User reviews

Bad doesn't begin to explain this movie, And I use this term movie loosely.

My dad took my brother and I to see it at the theater when it opened in Houston, Texas in 1972. Apparently my Dad, brother and I are the last living humans that actually saw it, because there are no comments or voting as of this posting.

It's actually a really bad movie within another really bad movie. Come on, Santa Clause on the beach? It's a running joke in my family over the past 20 years that when we see a bad movie we always say 'yeah, but it's no Santa Clause and the Ice Cream Bunny' No joke. Of course having said this, I an currently trying to purchase this sorry excuse for entertainment. Go figure.

Yes, this is among the very worst films ever made--even worse than MANOS HANDS OF FATE and light-years worse than anything made by Ed Wood, Jr.--it's that bad! Incompetent, stupid and saccharine--you just can't imagine how terrible this film is! It only avoids mention on IMDb's bottom 100 because so far there aren't enough votes to make the minimum needed for this infamous list.

The film begins with Santa and his sleigh (minus the reindeer) stuck in the sand in Florida and Christmas is just around the corner. Some kids discover him and try to help--at which point, you notice just how creepy and untalented this Santa is--and you wonder what kids would be fooled into thinking this is the genuine Saint Nick. Plus, he talks and talks and talks--he simply won't shut up--yet amazingly the kids don't run home and call the cops or walk away in boredom. Instead, they do what any kids would do--get some guy in a gorilla suit to try to dislodge the sleigh. They also try using sheep and several other half-hearted ideas. When these don't work, Santa decides to take his anger out on the kids and tells them an irrelevant story. This becomes the film "Thumbelina" (1970) and this prior film (made by the same director) consists of most of the film! Talk about a crappy way to reuse old footage. There's more to it than this, but frankly after a while I simply didn't care.

Let's face it, this film looks like a production by a local community theater--a very bad one at that. To save money, they filmed this anywhere they could locally--on the beach and at a now defunct amusement park (perhaps this film killed it). The acting, direction, production values and every aspect of the film is as poor as you can find. To make it all much worse, the film is filled with original songs--the most god-awful and annoying songs as sung by people who often couldn't carry a tune. The total effect is to make what is probably the worst Santa movie ever made--much, much worse than "Santa Claus vs. the Martians" and it's craptastic tunes. I am not exaggerating with this comparison! Aside from showing closeup footage of roadkill being eaten by vultures, I can't think of anything less entertaining for the kids. This film is likely to make parents to commit self-harm or beat the kiddies, so avoid it at all costs unless you are a genuine bad film junkie!

By the way, schlock-meister Barry Mahon made a ton of porno films before switching to saccharine kids' films late in his career. Perhaps that is why I got such creepy vibes from his Santa.

I had heard a lot about this movie before. I heard more about this movie than anyone deserves to hear. Still, I had no idea what I was in for when I finally got to see Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny. (Sitting here, I realize it's hard to articulate my true reaction to this movie). Obviously, from the comments above, it's an awful movie. Yet it has a strange draw. Like a really, really bad car accident, you can't quite turn away. And just when you think it can't get any worse, the Ice Cream Bunny actually reaches up to hold the head of his costume on while nodding vigorously at Santa's ramblings. Sad thing is, that's just a SMALL problem with this movie. My friend loves this movie. He actually recites the lines along with Santa and the gang. When I first left my initial viewing, I thought about calling the cops on him...but the more I think about it, there is a strange appeal to SICB. If you have any appreciation of the absurd and surreal then you really must see this movie. (Assuming you head doesn't explode during one of the musical numbers.)

I just watched this movie online... Wow!! It's so hideously bad it makes some notoriously bad movies by Edward D. Wood look like Citizen Kane, the only motivation I could think that this abomination was produced in the first place was simply because some guys had a couple of tacky-looking fancy dress outfits laying around in the loft and decided to make a movie with them.

The plot (or lack of) consists of a particularly creepy Santa stranded on a beach in Florida because his sleigh is trapped beneath two grains of sand (we learn that his reindeer have already flown back to the North Pole courtesy of some grainy-looking stock footage). Santa sings a song and waves his hand around a lot and telepathically enlists the help of some neighbourhood kids to bring their household pets to help him out of this pickle. One girl turns up with a guy in a Gorilla suit, while others with a variety of farmyard animals. Even Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer join Santa's helpers, but this is all to no avail, so he decides to tell the story of Thumbelina to some REALLY bored looking children...

Now, the version I watched didn't have the story of Thumbelina at this point (like the original release) and it simply fades to black and then back to Santa being creepy.

