SANTA’S SUMMER HOUSE (2012) *

This week, I was a guest on The DTVC Podcast where Matt and I discussed this in more detail.  You can listen to our in-depth discussion of the film (among other topics) here:   DTVC Podcast 79 Santa's Summer House (talkshoe.com)

A van gets lost in the fog on the way to a summer resort.  The driver happens along a secluded mansion and decides to stop and ask for directions.  The owner, “Nana” (Cynthia Rothrock) invites the passengers to forgo their vacation and stay for the weekend with her and her husband, “Pop” (Chris Mitchum).  The guests soon come to the realization that their generous hosts are none other than Santa and Mrs. Claus. 

Santa’s Summer Home was directed by David DeCoteau.  He started his career in porn before becoming a legendary B movie director.  After helming the classics Creepazoids, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, and Nightmare Sisters within the span of two years, he spent over a decade making films for Charles Band’s Full Moon Pictures, directing everything from Puppet Master to Skinamax fare. 

Around the turn of the millennium, DeCoteau branched off on his own and began churning out films at an unbelievable rate.  He alternates between gay-themed horror flicks (like the 1313 series), Lifetime Originals (like the “Wrong” series), and family entertainment like this.  Of the kid-friendly movies, A Talking Cat!?! is probably his most well-known.  Santa’s Summer House isn’t quite as jaw-droppingly bad as that one; it’s just innocuous, overlong, and boring.

At least the cast, which is chockfull of B movie action stars is interesting.  In addition to the aforementioned Cynthia Rothrock and Chris Mitchum, we have Gary Daniels, Daniel Bernhardt (playing a rocket scientist!), and Kathy Long.  You can’t really blame them for trying something new.  I’m sure they appreciate an opportunity to make a movie where they don’t have to kick somebody in the face for 90 minutes straight. 

The idea itself isn’t bad.  I mean it certainly sounds better than your typical Hallmark Channel Original where the former childhood sweethearts rekindling their love affair while trying to save the local coffeehouse or some shit.  The third act hits all the cliches you’d expect from a Christmas flick.  The workaholic dad learns he needs to pay attention to his family, squabbling sisters put aside their problems for the holidays, etc.  The cast commit to the material as best they can, but I’d much rather have seen a Christmas-themed action movie starring same cast.  Can you imagine Daniels, Rothrock, and Bernhardt saving Santa from Ninjas or terrorists or something?  That would’ve been great.

If you’re a fan of DeCoteau, you’ll enjoy seeing the same house he uses in a lot of his recent movies.  I wonder if Santa’s Summer Home is part of the same continuity as his other films.  It would be funny if Santa rents out his summer home to covens, vampires, and talking cats while he’s up at the North Pole.  Maybe DeCoteau is building up towards an Avengers-style crossover in which it all comes together.  Only time will tell.

As much as I’m trying to sugarcoat this (it is Christmas, after all), there’s no denying how bad Santa’s Summer Home is.  From the nonstop public domain Christmas music blaring in the background, to the crappy porn-level cinematography, to the cheesy Christmas card-looking wipes during the transition scenes, it’s just plain bad.  Not even a jolly performance by Chris Mitchum as Santa can save it.  (That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.)  He certainly gives it all he’s got.  He doesn’t have a beard (because it’s the “off season”), but it is kind of funny when he randomly busts out his “Ho-Ho-Ho’s”. 

I haven’t even gotten to the worst part.  It’s a scene that will put even the most die-hard “So Bad, It’s Good” fans’ mettle to the test.  I’m talking about… croquet. 

If you’re a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and you’ve seen The Lost Continent or Hercules Against the Moon Men you know what the terms “rock climbing” and “sandstorm” mean.  That’s right… DEEP HURTING.  They are scenes that stop the movie cold and zap whatever energy it had right out of it.  I’d add croquet to the list of DEEP HURTING.  About a half-hour into Santa’s Summer House, everyone stops what they are doing and plays croquet… and they play… and they play… and they play… 

In most movies, sports sequences are shown as montages.  In this one, you more or less get to watch the game unfold in real time.  Folks, this goes on for literally ten minutes.  No attempt is made to make it interesting or exciting.  They just play… and play… and play…  To make matters worse, the shaky-cam camerawork makes the whole thing look like a home movie.  Even if they had ESPN-level camerawork, it would not have made a difference.  This is Deep Hurting of the highest order.

