Santa's Fairy Tales: Vol. 1 (1964, 1987)

... aka: Santa's Fairy Tales: Volume One

Directed by:

"Manuel San Fernando" (prolly K. Gordon Murray)

This 1987 VHS release from United American Video Corp., which probably sold a zillion copies around Christmastime in the late 80s, is the perfect embodiment of what scam art distributors would regularly release to hapless consumers back in the day. I can imagine many unsuspecting parents picking this up for their kids, popping it in when they got home and being irate at making their kids suffer through promotional videos for an incredibly lame looking and outdated theme park. Even worse, instead of getting the heartwarming family fun they'd anticipated, their little ones ended up traumatized for life! Containing two 1960s short subjects (Santa's Enchanted Village and Santa's Magic Kingdom) and with a running time falling well short of the claimed 30 minutes, these two mini-films were nothing more than PR for Santa's Village amusement parks. At one time there were a handful of these parks scattered around the U.S. in places like Santa Cruz and Skyforest, California and East Dundee, Illinois. By 1977, after Santa's Village Corporation filed for bankruptcy, some of these parks closed for good while others remained open, though under new ownership and with new names and new attractions. The location in Skyforest (near Lake Arrowhead) became Skypark at Santa's Village, while the Dundee location currently operates at Santa's Village AZoosment Park.

You may be wondering why something like this would even be covered here. Well, let's hear from a few unsatisfied former child customers via the Youtube comments section...

• "So creepy." - dan Hamakua
• "My brother and I used to have this on a VHS...we were just talking about it. It always creeped us both out." - Life Unpaged
• "When I was 4 my mom rented a VHS tape from some church. It had this damn thing on it instead of the Christmas cartoons we were expecting. I dreamed night after night that the skunk thing was in my basement and had me cornered, speaking in its nasally squeaks. Years of trying to make my parents remember the tape followed. Only my brother shared the same fear so I knew it was real in some way. I stumbled upon this 3 days ago and showed the rest of my family. My mom instantly knew what it was, but said she blocked it from her memory "so she didn't have to think about it anymore." - Santa's Ashes
• "I'm horrified" - ?Mystery Nyan?
• "Glad to know the title of this. Now my therapist will stop thinking I'm insane." - awfulsails

Both of these shorts were directed by one "Manuel San Fernando," who I'm pretty sure is actually one K. Gordon Murray. Murray was best known for cheaply acquiring the rights to Mexican movies like SANTA CLAUS (1959) and LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD AND THE MONSTERS (1962), dubbing and re-editing them and then releasing them as children's matinee features. Murray also handled more adult-oriented sci-fi and horror films from South of the border, but his family movies are most remembered due to the fact they typically horrified the children who viewed them. However, Murray was also involved in a few of this own productions, which is where these shorts came from. As a 13-year-old teen delinquent once said on The Maury Show, "It's all about the fast money, baby!" and Murray apparently made a fortune doing what he did.

Santa's Enchanted Village opens with recycled footage from the 1959 Santa Claus showing us Santa's magical outer space kingdom. Thanks to Merlin the Magician's discovery of the "5th Dimension," Santa is able to be countless places at once (like at every Santa's Village in the U.S., of course!) and also has many different homes (like every Satan's Village across the U.S.!). His village has all of the necessities, like a reindeer barn, a toy workshop filled with slave laborers (the boys are "elves" and the girls are "pixies"), a "chapel of the good shepherd" (?!) and even a (much too small!) North Pole despite not being like, ya know, anywhere near the North Pole.

Mistaking the pole for ice cream, Stinky the Skunk starts licking it and gets his ass chewed out by Puss 'N Boots. He then goes to his toy workshop job and leaves again, which infuriates his boss, The Ferocious Wolf, who then grumbles incomprehensibly and goes after him. That culminates with the wolf beating the skunk with a tree branch (!) in front of a bunch of children at a puppet theater (!) Santa Claus is shown several times, robotically laughing in an incredibly disturbing manner at the various events. The combination of tuneless accordion music, fog-enshrouded buildings shot at Dutch angles, giant mushrooms (!) everywhere and nightmarish-looking characters really does turn this into a creepy experience.

