has stained costumes, jerky editing, awkward acting, off-key singing, bare-bones sets, contradictory plot points, and reeks of desperation. It's a disaster of epic proportions and it's safe to say that it did not result in digging "Pirates World" out of its hole.

Let's try to examine the story: Santa's sleigh is stuck in a whole INCH of sand on the poorest-looking beach in Florida. His reindeer have flown back to the North Pole to cool off. Santa then telepathically calls various children playing in a nearby neighborhood to help him. The kids try all sorts of fill-ins for the reindeer, including a dog, a horse, a pig (violently squealing the entire time), and even a "gorilla" which is clearly just a guy in a suit. None of these solutions work, so Santa decides to tell the kids a story about believing in yourself, and then for nearly an hour an adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk begins, with the same production value as a cut-rate porno.

Then the film hard cuts back to Santa, still stuck in the sand. With just 10 minutes left in the movie, finally the ice cream bunny makes his grand entrance. He's carting the entire group of kids in a rickety old firetruck through the park and woods, eventually landing on the beach with the stranded Santa. Although he previously told a kid he couldn't fly home in a plane because he couldn't leave his sleigh, Santa happily joins his old friend the Ice Cream Bunny (who is never introduced) on his fire engine, off into the sunset. His sleigh disappears soon after and the movie ends. We never learn what happens to them, who the bunny is, or how the bunny is connected to ice cream.

Even without knowing the "history" behind this movie, it's painfully obvious that the filmmakers were desperate to pad this thing out. There is a totally random appearance from Huck Finn at the beginning of the movie, most of the run time is an entirely different film, and the time it takes for characters to finish speaking you'd think they'd had brain damage. It's also filled with "music" that's the audio equivalent of sticking a fork in a light socket (the first song, sung by "elves" in Santa's workshop is completely indecipherable without subtitles).

Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny feels like a public access fever dream, like if David Lynch decided to make a Christmas movie. It was clearly made as a cheap matinee flick to drop off your kids while you went shopping, but the only thing kids who watched this would've asked Santa for is a therapist. Utterly bizarre, ugly, pointless, nonsensical, tone-deaf, and cheap-as-hell - it's exactly as awkward as you'd expect a 1970's pornographer would make a micro-budget children's film.

Rating: 0.5 out of 5

Clip (Just a taste of the insanity of this movie):