Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Awful Advent #3: 3615 Code Père Noël (1989)

Welcome to Awful Advent: a countdown of 13 Holiday Horror movies for the 13 days before Christmas

For this year’s third entry, we have the movie that (maybe?) was the inspiration for Home Alone, the French thriller 3615 Code Père Noël, aka Deadly Games, Dial Code Santa Claus, Game Over, and Hide and Freak

A young boy must use improvised traps and weapons to protect himself, his grandfather, and their home from an invader dressed as Santa Claus.

The obvious parallel is to 1990’s Home Alone where a young boy has to keep two thieves from robbing his home while his family is away for Christmas. However, where that movie is very cartoony, this is almost immediately more grim. When the false Santa first arrives at the house—via chimney no less—he’s attacked by the family dog and stabs it to death while the child watches from under a table.

And here’s the crazy thing: despite that, this doesn’t feel much less like a child’s fantasy than Home Alone.

One element contributing to that feeling is the semi-dreamlike nature of a lot of the movie. You remember how movies used to indicate a kid was rich by showing his racecar bed? This movie introduces our hero, Thomas, waking up in his fighter jet bed that hangs from the ceiling. The house itself is a castle which Thomas—a child prodigy, of course—has wired up with video cameras, remote-operated security shutters, and booby traps. Within the house is a secret passage that only he knows about that leads to a cavernous room that holds all his toys, all his father’s toys, and all his father’s father’s toys.

In other words, we start with the house an 8-year-old would make for themselves if they could make their dream house a reality.

His mother and grandfather give him full reign, allowing him run of the house and denying him nothing. He wakes up by dressing himself in Rambo cosplay and then has a guerrilla-style chase with his dog including piping the sound of gunfire through the house speaker system.

Reality is creeping in, though. His mother gets a ride to work (at the Printemps department store downtown that she owns) from her colleague and lover that Thomas clearly doesn’t approve of. Also, Thomas’ friend has told him that there’s no such thing as Santa Claus.

In the hopes of keeping his fantasy alive, mom decides, on Christmas Eve, to throw a massive Christmas party at the store requiring the hiring of all sorts of performers. Why start planning this on Christmas Eve and not a month ago? “A month ago, children still believed in Santa Claus,” she says.

As an aside, I know this is supposed to be charming, to demonstrate the mother’s affection for Thomas, and to ramp up the fantasy aspect of the story (my mom can make anything happen!), but it does flip all my switches about living under capitalism. The rotten boss’ dirty shit boy son doesn’t believe in Santa so all the plebes have to work a surprise double shift on Christmas Eve. And if those costumes aren’t perfect, heads are going to roll! To top it all off, Thomas never goes to the store so there's no reason within the world of the story for any of this to happen. However, for the purposes of the plot, the Christmas party is to get the home invader hired as a last-minute Santa, get fired, and then seek out the boss’ son for his own reasons.

Those reasons stem from the titular 3615 Code Père Noël. The movie opens with children having a snowball fight in front of a billboard advertising a BBS where you can chat to Santa via your computer. The home invader sees the kids having the snowball fight and tries to join in only to have them all run away. The next time we see him, he’s using a public computer terminal to chat on the BBS as Santa. He’s talking to Thomas who wants proof that Santa exists and mentions that his mom is the manager of the local Printemps.

So through a series of narrative contrivances he ends up at the house and is stalking the kid and his grandfather. Things go as you’d expect, but we never really know why he’s there or what he wants. It’d be better, honestly, if it were a little more like Home Alone and he was just a robber. Instead he seems to be mentally impaired somehow, not fully aware of what’s going on, which makes some of the things that happen later unexpectedly tragic. However, when we see him working as Santa, it’s his seeming creeping on a little girl that gets him fired. And he kills the dog. So how much sympathy are we supposed to have?

The movie is pretty good overall. It has a nice subtle arc throughout of moving from being a kids’ fantasy to being a serious thriller: Thomas’ desire to talk to Santa Claus and being obsessed with toys evolving into him dropping his pretenses at fantasy and focusing on things like keeping safe and getting his grandfather insulin. The conclusion features Thomas repeating various things said throughout the movie that culminate in him being clearly traumatized by the situation which speaks to the movie being really well composed and thought through.

This was a movie I’d heard about a lot but only recently had access to, and, sadly, it didn’t live up to the image I had of it being a truly bonkers ultra-violent version of Home Alone, which is an unfair standard to hold it to. However, it does feel like a demented Miracle on 34th Street in that it’s about someone trying to convince a child that Santa is real. Only it’s done through the lens of Silent Night, Deadly Night, and that’s still pretty wild. It’s a pretty good, albeit dated, flick and definitely worth a watch. I don’t’ know that I’ll return to it again on my own, but if I’m ever programing another holiday marathon/party, it’s 100% on the list.

3.5/5 secret stalker Santas

3615 Code Père Noël is currently available to stream on Shudder

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