The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project Part 2: David DeCoteau is a director who made his bones with Roger Corman (one of many, including Coppola, Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and James Cameon). Unlike those four, his Corman works are easily the artistic high point of his career. At this point, he has 159 directing credits under his belt, half of which were made in the past 11 years. Obscurus Lupa said that "David DeCoteau has two specialties at this point: homoerotic fantasies and really stupid family films. The only difference between the two is that in the family films, there's less guys showering." Well, that and the family films are probably going to have some Z-list actor putting in as little work as possible. Case in point: A Talking Cat?!, a movie I would have added to the project if only my local library had a copy. The title role is voiced by Eric Roberts. His audio sounds like it was literally phoned in. In reality, it was filmed in his living room in the space of 15 minutes. And there's a lot more where that came from. Case in point: Santa's Summer House (AKA Action Star Christmas).

It's basically a Christmas movie about a van full of martial artists (played by actual martial artists who don't actually do any martial arts in this film, so this is entirely pointless), one of their teenage sons, and a van driver, who get lost on the way to a resort, and end up in a mansion (the exact one in A Talking Cat, and I'm willing to bet a lot of his other films because it's his own home), that is apparently owned by Santa Claus, and his wife.

• This Christmas Movie starts off by explaining it's not even Christmas. And this kid who can't act stumbles around that fact, and even bringing up that, in Australia, it's snowy during the summer months (because Australia, being part of the Southern Hemisphere, has its seasonal cycle off by half a year from the Northern.)
  
• Well, this over-long Windham Hill-sounding version of "The First Noel" is at least more pleasant than the over-long theme from A Talking Cat?! That said, it gets tedious rather quickly. 
  
• We have Several long establishing shots of the beach near DeCoteau's home for no reason. And they're given transitions like they're supposed to be scenes in themselves. In reality, they're just padding. And it keeps happening between sequences. Even though the whole film's set in this mansion (with some short scenes early on and near the end of them driving that doesn't even have the dubious charm of the long driving scenes in Manos: The Hands of Fate). And that's nowhere near the biggest example, because there's a 10-MINUTE SCENE OF A CROQUET GAME. To be fair, there are better movies that include Croquet scenes, but at least Heathers uses it as a little reflection of the coming psychodrama in the clique and their members' privilege. This is pretty much a home movie, and has no real bearing on anything (except that one character might have thrown the game as a gift to his wife). 
  
• So... what the fuck is a rocket scientist working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory doing in a van full of martial artists?
  
• So, they just decide to have them all stay in the mansion for the weekend, treating it like a resort. And it has no wi-fi. This sounds like a setup for a horror movie. 
  
• For the record, the people who own this house, they're mostly called "Nana" and "Pop," and they're actually Santa. And what does Santa look like here?
  Yes, this Santa looks fuck-all like Santa. This is one of the most instantly recognisable figures in the world, and he looks nothing like normal. And he can't even get the "Ho Ho Ho" right.
  
  But he does look suspiciously like someone else:
  
  Yes, this is Christopher Mitchum, Robert Mitchum's son, playing Santa. I consider Night of the Hunter to be my Third-favourite film of all time. So, just to spite this movie, I'm going to say this is the third-worst movie (non-asterisked) that I've ever seen (behind Kiara the Brave and One Missed Call.) This may or may not change by the time I finish the Project. Hell, I get the impression that this could possibly be worse than even Kiara. Honestly, the DeCoteau "charm" from A Talking Cat?! rubbing off on the film (and that weirdly fragmented car that he keeps in his living room), the inoffensive template (if undeniably glurgey), and the symmetry with Night of the Hunter is the only thing keeping me from definitively saying that.
• And why is the guest list on a scroll, and why is that scroll clearly a denuded flagpole for a miniature American Flag you wave at Fourth of July parades?
  
• So, we have two sisters, and one wants the other to abandon their dreams of being a photographer so they can work together on a business. Because it's not like I've spent several years balancing writing an Anglotopia column and a job at a candy store. Or, more to the point, say, a woman can balance being a nanny for 40 years with taking over 150,000 photos, which eventually turned her into a hugely famous artist.
  
• Am I the only person who finds it odd that it's the teenage boy who latches so quickly onto Santa?
  
• Also, in A Talking Cat, there's this subplot with a kid and his male friend, with whom he has more chemistry than his love interest, and one scene where one teaches the other to swim and it's really homoerotic. There's a similar scene where the teenaged boy is in a hot tub with Santa and this guy I've forgotten who he was who looks like G.O.B., though it looks like Santa, thankfully, isn't really a pederast. Still, Dafuq?
  
• It takes 55 minutes for the movie to confirm that it's Santa. Through badly-composited photos of Mitchum and Cynthia Rothrock, with Mitchum in a clearly fake Santa beard in locations around the world. And, of course, he played Prospero, bringing these misfits to his summer home..
  
• So, bizarrely, after I admitted I forgot who Bryan (the rocket scientist who looked like G.O.B.) was, Santa has a huge scene where he infodumps his whole backstory, that his parents divorced and he wanted these impossible toys, they spend an entire time quizzing each other about toys, and how he became a rocket scientist so he could create the toys that didn't exist. This probably could have been an interesting backstory in a much better film.
  
• How did she know he liked rockets? Because he kept mentioning rockets and how he planned to go to the Jet Propulsion Lab?