Yesterday's Hits: The Santa Clause (1994, John Pasquin)

Paul Clark — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Well, it’s the holidays again, and that means that Christmas movies are back in season. But while Christmas movies have long been an annual tradition, in the last few decades the market for new holiday-themed classics has grown by leaps and bounds. Gone are the days when scruffy little movies like A Christmas Story would do decent business in theatres only to become classics on video and cable. Today, Christmas movies are big business, and rare is the big budget holiday movie that doesn’t clean up at the box office. For my next three Yesterday’s Hits columns, I’ll be taking a new look at three of the biggest holiday hits of all time, to get you all in the spirit of the season. This week, I’ll begin with the 1994 blockbuster The Santa Clause.

The Santa Clause came after nearly a decade of Christmas movies that shied away from dealing with Santa Claus. While this might seem odd nowadays, there was a good reason for this at the time- 1985’s Santa Claus: The Movie was a massive flop, scaring the studios into making less fantasy-based holiday movies in the years to come. But by the mid-1990s, Disney decided it was time to bring back the jolly old elf, and The Santa Clause served up St. Nick with a twist on the old tale. After several established movie stars (Bill Murray and Chevy Chase, to name two) turned down the role, Disney turned to the star of the hugely popular sitcom Home Improvement, a former standup comedian named Tim Allen. The combination of Christmas and Allen’s big-screen leading man debut proved as irresistible to audiences as milk and cookies, and The Santa Clause became the biggest hit of fall 1994, spawning two sequels and propelling Allen to movie stardom.

The premise of the film certainly helped. Rather than beginning with its main character born as Santa, The Santa Clause took the novel approach of having its protagonist Scott Calvin (played by Allen) more or less inherit the job. In the film, if something happens to the current Santa, the next person to don the suit takes his place, with all of the side effects that implies. The Santa Clause’s best sequence takes place right after Scott finds himself thrust into the role of Kris Kringle, when we discover through his eyes the perils of the job- snarling dogs, home security systems, gifts that are too big to fit under the tree. And while Scott predictably finds himself turning physically into Santa, gaining 45 pounds in a week and growing a long white beard in a matter of minutes, the sight gags are fairly enjoyable nonetheless.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie isn’t as much fun as the Santa material. Scott’s life in the temperate latitudes includes a well-paying job as a toy company executive and an ex-wife Laura (Wendy Crewson), with whom he shares custody of their young son Charlie (Eric Lloyd). Naturally, Charlie is jazzed about his dad being Santa, but of course none of the other adults believe his stories of when they visited the North Pole and went around delivering gifts. Laura’s new husband Neil (Judge Reinhold) just happens to be a psychiatrist, and he quickly concludes that Charlie is having trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy, and that Scott with his physical changes is feeding his son’s delusions in order to look better in Charlie’s eyes. The resulting plot developments are too contrived to be effective, and they’re exacerbated by Reinhold’s awful performance, in which he comes off less as a competent doctor than someone who’s suffered a recent blow to the head.

Ever since Charles Dickens penned A Christmas Carol more than 160 years ago, there has been a fairly standard trajectory for Christmas stories and, later, Christmas movies- a character, or group of characters, overcome their self-centered ways by discovering the meaning of Christmas. Even Bad Santa’s Willie, the most dissolute of recent Christmas movie protagonists, ended up finding some member of the Christmas spirit through his unlikely mentorship of a (very strange) kid. The Santa Clause was directed by John Pasquin, who had previously worked with Allen when he directed numerous episodes of Home Improvement, and the movie feels and looks like a big-screen sitcom, with some easy laughs and nothing offensive to scare away audiences. Like most Christmas movies, it’s an okay way to take a break from holiday shopping or entertain visiting relatives. But as a movie, it’s really nothing special.

