Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny

Poor Santa Claus. This live-action feature finds his sleigh stuck in the sand on a Florida beach only days before Christmas Eve. He psychically summons prepubescent aid from a nearby subdivision. In order to extricate Santa's sleigh, the local children bring many different animals (presumably the sheep was someone's housepet), but nothing works, and the kids are afraid they won't get any gifts this year. To boost their spirits, Santa tells them the story of Thumbellina, and the setting dissolves into a "fantasy within a fantasy". Thumbellina is a beautiful but very tiny girl, "not much larger than a clothes pin". She becomes lost in the forest during the winter and finds refuge in the underground home of Mrs. Mole. A neighbor mole, Mr. Digger, falls in love and wants to marry Thumbellina, but she's having none of it. When warm weather returns, she runs back into the forest and deserts the two kindly creatures who saved her life, crushing their spirits forever ... the end. As Santa is finishing his story and yes, that is its intended conclusion he and the children hear the wail of a siren. The "Ice Cream Bunny" has arrived in his antique fire engine to save the day!

Customer Review: An up and coming cult classic

Some movies are indescribable and this is one of them. Maybe this movie is proof you can make a feature length film for less than a couple of thousand dollars. From the script to the costumes this movie reeks of small community theater. It is probably only a few notches above high school production values, but for all that it is completely hilarious. Santa's sleigh is not even buried in the sand for pity's sake! You get to see Santa's pink undershirt and his sweat stains on his suit in a delicate place! The Ice Cream Bunny's eye gets stuck and Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer are thrown in for good measure in a completely unrealated cameo appearance. One interesting thing about the movie is you get to see a part of vanished Florida. The Pirate World Theme Park (where the Thumbilina insert was filmed) was one of hundreds of local Florida attractions that disapeared with the coming of Disney to Orlando.
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