Dir. Terry Zwigoff, 2003, USA, 91 mins
Cast: Billy Bob Thorton, Tony Cox, Lauren Graham, Brett Kelly, Bernie Mac, John Ritter Kid: Your beard's not real.
Willie: It was real, but I got sick and all the hair fell out.
Kid: How come?
Willie: I loved a woman wasn't clean.
Kid: Mrs. Claus?
Willie: Actually it was her sister. Bad Santa is not your typical Christmas film, as such comedic gold Q&A interchanges can firmly attest to. The Santa in question is the demented creation of Willie T. Stoke (a viscerally harsh Billy Bob Thorton), possibly the worst St. Nick to ever grace celluloid (or a Mall for that matter). Habitually drunk safecracker Willie and foul-mouthed midget sidekick Marcus (Tony Cox) are two small-time crooks that get jobs entertaining the "little shits" every Christmas so they can case the Mall and rob it on Christmas Eve. Admittedly not exactly the most seasonable of endeavours. But it gets worse - Willie is one of the most alcoholic, lecherous, depressed, unlovable and even unredeemable men imaginable - he's drunk at work, smokes and swears in front of the children, urinates over himself in public and has a penchant for sexual relations with women in the Plus Sizes dressing room. All this makes pint-sized Marcus' job of keeping them employed until the big festive heist increasingly hard with each passing year. To top it all Willie's more drunk than ever this year, and their new job is at the most un-yuletide desert location of Phoenix , Arizona. Almost despite itself Bad Santa, a film that rampantly breaks each of the golden rules of modern American movies, went on to become the biggest grossing comedy of last year in the US. But how? Because it is one of the most witty, sadistic, surreal and most importantly, utterly funny comedies for years. A large proportion of the credit must of course go to the dementedly, suicidally unlikeable performance by (a genuinely intoxicated) Thorton, who deadpans throughout scenes lesser actors would simply gurn through. Willie's partnership with Marcus despite what would be the norm in more complacent movies resolutely refuses to enter buddy film status, quite simply they hate each other, as their hilarious verbal batterings frequently confirm. Zwigoff's film veers towards a different direction, instead raising its game; Willie doesn't so much as befriend as take cruel advantage of "The Kid" (a fantastically straight-faced Bret Kelly), a self-deceiving, picked-on fat loner who lives in a huge luxurious house with his comatose grandmother. And then moves in. And steals the car. Things continue to look up when Willie hooks up with bar maid Sue (Lauren Graham) who has a thing for a guy in a Santa suit. The vague plotline (the bitting comedy is more important here) is kicked up a gear by the Mall store detective, Gin (Bernie Mac, scene-stealing when just eating an orange) who wants in on Willie and Marcus' heist. Terry Zwigoff's (Ghostworld, Crumb) brilliant black comedy can be a tad one-dimensional at times, perhaps relying on its profuse swearing a little too much occasionally - yet it is at times so funny and so sinfully wrong that this can easily be forgiven. Zwigoff manages to make Jon Requa and Glenn Ficarra's script (whose previous efforts unbelievably include Cats and Dogs) rise above the brain numbing vulgarity of films from the likes of the Farrelly brothers or the teen obsessed American Pie school of filmmaking. Only in Bad Santa could Thorton get away with the brilliant moment when Willie suddenly finds meaning to life by beating up a 12 year old skater. As Thorton himself recently explained, "it's not just a movie that's for shock value, to be cynical. It's got basically the same message as any other Christmas movie does, it's just executed differently." Paul Nash
Bad Santa is released on region 2 DVD on 14th November by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Features include:
- 1.85:1 Anamorphic Widescreen
- English and German DD5.1 Surround
- English HOH, English, German, Hindi and Turkish subtitles
- Outtakes
- Deleted Scenes
- Featurette
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