With his consistently irreverent and often hilarious holiday comedy, Bad Santa, Terry Zwigoff raised the bar on bad taste to a level that's unlikely to be surpassed, unless John Waters convinces Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor and Dom DeLuise to star in a sequel to Pink Flamingos. Instead of allowing the theatrical version of the R-rated film to stand on its own merits, however, Miramax has ladled on an extra dollop of sleaze in a separate unrated DVD, which includes about five minutes of unseen footage.
Talk about bringing coals to Newcastle … adding a dozen more raunchy snippets to Bad Santa (a.k.a. Badder Santa) is like watching one of Sean Penn's characters light up yet another cigarette. After a while, who can keep track? Just for the record, though, the bonus material also includes a gag reel, making-of featurette and other deleted and alternate scenes.
It's difficult to imagine that any parent would mistake either version of Bad Santa as a holiday movie for the entire family to enjoy. Nonetheless, a restating of the relevant facts might keep some out-of-touch moms and dads from using it as a video baby-sitter.
Billy Bob Thornton was the perfect candidate to portray Willie T. Stokes, a foul-mouthed alcoholic and master safe-cracker who uses his position as a department-store Santa to pull off heists each year on Christmas Eve. He is so belligerent and uncouth, in or out of his Santa uniform, he makes Charles Bukowski look like Mr. Rogers. In this nefarious annual pursuit, Stokes is ably assisted by his angry elf sidekick, played by that wonderful 3-foot-tall actor, Tony Cox.
After one particularly unpleasant afternoon on the job, Stokes is befriended in a bar by the only person on Earth who could possibly put up with such an unsavory and hateful person: a depressed woman with a Santa fetish (Lauren Graham, the impossibly perky mom in Gilmore Girls). Even better luck for Stokes comes in the form of a dim-witted suburban kid, who after being left in the care of his near-comatose grandmother by his single dad, encourages the disheveled Kris Kringle to move in with them.
That Zwigoff doesn't appear to feel much affection for his protagonist, created by screenwriters Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (Cats & Dogs), only makes the film's continually unsentimental tone that much more credible. Of course, you would expect such an unvarnished portrayal from the director of Crumb and Ghost World. But, even when Thornton's performance is as unsettling as watching an alcoholic succumb to cirrhosis, there always is a laugh to be found around the corner.
That's how black comedies should make audiences feel. If they don't make you squirm, what's the point? In this regard, Bad Santa is the real deal, with or without the extra five minutes.
Speaking of which, it's been 30 years since Mel Brooks achieved the cinematic equivalent of breaking the sound barrier, with his hilariously irreverent Blazing Saddles. In 1974, Brooks' main accomplishments included writing and directing The Producers and The Twelve Chairs, creating the spy-spoof sitcom Get Smart, and being part of Sid Caesar's legendary writing team. Blazing Saddles would represent the first in a long string of hits—Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety and Silent Movie among them—poking fun at Hollywood's time-honored genres. They were conceived at a time when political correctness had yet to take root and Brooks was free to tackle, with scattershot humor, such thorny subjects as racism, homosexuality, political corruption and religious fanaticism. In Blazing Saddles, of course, he also managed to add fart jokes to the cinematic vocabulary. This special 30th anniversary DVD edition contains commentary by Brooks, the reunion documentary Back in the Saddle, a tribute to the late Madeline Kahn, and Black Bart, the TV pilot that inspired the film. Young viewers may find some of Blazing Saddles forced, silly, and even tame by today's standards, but most of it holds up fine. It's being released simultaneously with Brooks' 1995 horror-movie spoof, Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
Among the many less-than-successful parodies of Hollywood genres, now on DVD, is Larry Blamire's The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavera. It attempts to spoof the sci-fi/monster movies of the 1950s, but in the opinion of some critics, it mostly bore an unfavorable likeness to Ed Wood's cult classic, Plan 9 From Outer Space. Perhaps the film's most notable distinction comes in that it was made using props bought on eBay, and shot in a corner of Los Angeles County that served as a location for other cheesy flying-saucer flicks.
By contrast, from Japan comes Yasuharu Hasebe's wonderfully campy Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter!, the third in a five-part series about a gang of girl delinquents. Made in 1970-71, the Stray Cat Rock series used psychedelic effects to add an extra layer of goofiness to stories that reference James Dean's juvenile-delinquent turn in Rebel Without a Cause and other '50s-era teen exploitation films. Hasebe also is represented in this week's release list by the stylish yakuza thriller, Bloody Territories.