For no reason whatsoever, some other guy in a white rabbit costume drives a Fire Truck with an awful lot of children passengers towards the beach only to detour through an amusement park and finally get to the beach while the children sing songs. Santa and the rabbit character mumble to each other and then they take off. The kids run back to Santa's sleigh and it mysteriously vanishes.

Then comes the Thumbelina adaptation, which, in a nutshell is a fairly pretty girl singing songs around the same amusement park Mr. Rabbit took an inane detour through. The narration of the story sounds like it's coming through a PA system and the sets look like something in the average 4th graders Christmas nativity. However, this is the best part of SC&TICB simply because the girl who plays Thumbelina can carry a tune when she sings.

I can only imagine that the intention of this movie was to advertise "Pirate World", the amusement park where most of it is based, quite the way Santa Claus (1985) advertised a certain fast food restaurant and soft drink brand.

As a movie, this is the poorest you could ever find. Everything about it is amateur, from the acting to the set design to the photography, editing and direction. Even the songs are akin to the type a 6-year-old could come up with. The kazoo-heavy score is also inferior. This could surpass for entertainment as a movie, and if it's intended to be a 90-minute advert, it fails at that too. Pirate World shut down around 1975. With this movie to advertise it... I'm expecting Santa's wake very soon...

I saw this awful movie with my house mates in 2001 or 2002. It was so horrible it was hysterical!!! We laughed for hours after seeing this film. It is incredibly disjointed and makes no sense. The movie is VERY cheaply made. In one scene you could tell how many times they had to shoot the scene because the firetruck left wet tracks every time they re-did it. Also, at one point the back of Santa's pants look like he had an accident in them! Who the heck is the Ice Cream Bunny anyway??? If you enjoy watching bad movies because they are so bad, this is one to see! I will always remember this movie and hope I can buy it to share it with my friends and family.

I saw this when I was a kid and remember it being one of the worst movies ever. Many year later, someone I knew found a copy on a VHS tape and we watched. It confirmed what I knew as a child, this is a very bad movie. Why this thing was ever made to begin with is one question left to be answered? Why it was put on video is another. ALL copies should be destroyed to save the world from this travesty.

Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny… AAAHHH….. This film is a delightful(if you have been lobotomized that is) piece of cinema that was made at the now defunct amusement park Pirate's World(not that you see much of it.) The movie is such an insipid piece of fluff that they had to insert another of their films into it to liven and or pad it out. Almost nothing happens, and the little that does is poorly conceived and executed.

The plot is stupidly simple, Santa Claus loses his reindeer and is stranded in the worst place imaginable, Florida! He enlists the help of a bunch of local children to pull his sleigh out of the sand and eventually decides to tell them a fairy tale story. The story he tells varies depending on the version you are watching, and is the best part of the film, which is not saying much since both fairy tales are bad.

This film is the second worst piece of garbage I have EVER SEEN! Insipid, inexplicable, imbecilic, and ignominious, Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny deserves nothing less than the lowest rating I can possibly give it, one star on IMDb(equivalent to a negative 0 out of 4.) Avoid this toxic waste of a film at all costs!

Wow I was shocked when I searched this movie and received a hit. I was telling my children about the worst movie I had seen as a child.Which happened to be this one. My mom had taken all six of us to a Saturday matinée at the Palace Theatre in Norwich,Conn which was a weekly tradition.It had to be later than the original date for this which was 1972. The second feature was Empire of the Ant's.My mom almost got up and left during the Santa and Ice Cream Bunny movie because it was so bad.All we remember was Santa sitting in a sled that was stuck in sand.And he kept saying hohoho.I think he told the story of Jack and the Beanstalk also while he was stuck.

A new pandemic tradition...My daughter and I spend Wed afternoons together, drinking and watching bad movies. This one hit a new low. I can't believe this was an honest to goodness theatrical release. It looks like something kids would film for their parents at YMCA summer camp. We killed a bottle of Pinot Noir in 1hr 22 min. However, there was some value added to my life from the experience: 1) I researched the amusement park featured in the film (Pirate World) and learned they had some amazing concerts there between 1967-1973 - like Led Zeppelin 2) Decided to read some Hans Christian Anderson stories to see if they are as dark as I remember.

Allow me to summarize the movie.

Santa's sleigh ends up on a beach in Florida, buried in an inch of sand. Santa summons a bunch of kids and they basically just go along with it and get a bunch of animals (not all at once, hello?) to pull the sleigh free, including a horse, a cow, a sheep, and even a guy in a gorilla suit. Santa, meanwhile, fans himself and mumbles "oh it's hot ooh golly oh my gosh i have never been so hot in my life oh ho ho ho oh gosh oh my golly".