In short, throw this one on the yule log.

AKA:  Super Dog’s Summer House.

39 STRIPES (1979) *

39 Stripes was the last film by Ron Ormond.  Like all the movies he made in the last decade of his life, it is a Christian picture.  Unlike If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do?, The Burning Hell, The Believer’s Heaven, and The Grim Reaper, it is not designed to scare the audience into accepting Jesus as their savior.  Instead, it’s supposed to uplift them with an inspiring story of one man’s quest for spirituality.

Ormond was a lot more fun when he was scaring the Jesus into people, that’s for sure.

39 Stripes tells the true-life story of Rev. Ed Martin, who appears as himself in the prologue.  As a reckless youth, the hotheaded Ed resorted to a life of crime to make ends meet.  He is arrested for theft and sentenced to work on a chain gang, which does little to cool his hot temper.  When he hears a religious sermon, it changes his perspective, and he starts to accept Jesus into his life.

This is frankly a slow, boring, preachy mess.  It’s only an hour long, but it feels longer than the Hellish eternity Ormond depicted in The Burning Hell.  There are no nutty quirks or bizarre imagery this time around, which will severely disappoint Ormond fans looking for another one of his wonderfully campy Christian Scare movies.  While there is a brief religious recreation near the end, it isn’t nearly as weird as Ormond’s best stuff.

At all times, 39 Stripes looks and feels just like something they would show in Sunday School.  I was nodding off almost instantly and had to resort to grabbing a cup of coffee to keep me awake.  Even then, my eyelids were growing heavy by the end of the picture.  Even the usually energetic Tim Ormond, who plays Martin, looks as if he’s merely going through the motions.

Unfortunately, this proved to be Ron Ormond’s final film.  Even though it is by far the worst Ormond movie I have seen, his other pictures are really unique and wild.  If Ormond believed what he preached, he’s up in Heaven looking down and enjoying seeing new generations of fans discovering his work.

DIAL CODE SANTA CLAUS (1990) **

Dial Code Santa Claus is a French horror flick that plays like a mash-up of Home Alone, Silent Night Deadly Night, Rambo, and Die Hard.  Thomas (Alain Musy) is a little boy who stays up late on Christmas Eve to get a glimpse of Santa Claus.  What the kid doesn’t know is it’s a killer Santa (Patrick Floersheim).  Before long, the crazy Kris Kringle begins terrorizing the boy and his half-blind grandpa (Louis Ducreux).  What Santa doesn’t know is that Thomas more or less thinks he’s Rambo, and he has an arsenal of homemade weapons, booby traps, and high-tech surveillance to help fend off the not-so Jolly Old St. Nick’s attacks. 

The way this thing started out had me thinking it was going to be some kind of classic.  The scenes of the kid suiting up for war cannily pokes fun at American action icons like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger as they closely imitate both Rambo and Commando.  I also thought it was interesting how the early scenes predicted the perils of online stalking as the creepy Santa tries to lure kids using a primitive French version of the internet.  The initial face-off between Santa and the kid works too. 

Unfortunately, it quickly goes downhill from there.  This might’ve been a fun short, but as it is, it just goes on way too long.  Although the premise is kind of thin, it could’ve worked had director Rene Manzor not played all his cards so soon.  While it often flirts with cutting loose, it always seems like it holds back just when it’s about to kick into gear.  I don’t know if that had to do with having a child as a protagonist, or what, but it just never really goes for broke.  The conclusion is needlessly drawn out as well. 

Still, I guess it’s better than watching Home Alone for the umpteenth time this year.

AKA:  Game Over.  AKA:  36.15 Code Pere Noel.  AKA:  36:15 Code Father Christmas.  AKA:  Deadly Games. 

THE GRIM REAPER (1976) ** ½

 

A preacher (Greg Pirkle, son of Estus Pirkle, star of Ron Ormond’s Christian Scare movies) refuses to give a sermon at a funeral for a man who has not accepted Jesus as his Lord and savior because he believes he went to Hell.  The family puts pressure on him, and he eventually relents.  While he’s preaching, the dead guy’s mother flashes back to all the warning signs that her son was a sinning heathen.  Months pass, and the man’s parents have a feeling their son’s soul is restless.  They then turn to a spiritualist who holds a séance to contact their dead son’s soul.  

