Sick, twisted, uncouth, offensive – I think I have a new favourite Christmas movie. You really better watch out for Billy Bob Thornton’s magnificently dark Santa Claus. As Willie T. Stokes, a mad, bad and putrid to know Santa impersonator, Thornton stumbles onto the screen, swigging liquor, sodomising fat chicks, vomiting into his fake beard, pissing his jolly red pants, spewing obscenities at the unfortunate children who venture onto his knee and whipping out his, er, fuckstick at every inopportune moment. This sabotage of all things seasonal gets even more hilariously caustic before relenting at the last possible moment to offer Ebenezer style salvation to its outlandishly offensive anti-hero.
But my goodness, don’t we have fun with the extravagantly incongruous concept before things get all Christmassy. The lesser half of a heist team, every December Thornton teams up with the brains of the outfit – a superbly profane dwarf (Cox) and his avaricious trophy wife – to take on shopping mall Santa duties, only to rob the joint come Christmas Eve. Well, the employment possibilities for a man in a red suit and his elf-impersonating midget sidekick do tend to dry up during the January sales.
When not studying the safes he has to crack, hooking up with loose women for anal antics in the changing room or meeting girls with Christmas fetishes (you’ll hear the words “Fuck me, Santa” more than once) Thornton is looking for places to lay his sleazy drunken head. He strikes gold when he happens upon Brett Kelly’s lonely, podgy, snot-nosed boy. Not the brightest little fairy light on the tree, the kid, as he is affectionately known, proves immune to Thornton’s torrents of abuse and is so enamoured with the idea of having St. Nick around, he invites Santa back to the cosy suburban house he shares with his senile Grandma.
They almost bond. Well, Thornton does kick the shit out of the boy’s pre-teen tormentors and puts ketchup on his baloney, but the film wisely holds on to its subversive comedic premise for as long as humanly possible. Meanwhile, the late John Ritter’s store manager is getting a little suspicious about his thoroughly unprofessional seasonal workers – what with the loud sweet nothings emanating from dark corners (“You won’t be able to shit right for a week baby”), the falling over, the self-soiling…
Zwigoff’s fabulously funny film works brilliantly as a dyspeptic black comedy, an anti- It’s A Wonderful Life, a tirade against the materialistic tackiness of the entire festive industry and a radical reworking of A Christmas Carol. The accomplished Ghost World and Crumb director brings his deft, off-kilter sensibilities to a script originally conceived by the Coen brothers (no surprises there) and is happy to let Billy-Bob revel in vulgarities that may well eclipse anything he got up to during his life with Angelina. In Bad Santa, Thornton quite surpasses (amongst other things) himself. Finally, he’s found a role to make Jack Nicholson’s misanthropic screen personas look like, well, Santa Claus.
A thing of demented, tasteless schaudenfraude is a joy forever. As the best X-mas movie since Silent Night, Deadly Night 4, it’s hard not to believe in Bad Santa.