Santa takes a break from sweating to tell the kids the story of Thumbelina, and then they pretty much just play this older film called 'Thumbelina', made by the same guy who made this. It's meant to "inspire" the kids or whatever, but it never gets referenced after it's finished, the kids don't seem to take much from it, it's unbelievably bland and forgettable, it has nothing to do with Christmas or Santa or anything to ever happen in the history of mankind, AND (possibly the worst of all), it's actually LONGER than the segment with Santa Claus. It's literally a lazy way of padding the film out to over an hour.

It's like, if they made a new Harry Potter movie, and they didn't have enough for a whole film, so they had Harry experience a flashback, then they just play one of the previous films, then that ends, then we get ten minutes of nothing happening, then it ends. That is EXACTLY what this is.

Anyway, when the Thumbelina segment is over, the kids go back to running around looking for help, and Santa goes back to "oh my golly it is hot oh my gosh look at that sun glaring down oh ho ho ho i have never been so hot in my life ho ho ho". The kids return with the Ice Cream Bunny.

I'm dead f*cking serious.

The "Ice Cream Bunny" drives a fire truck (what, you were expecting a fire truck? You're an idiot!) and Santa climbs onto the back of the truck and they drive off into the woods and that's the last we ever see of them. Then the sleigh vanishes into thin air, leaving the audience wondering, say, why was this such an issue if the sleigh could vanish at will? Where does Santa go; is he supposed to deliver presents all around the world on the fire truck now, or what? Who the hell is the Ice Cream Bunny? Was he supposed to be the Easter Bunny? There's no mention of ice cream in the film, he's literally just a guy in a generic, creepy white rabbit costume that never speaks.

Also, the Thumbelina segment is incredibly weak. Terrible acting, slow and tedious dialog and pacing, and the costumes and visuals make me feel like I'm in a bad fever dream. Seriously, is it just me, or are those moles nightmare fuel? So, here's my overall summation: Go see it. I know. I know, I just bashed it and criticized it, but it's actually fascinating. I don't know why on earth it was made, I don't know what the people behind it were thinking, I don't know what the hell is going on here. But, I'll be honest, it's oddly hilarious that way.

I'm pretty sure the whole thing is on YouTube for free, which is probably the best way to look for it because I strongly doubt you can still get your hands on a VHS copy of this thing anymore.

Also, you should check out the RiffTrax commentary on it; it's even funnier than this.

This film is hypnotically terrible, with appalling acting, questionable writing, embarrassing effects, and an overall strange, unsettling, somewhat creepy vibe. You absolutely need to see it.

Merry Christmas.

Unintentionally one of the funniest movies I've ever seen! So bad, but so entertaining.

SANTA AND THE ICE CREAM BUNNY - first thought: What the ????

Found this video for rental at Family Video at 76th & National in Milwaukee this week and it sounded so atrociously awful and ridiculous I just HAD to rent it. Never heard of this movie before... It indeed was interesting viewing of one of the worst movies EVER.

For those who are seeking this video, the copy I picked up says: copyright United Entertainment, Inc. United Home Video - 1987. Product #4006

So apparently this company acquired the rights to release this on tape.

Now the video box description mentions that Santa tells the children the story of Thumbelina, and segues into that movie...

But in the video on the tape, the structure of the film has been changed.

This video does contain THUMBELINA, but not as a "movie within a movie" as in the original version. Instead THUMBELINA and all the theme-park sequences that go with it are tacked on to the end of the "Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny" story.

So in this video, Santa begins to tell the story, and the picture fades to black. Then comes back from black and now Santa has finished telling the story... wrapping up with a an incoherent moral that sounds quite nonsensical considering the Thumbelina story had been excised from the body of the SICB film. Incidentally, the Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny portion of the film clocks in at about 30 minutes.

In watching the THUMBELINA film on the video at the end of the SICB story I was interested in finding out more about the Pirate's World Amusement Park in Dania, Florida. There is considerable footage of the theme park rides in the film, and this movie could be looked at as a historical film/video document of one of Florida's Lost Roadside Attractions. Perhaps it is one of the only motion-picture visual records remaining of what that park was like. I thought the Steeplechase Ride looked cool but would not pass muster today considering safety regulations.

Pirate's World was successful enough in its early days, but the opening of Walt Disney World in 1971 was the beginning of the end for that theme park. By 1973 it was in bankruptcy and in 1975 it was closed.

I would not be surprised if SANTA AND THE ICE CREAM BUNNY, released in 1972, in some way contributed to the demise of Pirate's World.