The Grim Reaper contains a little bit of everything Ron Ormond was known for.  There’s stock car race footage in the spirit of White Lightnin’ Road, spiritualism like in Please Don’t Touch Me, and of course, that old time religion.  Although Estus Pirkle sat out this time around, his son looks enough like him to get the job done.  Not leaving anything to chance, Ormond called in some heavy hitters such as Jack Van Impe and Jerry Falwell as guest preachers. 

There are a few moments of pure Ormond nuttiness here.  The séance scenes and nightmare sequences run the gamut of simply effective to overly corny to laugh-out-loud funny.  The shots of the devil's face superimposed over the medium work well enough, but the shots of him dragging the guy’s soul back to Hell are good for a chuckle. 

While the set-up is promising, the film flounders in the second act when it begins to heavily rely on biblical reenactments.  At least one of the scenes features June Ormond as a witch whose costume looks like it came off the Halloween sale rack.  With her heavily made-up wrinkles and cliched cackling, her scene is the sole bright spot in the otherwise dreary biblical sequences. 

As with The Burning Hell and The Believer’s Heaven, the film concludes with the usual fiery images of Hell.  They are reasonably effective too.  I'm sure they were enough to scare their intended audience. 

Compared to Ormond’s previous religious films, The Grim Reaper is the most straightforward.  While it is consistently entertaining/weird, it noticeably lacks the highs that made If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do? and The Burning Hell so bonkers.  Still, the séance scenes and Hell sequences are wacky enough for me to give this a marginal recommendation.

THE BELIEVER’S HEAVEN (1977) **

Ron Ormond and Estus Pirkle return to ask the question, “If The Burning Hell tire you what will The Believer’s Heaven do”?

The second Ormond/Pirkle collaboration, The Burning Hell showed unbelieving heathens refusing to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior, and as a consequence, they burned in Hell for all eternity.  It was only fitting that their next film would show the flipside of that equation.  The Believer’s Heaven depicts what happens if you live a good Christian life.  That is to say, your body turns into a transparent image via cheap optical effect, then it floats upwards offscreen until you and a bunch of other transparent people like you dressed in white robes mill around, poorly superimposed in the clouds. 

Sometimes though, Heaven is depicted as a mansion.  Other times, it’s somebody’s backyard.  There’s also a couple of times where it looks like the set of the Lawrence Welk Show during the Christmas episode.  I guess the good Lord is flexible when it comes to Heaven.

If you thought it was all nice and cheery stuff, don’t worry, because Ormond and Pirkle still enjoy showing the audience what’ll happen if they live a sinning life.  In fact, there’s an earthquake scene five minutes into the movie where papier Mache boulders crush unsuspecting sinners in their sleep.  We also see a bulldozer moving earth over a mass grave of children.  Unfortunately, this is about as close the film gets to flirting with the lunacy of If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do?

Once again, we have to sit through a lot of cheap-ass biblical recreations.  This time, there are even more of them, which is a shame.  The stories of Abraham, Jacob, and John are trotted out, and even though they only last a few minutes of screen time, they feel like the eternity that Pirkle described Hell as. 

As a fan of Ormond, it pains me to say The Believer’s Heaven is seriously lacking the oomph his previous religious pictures had.  It’s also not nearly as nutty.  The special effects are shitty, like when Jerusalem comes down from Heaven, and are good for a laugh, but moments like these are few and far between.  While there are some exploitative moments here, quite honestly, there’s not nearly as many as I was expecting.  Even the climactic Hell scenes just feel like outtakes from The Burning Hell.  Oh, and because it’s an Ormond movie, you know it’s going to be loaded with padding.  Unfortunately, the padding this time includes gospel songs (including one enthusiastic number by a little person in a wheelchair) and brief sermons from other guest preachers. 

All and all, the results are less than heavenly.

THE BURNING HELL (1974) ** ½

Ron Ormond teamed up with Reverend Estus Pirkle for a follow-up to their WTF Christian Scare film, If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do?  In that flick, Pirkle showed us what would happen if the Communists took over America.  This time, he’s out to give you a glimpse of what’s waiting for you if you go to Hell.

I don’t think The Burning Hell is quite as entertaining as If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do?, but I can easily say this is the only movie I’ve seen that has a credit in the opening title sequence for “Original Story and Preacher”.

