The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project, just before dinner, I'm watching the first few minutes of Elf Bowling: The Movie: The Great North Pole Strike

• So, you know those trailers that go before a DVD, the kind that are usually before you get to the main menu or in the special features? Yeah, in this film, they play after you press Play. Specifically, they're for 12 Dogs of Christmas and Noel.
  
• Somehow, it's earned a Richie Cusack clip faster than any other movie in the Project with the possible exception of The Undefeated. It opens on a pirate ship. The pirates are working on a scheme where they steal toys from children to sell them back to their grandparents. You'd think it'd be easier to just take their money, like actual pirates would. And the captain, Santa Maria Clausewitz Kringle. Yes, Santa is the pirate captain. Do I really need to explain why Santa, the embodiment of generosity, doesn't make sense as a pirate? 
  
  
  
• And then, they give Santa a hidden heart of gold, giving some of the toys to an orphanage... by tossing them out to sea in the hopes that they somehow get there. And if this was meant as foreshadowing, they fucked that up, since these hidden virtues don't seem to come into play, and it's not even his idea to give the toys to children. I'll update this if it does,
  
• So, the big inciting incident that sets the plot up? Santa and his brother Dingle are bowling and a parrot rats Dingle out as fucking with the scores. And somehow, the fact that apparently the other side manages to score 51 points in a single frame isn't the big problem, but Dingle changing the score at the last minute for no clear reason. This leads to a fight and they fall into the ocean and get frozen in ice floes IN MID-SWORDFIGHT.
  
• And they get unfrozen by an elf who thinks they're monsters who gets told that it's a bad idea, and the oldest rule in the book by using an orb to unfreeze them saying "Stand back, I'm rewriting the book? "
  
• A guy's pants are on fire and you decide to play the harmonica and just pull out a jaw harp? And that counts as a fandango?
  
• As a strange note, to divert suspicion away from them as pirates, they claim they're really clog salesmen. To pull this off, they replace the hats they were wearing with a soda helmet that says "baseball" and a cheese hat.  I'm not going to question how they got there or what sports hats have to do with clog sales, but I will point out that Santa's cheese hat is most associated with the  Green Bay Packers, a football team.
  
• How the fuck does Santa's workshop stay up with all that bulbous architecture? It's like the Kebler elf tree except there's no actual tree.
  
• So the elves make 10 trillion toys and then just hoard them in hollowed-out mountains? And the elves are masochists who cheer when Santa tosses the orb at them and knocks them down? What? And they're armpit farting to show how much they like him?
  
• And Santa's favourite food is STRUDEL? Do they have even the slightest familiarity with the Santa mythos?
  

You know what, I'm going to just eat dinner and then try to make sense of the remaining hour or so of this movie. And maybe after that, come up with a new set of Deep Hurting Awards.