This movie is so awful, it probably scared potential theme-park visitors away!!!

Garden gnomes sing and dance, briefly, yet interminably, before Santa Clod- I mean, Santa Claus, gets his sleigh stuck in a light dusting of beach sand on a Florida beach. His reindeer abandoned him, and who could blame them? A group of horrendously annoying, ugly kids with huge teeth are telepathically summoned in freeze-frame, they find him (after running past the same house twice) gather round him, and use conveniently located goats, chickens, mules, and even a guy in an ape costume, to try to move his sleigh.

When that proves useless, these obviously bored kids spend an inordinate amount of time listening to him tell them fairy tales- either Thumbelina, or Jack and the Beanstalk, depending on which version one watches, which is merely used to pad out the film's runtime.

The Santa footage appears to be silent footage, with sound dubbed in afterward, there are continuity issues left and right, a Santa who looks like he's about 30, and taken a dump in his Santa suit, ugly kids overacting outrageously, and massive amounts of stock footage reign, until a guy in a white bunny rabbit costume drives up (is pushed up by obvious stagehands) through the nearly empty amusement park, and gives this clod a ride ... to, the North Pole? I guess. There is repeatedly shown a dog growling and barking angrily at this costume bunny. I was waiting for him to bite the bunny. That would have been a surprising twist.

The sleigh then just simply evaporates into fat air..... The End.

What the hell is this about? Who thought this was a good idea? And what the hell were they on when they made this barely Christmas movie (aside from the guy in the unwashed Santa suit, there is no mention of Christmas)? It seems like they filmed a short ride through the awful looking amusement park, then padded that with this story of Santa on the beach, but when that still came up short, the padded it out even further with unrelated fairy tale stories, to horrible effect.

I think I heard about this movie on Slate.com's periodic posting of "The Worst Cinematic Crap of All-Time." It reminded me of the movies that served as fodder for "Mystery Science Theater 3000." On the always-unproductive day before Christmas Vacation, I found it on the internet and showed part of it to my 6th grade class, without telling them anything about what they were about to view.

At first the sixth graders were happy not to have to do actual work. The campiness of the stock-footage Caribou and the horrid elf songs and even more horrid kazoo singing were lost on them, but soon confusion and irritation set in. When I paused it after about 10 minutes to ask them what they thought of it, I got questions like "Why are Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in it?" "Why would the elf use a hammer to make a stuffed animal?" "Why is Santa so skinny?" "Where is the Ice Cream Bunny?" They were impressed by the kid jumping off the roof with the patio umbrella parachute, though.

I explained that these were all good questions, and that I didn't have an answer for any of them, but that they were watching what was widely considered to be the worst kids' movie of all time. Thanks to the beauty of streaming video, I was able to show them the remaining 80(!) or so minutes of this crap in about ten minutes, by skipping to various scenes and adding my own narration of what they were seeing.

The sixth graders' reactions: *The attempts to free the sleigh using barnyard animals were amusing, but mostly confusing. *The horse-on-a-rail ride at Pirate World looks like a lot of fun. *The sets for Thumbalina are uproariously horrid. *It's really random to have a completely different movie inside of another movie. *Why did Santa go to all that trouble if the sleigh could just disappear on its own? They mostly enjoyed it because it was better than taking a spelling test and sixth graders love making fun of stuff.

Why does this movie suck so much? Sure, the movie has terrible songs, a completely ridiculous "plot," an unrelated movie that is 2/3 of the total run time grafted into the middle of it, it serves as an advertisement for a defunct theme park in central Florida, and it looks like it was filmed on a weekend with about a budget of $300, but the real reason it sucks is because of the EDITING.

My gripe isn't even that it's obvious that only one camera was used to film this, so nearly every scene is shot from a distance. It's that every scene is about 5 times longer than it has to be! Overly-long footage of kids running, Santa fanning himself and staring at the sun, and walking, walking, walking! The worst is the "daring rescue" in the fire truck. It is literally five minutes (I timed it!) of driving at about 5 mph, with the only interesting thing happening when the dog stops to drink from a puddle in front of the truck and almost gets run over.

It's fairly easy to find part or all of S&TICB on the internet, but remember, your only reason for watching it should be to avoid taking a spelling test or because you like making fun of things.

I'm one of the few who saw this thing in the theaters. That was in Minneapolis, MN. I never remembered the title until I found it here, but I remember the movie. I was just about ten years old. I attended with my younger sister and my older cousin. I was very confused by this movie. Maybe someone will put it out on DVD so I can relive the confusion. Wow.