That credit belongs to none other than Estus Pirkle.  Not only did Pirkle provide the story and preach, he also stars.  Early in the film, he is visited in his home by two traveling salesmen trying to get him to buy a book promoting a new religion.  He urges them to stop following their phony baloney religion at the risk of going to Hell.  One guy gets in his face and says, “If I do go to Hell, there will be a lot of my friends waiting on me!”  

They then take off on motorcycles and the loudmouth runs his bike off the road and is decapitated!  His pal (Tim Ormond) tearfully goes to church where Pirkle is preaching and asks him if his friend went to Hell, and without missing a beat, he says, “Chances are, he’s likely burning in the flames of Hell right now!” 

What’s great about this scene isn’t the way Pirkle flippantly (and somewhat joyfully) announces to Ormond that his friend is burning in Hell, but the fact that Tim doesn’t go to the police to report the accident… he goes right to church!

Tim basically has the same role as the wayward girl in If Footmen…  He just sits there in church and thinks about all the wrong he did as the preacher preaches away.  It’s not the best use of his talents to be sure.

The biblical dramatizations are probably the exact same thing you’d picture in your head when you think of a Christian Scare film, namely poor production values, shitty costumes, and even worse fake beards.  You know, just like the shit they used to show us in Sunday School. 

The Hell sequences are something else though and help redeem those pokey passages.  The shots of the bloody, screaming faces of the lost souls running around a flaming black void are rather effective, as are the close-ups of maggots crawling on the faces of the damned.  Too bad the preachy scenes and biblical reenactments get in the way of the fun. 

Still, this is pretty good for a Christian Scare film.  It’s a lot more demented than the typical Sunday School fare, that’s for sure.  It just lacks the demented flee of its predecessor. 

PLEASE DON’T TOUCH ME (1963) ***

 

Ron Ormond’s Please Don’t Touch Me is a mix of hypnotism propaganda, roadshow ballyhoo, and frigid wife melodrama. 

Things kick off with the rape of our leading lady, Vicky (Vicki Caron) when she was just a teenager.  From there, we get a lecture on hypnotism.  We see Franz Mesmer (Ormond) perfecting the art of mesmerism as well as a demonstration of a needle being inserted into the arm of a hypnotized person.  The best part though is the artist renderings of people who have been helped by hypnotism, including a guy with a “103-pound scrotal tumor”!  Next, we get Mondo movie-style footage of real-life operation scenes, flagellants, and a guy laying on a bed of nails.  Finally, the movie begins. 

The ensuing drama claims to be a case history of a real woman who used hypnotism to cure her sexual hang-ups.  Vicky is worried that her fear of being touched by her newlywed husband will ruin their marriage.  Her meddling mother (Ruth Blair) insists she see a shrink (Lash La Rue!).  He then turns to a hypnotist (Ormond McGill, a real-life hypnotist) to help unlock her psychosis. 

Please Don’t Touch Me plays sort of like a slightly tawdrier version of roadshow movies from the ‘30s like Mom and Dad.  Despite its exploitative foundation, there are some stretches that are surprisingly sensitive (for the time at least).  Other moments are rather hilarious, like when the hubby has a dream where Vicky is tempting him with a striptease, only to have her mother appear in between them when they’re about to get close.

Vicki Caron gives a great performance.  You really feel for her, and it’s a shame she never made another movie.  She also looks great in a series of sexy outfits, negligees, and low-cut blouses, the latter she wears while lying on the shrink’s couch, spilling her ample cleavage everywhere.  Like Ormond’s Monster and the Stripper, there isn’t any nudity, but it’s a bit more revealing than most films of the era.  (We get a bit of side boob during the wedding night flashback scene.) 

Even if Vicky’s plight has been somewhat sensationalized and exploited, Ormond is clearly on her side.  Topics like rape and sexual inadequacy in the marriage bed were certainly taboo subjects at the time, so it’s kind of shocking that it’s all handled as tastefully as it is.  In fact, Ormond exploits hypnotism more than anything.  Hypnotism was all the rage in the late ‘50s (it was shot in ‘59), and the film is mostly a tribue to Ormond’s mentor, Ormond McGill (whom he took his stage name from). 

The rape angle was really there to put butts in the seats.  I mean, who would come to see a movie about a woman using hypnotism to cure… say… smoking…. or snoring?  So, I guess it really is exploitative after all.  It’s just not as crassly done as you might expect.

The harmonica heavy soundtrack was courtesy of The Mulcays, the pair of harmonica players who later appeared in Ormond’s Girl from Tobacco Row and Monster and the Stripper.