Holiday movie imbecility from the Florida underground! It was this community that gave us bad movie auteurs like H.G. Lewis and Brad F. Grinter, in whose company C’S helmer R. Winer (which may well be a pseudonym for Barry Mahon, a name that will recur below) deserves to be placed.
SANTA AND THE ICE CREAM BUNNY (1972) actually exists in two distinct versions, one that runs 96 minutes and incorporates footage from THUMBELINA (1970) and another that runs 71 minutes and features footage from JACK AND THE BEANSTALK (1970)—two grade-Z epics directed by WWII hero-turned-trash movie auteur Barry Mahon (who was also repoinsible for 1971’s SANTA’S CHRISTMAS ELF (NAMED CALVIN)). The THUMBELINA cut is the more common of SANTA AND THE ICE CREAM BUNNY’S two versions (it’s the one profiled on the imdb) but the JACK AND THE BEANSTALK one is preferable, I feel, if only because it’s shorter.
Both versions begin a few days before Christmas, with Santa Claus’ sleigh getting abandoned by its reindeer, leaving Santa (Jay Ripley) stranded for some reason on a Florida beach. This is detailed via narration by an unidentified female voice—a necessity, as the dialogue recording, like most everything else herein, is atrocious.
Santa telepathically contacts several children, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (Barry Mahon had tried to make a movie about Tom and Huck, the surviving footage from which is incorporated here), to come help him out of the sand. When this doesn’t work he encourages the children to bring pigs, cows and horses to do the job, but this likewise fails (Santa and the kids can’t seem to get the animals to face the right direction).
At this point, depending on which version of the film you’re viewing, Santa decides to tell the kids the story of Jack and the Beanstalk or that of Thumbelina, leading to extended dramatizations. The Jack and the Beanstalk dramatization is a thoroughly lackluster take on the oft-told fairy tale, with Mitchell Poulos as Jack climbing a giant beanstalk in his backyard, bequeathed by magic beans thrown out the window by his mother, and finding husband and wife giants residing in a house atop the ‘stalk. The giants are depicted via incredibly primitive rear projection effects, and everyone breaks into periodic song numbers that are instantly forgettable.
The Thumbelina dramatization comes complete with elaborate opening and end credits sequences, and a wraparound non-story set in the late Pirate’s World amusement park. It’s narrated by, presumably, the same never-seen woman who narrates the film overall (the orations here emit from a speaker, close-ups of which are inserted whenever the narrator speaks). As in the Jack and the Beanstalk dramatization, this one is packed with lame music numbers and ultra-primitive rear projection effects to delineate the world of the pint-sized Thumbelina (Shay Garner, who wears a miniskirt and extremely low-cut top despite it being snowy outside). On the run from a guy in a frog suit, she enters the underground layer of some moles, one of whom creepily propositions her. She also finds a dying bird she nurses back to health, and it flies her to the Kingdom of the Flower Children, so named because the people of said kingdom live inside flowers (although the name doubtless meant something else to early 1970s audiences).
Back to Santa on the beach, the final scenes of which are identical in both versions. They involve the kids running off and returning in an ancient fire truck driven by the Ice Cream Bunny (i.e. a guy in a tacky Easter Bunny costume), who gives Santa a lift back to the North Pole. The end.
Vital Statistics
SANTA AND THE ICE CREAM BUNNY
R&S Films, Inc.
Director: R. Winer, Barry Mahon
Producer: C.T. Robertson, Barry Mahon
Screenplay: Barry Mahon
(Based on stories by Hans Christian Andersen)
Cinematography: William Tobin
Editing: Steve Cuiffo
Cast: “Jay Clark” (Jay Ripley), Shay Garner, Pat Morrell, Bob O’Connell, Ruth McMahon, Heather Grinter, Sue Cable, Mike Yuenger, Mitchell Poulos, Dorothy Stokes, Renato Boracherro, Christopher Brooks, John Loomis, Sami Sims