Summer of ’78: “Jaws 2”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

Jaws 2

Release Date: June 16, 1978

Cast: Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, Joseph Mascolo, Jeffrey Kramer

The Buzz: Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…

Keywords: Shark Attack, Waterskiing, Beached Whale, Lighthouse, Ribbon Cutting

The Plot: It’s been a few years since that pesky shark attack ruined the summer for the residents and tourists of the quaint New England island town of Amity. Brody (Roy Scheider) is still the chief of police, and inexplicably enough, sleazebag Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) is still the mayor. (“Re-elect Mayor Vaughn! He didn’t let all of you get eaten!”) Mrs. Brody is now working for a slick real estate developer, and eldest son Mike is a horny teenager with a sailboat. Everything seems normal, until a series of freak accidents awaken a fishy fear in Brody. Two divers disappear after stumbling upon the sunken ruins of the Orca, Quint’s boat from the first movie. A waterskiing boat blows up. A killer whale washes up on the beach with huge chunks bitten out of it. Brody’s shark fever gets out of control when he shoots up the surf in front of a huge crowd of beachgoers, only to find he’s been targeting a harmless school of bluefish. Worried that Brody will scare off all the developers, the mayor and city council give him his walking papers. But the joke’s on them, as Mike Brody and his gaggle of teen buddies learn when they go sailboat racing the next day and Amity’s new shark starts using them as its own personal concession stand.

The Test of Time: I can’t think of many movies I ever anticipated more rabidly than Jaws 2. When everyone else my age decided Star Wars was their favorite movie, I still stood by Jaws – I even remember being bummed out when Lucas’s clunky space opera overtook my beloved shark movie as the all-time box office champ. So when I heard a sequel was on the way, I was all over it. By the time the movie opened, I had already consumed the making-of book, the novelization (a cut above the usual hack job, written by Hank Searls as a follow-up to Peter Benchley’s novel, complete with a continuation of the Mafia subplot that never made it to the movies), and the Marvel comics adaptation (based on the early footage shot by original Jaws 2 director John Hancock, who was fired a few weeks into production). I think the future movie critic in me made his first appearance that day in 1978 when I walked out of the matinee show. I’m not sure I was disappointed, exactly, but I knew something wasn’t quite right. It may have been my first realization that the director was more than just the guy who called “Action!” and “Cut!” They might have both gotten their starts on Night Gallery, but there was a big difference between Steven Spielberg and Jeannot Szwarc, even if I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.

Thirty years later, it’s a little easier to figure out. (In case you’ve lost track of Szwarc’s career, he went on to direct Supergirl and Santa Claus: The Movie, and currently helms episodes of Cold Case and Without a Trace.) With Robert Shaw’s character dead and Richard Dreyfuss deciding he had better things to do, only Scheider remained from the original Orca crew, and he made it clear to anyone who would listen that he was basically doing the sequel at gunpoint. To fill in the gap, Universal essentially fused their shark movie with a teen sex comedy, with the result that we spend much of the running time waiting for some really unappealing young actors to get eaten. Even the most effective moments in Jaws 2 are pale echoes of scenes from the first movie, as when Brody wades out into the surf, overturns a piece of driftwood, and a burnt corpse pops up. The one kernel of a new idea is Brody’s shark paranoia threatening to ruin his career and marriage; it’s possible Jaws 2 would have been more interesting if it turned out there wasn’t a shark at all, but of course, that’s a movie that would have never been made. The shark sequences are sorely lacking Spielberg’s sure-handed touch, and naturally, the bigger and better mechanical fish looks much faker than the original. Obviously, Jaws 2 wasn’t the first such follow-up – we just saw Damien: Omen II last week, after all – but it was really the birth of the blockbuster sequel, the “tentpole” movies that would come to dominate the summer season, which is reason enough to look back on it with very little fondness at all.

Quotable Quote: “Open wide!”

2008 Equivalent: A redundant sequel/remake about a powerful, dangerous beastie? The Incredible Hulk, of course.

Previously on Summer of '78: Damien: Omen II

The Screengrab : santa claus: the movie

Yesterday's Hits: The Santa Clause (1994, John Pasquin)

Summer of ’78: “Jaws 2”