Next up is Santa's Magic Kingdom, which starts with Santa giving us a tour of his village as he takes his sleigh and reindeer hostages into the dark recesses of an ice cave, and then cuts to Merlin the Magician taking over the tour cause he can do it quicker using the - you guessed it! - "5th Dimension." The horrifying sights that follow include a 6-foot-rabbit riding a train that looks about a 10 mph gust of wind away from falling right off the tracks, manic depressive whistles and a slumped-over, dead-eyed jack-in-the-box. We also gets to see the Easter Bunny's home, a post office, a gingerbread house and a toy factory, all accompanied by stolen horror movie music (?) Unlike the previous short, this one attempts something of a plot after awhile.

Puss 'N Boots, chief of the theme park security, has received reports of an ogre who's about to attack the village. As a princess rushes off to warn Santa, Puss encounters the ogre, who looks less like an ogre and more like a plaster dinosaur head. The "ogre" then threatens "Where are you Santa Claus? I am looking for you! And when I find you, I am going to destroy you and your villages!" Merlin then must do battle with the "ogre" which takes place entirely off-screen and then we're treated to the cast singing along to some operatic vocal that never once matches their lip movements. Eegads. It's very rare that I watch something that has no redeeming qualities whatsoever but I'm really struggling here!

The same company also released "Santa's Fairy Tales: Volume Two," which features two more ancient shorts again "presented by" Jeffrey C. Hogue. The first is Murray's Santa Claus and His Helpers, which was yet another Santa's Village promo video featuring the same characters and shot at the same time. It, and the other two, were edited by future hardcore porno director Jack Remy. The other is The Magic Snowman, a re-title of the 1944 German short Der Schneemann (aka Christmas in July), which is at least a proper piece of animation.

NO STARS!

Screamer (1974) (TV)

... aka: Thriller: Screamer

Directed by:

Shaun O'Riordan

Most horror fans are probably pretty well-acquainted with British actress Pamela Franklin. After all, with a dozen genre films / TV appearances on her resume over a fifteen year period, she was certainly one of the more ubiquitous females in 60s and 70s horror. For awhile, she even managed to avoid the same fate as fellow child actress Linda Blair, whose attempt at a mainstream career pretty much went straight in the toilet soon after The Exorcist had made her famous. Franklin was able to follow her initial success - the superb Henry James adaptation The Innocents (1961) - with a number of other quality projects like Hammer's The Nanny (1965) with Bette Davis, the TV movie Eagle in a Cage (1965), which netted the young star an Emmy nomination, the very interesting (and unfortunately overlooked) Our Mother's House (1967) and the crime-thriller The Night of the Following Day (1969) alongside Marlon Brandon. All that before even turning 20.

The young actresses career then hit a high mark at the end of the decade when she gave an acclaimed turn as Maggie Smith's precocious student in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). However, while Smith dominated the awards circuit that year, Franklin's equally-deserving contributions were given a cold shoulder from the Golden Globes and Oscars. While I personally don't put much stock in those awards as their histories are riddled with unjust snubs and ridiculous nominations, there's no denying what they can do for a career. Seeing how Goldie Hawn won the Supporting Actress award that year for the long-forgotten comedy Cactus Flower and they had room to nominate Sylvia Miles for a glorified cameo in Midnight Cowboy, the oversight of Franklin certainly qualifies as a huge injustice. Even Blair, a fun though far less talented actress than Franklin, was able to sustain a long B-movie career from her initial Oscar notoriety. All that makes me wonder what kind of boost Franklin's career would have seen had she been nominated herself.

