Prancer is not filled with a lot of action. Only ordinary things happen, as when the local newspaper prints a letter that Jessica wrote to Santa, assuring him that Prancer would be back in good shape for Christmas duty. (The headline, inevitably, is “Yes, Santa, there is a Virginia.”) The reindeer finally is discovered, and Jessica’s dad sells it to Mr. Drier, the local butcher. Of course, Jessica is sure Prancer will end up as sausage meat but, no, all Drier wants to do is exhibit the animal as a Christmas attraction.
The best thing about Prancer is that it doesn’t insult anyone’s intelligence. Smaller kids will identify with Jessica’s fierce resolve to get Prancer back into action, and older viewers will appreciate the fact that the movie takes place in an approximation of the real world.
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
R, 84 m., 2010
Onni Tommila (Pietari), Per Christian Ellefsen (Riley), Peeter Jakobi (Santa). Directed and written by Jalmari Helander. Produced by Petri Jokiranta. In Finnish and English, with English subtitles.
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is a rather brilliant lump of coal for your stocking hung by the fireside with care. How else to explain an R-rated Santa Claus origin story crossed with The Thing? Apart from the inescapable that the movie has Santa and reindeer in it, this is a superior horror film, a spot-on parody of movies about dead beings brought back to life. Oh, and all the reindeer are dead.
I need to help you picture this. It is the day before Christmas in the far Arctic north. Young Pietari lives on a reindeer ranch with his dad and other men who would feel right at home shooting reindeer from a helicopter. Yes, they are hunting food. The Scandinavians eat reindeer. God knows they do. Years ago, I once visited Finland, Norway, and Sweden on a tour for the Scandinavian Film Institute, and at every single meal, some sort of reindeer appetizer was served as a “delightful surprise.” Between meals or when lost in the snow, they gnaw on reindeer jerky.
I stray. Nearby, there is a huge mound that looks vaguely sinister. The Americans have been blasting away up there with dynamite. Very sinister. Pietari (Onni Tommila) and his friend Juuso have been sneaking through the fence to spy on the Yanks. Pietari is a dead ringer in every way for Ralphie in A Christmas Story.
There is a legend that centuries ago the citizens were threatened by fearsome monsters. They were able to trick them onto the lake, where they froze. One of them was cut out inside a giant block of ice and buried deep beneath the mound. And now . . .
It’s an idea from The Thing, where an alien was found in Antarctica and brought frozen into a hut, where drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . it began to thaw. We approach this possibility on the Night Before Christmas. Pietari’s mother is dead (lots of lumps of coal in this stocking), and his dad, Rauno (Jorma Tommila), keeps telling him to stay in the house, and Pietari, an earnest, stubborn Ralphie type, keeps sneaking out. He’s the only one who figures out what’s happening: Inside the mound, inside the ice, is Santa Claus.
Well, not Santa precisely. A savage, scrawny beast of a man with a beard, who eventually does admittedly end up wearing a Santa suit, but strictly for warmth. This creature is however arguably of the species Santus Clausium. The director of Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, the Finnish Jalmari Helander, has made two Rare Export short subjects about the capture and taming of wild Santas, who are then supplied to the worldwide market for Santas. Those Finns, what cut-ups.
Don’t let it get lost in the confusion that this is a fine film. An original, daring, carefully crafted film, that never for one instant winks at us that it’s a parody. In its tone, acting, location work, music, and inexorably mounting suspense, this is an exemplary horror film, apart from the detail that they'’re not usually subtitled A Christmas Tale and tell about terrifying wild Santas.
The R rating was earned by the F-word and a nekkid Santa. Did I mention the reindeer slaughter?
The Ref
R, 97 m., 1994
Dennis Leary (Gus), Judy Davis (Caroline), Kevin Spacey (Lloyd). Directed By Ted Demme. Produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Screenplay by Richard LaGravenese and Marie Weiss.
The Ref is a flip-flopped, updated version of O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief,” in which a kidnapper naps more than he was counting on. The movie stars sometime standup comic Dennis Leary as Gus, a would-be jewel thief who sets off an alarm in a private house in an affluent Connecticut hamlet, and in desperation kidnaps a married couple on Christmas Eve and orders them to drive to their home.
Once there, he assumes, he will have time to plot his next move. But he doesn’t get a moment’s peace, because the couple he has kidnapped, Caroline and Lloyd, have been fighting for years, are constantly at each other’s throats, and are both completely incapable of surrendering in an argument.
The couple, played by Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey, are smart, bitter, and articulate—and boy, can they fight. Gus is almost forgotten at times; he has a gun, but he can’t get the floor. He tries to explain: “People with guns can do whatever they want. Married people without guns—for instance, you—do not get to yell! Why? No guns! No guns, no yelling! See? Simple little quiz!”
That doesn’t stop them for a second. After the kidnapper demands rope to tie them up, for example, Lloyd says they don’t have any, but Caroline helpfully remembers some bungee cord in the kitchen, and that sets off Lloyd, who thinks his wife is being cooperative because she’s attracted to the criminal. Caroline explains that she was frightened: “Humans get frightened because they have feelings. Didn’t your alien leaders teach you that before they sent you here?"
The situation at the house grows even more desperate after the couple’s young son arrives home from military school. The kid is a conniver who has made piles of money by blackmailing a teacher (named Siskel) at his military academy, and now he’s impressed by Gus and basically welcomes new excitement in his life. And all of Lloyd’s hated relatives are scheduled to arrive shortly for a holiday supper.
At some point during this process, the relationship between Gus and his victims subtly shifts; he becomes not so much the kidnapper as the peacemaker. He tries to enforce silence, truces, agreements. The couple begins to cooperate with him, maybe because they’re afraid of his gun, but more likely because the situation takes on a logic of its own. (It’s pretty clear Gus isn’t going to shoot them.) Lloyd’s relatives know the couple has been seeing a marriage counselor, and so it’s agreed that Gus will pretend to be the marriage counselor so that the kidnapper can continue right through the Christmas Eve gathering.
Material like this is only as good as the acting and writing. The Ref is skillful in both areas. Dennis Leary, who has a tendency, like many standup comics, to start shouting and try to make points with overkill, here creates an entertaining character. And Davis and Spacey, both naturally verbal, develop a manic counterpoint in their arguments that elevates them to a sort of art form.
There are a lot of supporting characters in the story: The relatives, each with their own problem; the local police chief; Gus’s rummy-dummy partner; the drunken neighbor dressed as Santa Claus; and of course Siskel, the teacher from the military school, whom the kid is blackmailing because he photographed him consorting with topless dancers. The director, Ted Demme, juggles all these people skillfully. Even though we know where the movie is going (the Ref isn’t really such a bad guy after all), it’s fun to get there.