Silent night... HOLY HELL! I'm saying this, because I'm seeing the worst Christmas movie ever made! Literally, if you're looking for a good Christmas movie such as National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Home Alone, or The Santa Clause, this is not the one. For this film, Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny, is a massacre to the family matinée of the early 1970s. In fact, this is the Citizen Kane of awful family matinees.

If you don't know about this film, then just don't. Basically, the plot is about Santa and his sleigh going to get presents, unfortunately, the sleigh has run out of gas, Santa is stuck in the beach, and the reindeer runs away, all of it.

Because of that, he sings a HELLISH song, which is painful to listen, but better than the songs from the Jonas Brothers. It's called, "Woe Is Me." More like, woe is this movie.

The kids come and help, and yes, there's actually a footage of both the unfinished work of Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn and the unfinished work of Thumbelina. Apparently, they're made by the same guy that did this crap.

This footage shows Tom Sawyer holding the raccoon, and I can just imagine that the raccoon was actually saying, "Please, kill me now!" The kids try to help by getting the animals. Wow, a basic Noah's Ark, huh? After that, Thumbelina, which I told you.

Then, there comes a siren. This siren is actually an antique firetruck driven by the Ice Cream bunny. And look, there are the kids. And yes, it goes on and on and on and on and ON! So, the Ice Cream Bunny gets Santa in his firetruck and is saved. But, what about the kids? Well, they're looking at the sleigh, but it disappears. So is there gonna be a sequel? Hell no! It was awful! AWFUL BIG TIME! This movie was made by World War II veterinarian and a flying ace, Barry Mahon, who is also a professional pilot. How professional? Well, he was taught in college and high school. He is also an escapist of this prisoner of war camp, which was legendary. So legendary, that there was a movie of it, The Great Escape, with Steve McQueen as Barry Mahon. He also created bad kiddie matinees.

Anyway, this movie S-U-C-K-S, Sucks! It's confusing too. Why? Because it made us torture good Christmas spirits.

FINAL VERDICT: 0/10!!!

Everything about this movie is horrible. It has:

1. A plot that can be summed up in two sentences.

2. Cinematography that is on par with your grandparents' 8mm home movies.

3. Acting that is... wait... you can't honestly call it acting.

4. A 20-minute movie that is padded with a recycled fairy-tale film to achieve a 90-minute run time.

5. A "Thumbelina" insert that has the production quality of a middle-school play.

6. Costumes and scenery that are atrocious.

7. Children who cannot sing.

8. A Santa with a beard that looks ready to fall off his face at any time.

9. Lame attempts at humor.

10. Amateurish special effects.

11. A cameo appearance by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. What the ...?

12. A completely irrelevant appearance by the completely irrelevant Ice Cream Bunny, who has completely nothing to do with the aforementioned dessert treat.

This could be used as an interrogation tool in prison, or something to threaten children with when they misbehave. Sheer torture.

Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is nothing short of a pristine cinematic masterpiece and a dramatic triumph. The film takes us on an incredible journey as we witness Santa Claus' valiant yet fruitless attempts to free his sleigh from the devastating desert sands as he struggles with the scorching Florida heat and a borderline existential crisis, assisted by a colorful cast of children and wild animals that liven up the experience and bring some much-needed comic relief. Throughout the work, we are presented with themes of man against nature, the juxtaposition of fiction with reality, dramatic irony, and plenty of cues from the greatest works of Shakespeare, Moliere, Dickens, Cervantes, and many other masters. The Ice Cream Bunny is one of the greatest and most deeply-developed characters in all fiction, and deserves much more than the minimal amount of screen time that he was given. With an engaging plot and cinematic mastery, Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny will be remembered by many cinema enthusiasts for years to come.

In this review, I will divert from my usual writing style and simply list things that 'Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny' has to offer. Let us begin:

"Kids"

Creepy Narration

Sweaty Santa in Florida

Lazy Santa in Florida

Santa's Sleigh stuck in sand

Children freezing in midair

Kazoo music

Inexplicable appearances by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn

A guy in a monkey suit trying to pull Santa's Sleigh

Farm animals being shoved into Santa's Sleigh

Santa telling the children a story about Thumbelina

A teen girl at Pirate's World (a Florida Amusement Park 1967-75)

Unsafe rides

The story of Thumbelina being told on a speaker at Pirate's World being imagined by teen girl

Insane animal costumes/puppets

Annoying songs

A large, horrifying rabbit that recklessly drives a red car with a siren

A mad dog

Santa and the Bunny abandoning the children on a beach

And if that doesn't say "Merry Christmas", I don't know what does! Merry Christmas, everyone!