Alas, Franklin's big screen career started to fizzle out just a few years after Brodie. While she was in a few decent theatrical releases early on in the decade, like AND SOON THE DARKNESS (1970) and The Legend of Hell House (1973), by the end of the 70s she was doing nothing but guest spots on TV fluff like Fantasy Island, Love Boat and Vega$. Even worse, the final nail in her big screen coffin ended up being Bert I. Gordon's giant animal schlock-fest THE FOOD OF THE GODS (1976). Not that her previous Gordon starring vehicle - NECROMANCY (1972) - had been much better, but it was still a depressing way for the promising actress to go out. In between, she did land some genre TV work that many remember, like appearances on Circle of Fear and Night Gallery, plus two feature-length entries in the Thriller series: Won't Write Home Mom - I'm Dead (aka Terror from Within), and this one...

Pamela portrays Nicola Stevens, an American living in England working as a stenographer at the U. S. Embassy. She decides to take a late night British Railways train to visit a couple of friends - Jeff (Donal McCann) and Virna (Frances White) - out in the country. A rather sinister old woman (Ambrosine Phillpotts) sharing a cabin with her warns that three young women have all been sexually assaulted and beaten in just three months along the same route. One was almost killed. As her friends have already agreed to meet her at the station, Nicola thinks she has nothing to worry about. As for the old lady, she makes a joking aside: "I suppose if it happened to me at my age I could take it as a complement" before exiting. The next person to enter her cabin isn't quite as humorous. Instead, he's a creepy, leering, silent man (Jim Norton) who seems strangely familiar. That's because the old woman had just been reading the rapist's description to her from a newspaper and this guy fits that description to a T!

The uncomfortable, wordless train ride that follows finds the man staring at Nicola's legs and lighting up his pipe and throwing a match on the floor despite the no smoking sign. Subtly threatening gestures follow, like him reaching toward Nicola numerous times then pulling back to do something else, such as grabbing the newspaper she's just been reading that happens to have a front page article about him, and then peering over the top as if to tell her that he knows she knows who he is. Nicola makes it to her stop shaken but unharmed, but gets some bad news from the stationmaster upon arrival. Her friends still haven't arrived back in town yet due to car problems and won't be home until tomorrow. She's to walk to their home a quarter of a mile away and let herself in using a key hidden under the doormat. While she makes it, she forgets the key in the door and the rapist, who's followed her there, manages to get inside. When her friends arrive home the next morning, they find their home a wreck, blood smeared on the walls, a missing hatchet and a bruised and battered Nicola.

Nicola is rushed off to the hospital in a state of shock. At first, any man who enters her room, whether that be her attending physician (Michael Hall) or the police inspector (Derek Smith) investigating her case, she envisions is her rapist and hysterically screams them right out of the room. She's then sent to a mental home run by Dr. Ward (Peter Howell) for six months, where Nicola improves somewhat but still recoils from any man's touch and continues to have nightmares about her assaulter. Still, progress is progress and she's allowed to return to live with the (amazingly kind and patient) Jeff and Virna, who feel guilty about what happened and want to help her fully recover. However, that proves to be difficult when Nicola starts seeing fleeting glimpses of attacker around town...

The opening fifteen minute set-piece is tense, suspenseful and really quite excellent; perhaps the best spot of filmmaking I've seen on the series thus far. All of the performances are good and, though this has its slow spots afterward, the plot eventually introduces enough twists and turns to keep your interest and keep you guessing. The eventual resolution itself, however, is the most obvious of the possibilities when all is said and done and perhaps doesn't hold quite the same impact that something a little less obvious would have.

While this debuted as part of the Thriller series in the UK (the first episode of the 4th season), it premiered on TV here in America as a standalone movie on ABC and had a new opening credit scene added that's not in the later DVD versions. The 1986 VHS release from ThrillerVideo, which claims to run 71 minutes on the box (the original British version runs just shy of 67 minutes) appears to be this new U. S. cut.

★★1/2