Over the past three decades or so, New Zealand has definitely punched above its weight in terms of international cinema. The small island nation is about 1,200 miles from nearest neighbor Australia (roughly the distance between Denver and Los Angeles) and is home to only about 5.3 million, but has produced such world-class filmmakers as Jane Campion, Taiki Waititi, and Peter Jackson, who filmed both The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit trilogy primarily in his homeland.
Of course, before it could run, New Zealand's film industry had to walk, and before it could walk, it had to crawl, which is the best explanation I could come up with for the existence of The Monster's Christmas, a 1981 special made by Television New Zealand that stands out as one of the most bizarre specials I've ever seen, which is saying a lot.
A plot description really doesn't do the special justice. On Christmas Eve, a young girl (Lucy McGrath) is reading herself a fairy tale about a group of monsters who have had their voices stolen by a wicked witch (Lee Hatherly) angry that she came in last in their singing contest. Just as the girl has closed her eyes for a long summer's nap, she hears a noise from the living room, and discovers that it isn't Father Christmas but instead a monster ransacking it. She quickly agrees to help the monster by traveling to the witch's lair and saying the magic words that will restore all the monsters' voices.
The special is obviously very low-budget, with most of the money being spent on the elaborate costumes the various monsters wear. And what costumes! They don't look remotely realistic, and are very obviously all just men wearing elaborate Halloween garb, but it definitely works for the aesthetics of the special. Somehow, having realistic-looking monsters would hut the dynamics, and even within those limits, the costume of the witch's monster henchman looks genuinely creepy, even if he does mostly end up being comic relief. The limited budget certainly wasn't spend it on actors, as McGrath and Hatherly are the only ones who are not wearing head-to-toe monster getups and the only ones who have much in the way of dialogue (a consequence of the storyline requiring all monsters to basically just grunt instead of speaking).
The two major indoor sets--the girl's home and the witch's lair--weren't much to write home about in terms of setting (the house looks like a house, the lair looks very much like a soundstage made to look like the inside of a mountain and filled for some reason with exercise equipment), but most of the special was filmed out of doors, nicely showcasing New Zealand's natural beauty two full decades before the aforementioned Jackson would turn the country side into Middle-Earth. It may be worth watching the special just for that.
None of this description, sad to say, comes close to the actual feeling of watching the special, which largely consists of McGrath having to basically have a monologue reciting all the plot points while trekking through the forest and across the fields with whatever monster is currently accompanying her, all of which is punctuated by an extremely minimalist score that sounds like it was punched out of a Casio keyboard, and given that it was 1981, it probably was. In many ways, it captures a similar weirdness to The Star Wars Holiday Special, though at half the running time and probably about one-one hundredth of the budget, it comes across as charming rather than bloated.
An obscure foreign Christmas special should, by all rights, have faded from memory years ago. But the sheer strangeness of the special has kept A Monster's Christmas alive. Not only is it available for easy viewing, but there are numerous reviews of it up on YouTube, and a few years ago RiffTrax released a commentary track for it. I can't in good conscience recommend it, and doubt I'll ever revisit it, but in a strange way, I'm glad I watched it. It's not good, but it is unique, and if it paved the way for Peter Jackson, so much the better.
Next time: Five Nights at Freddy's is on the big screen, and the original animatronic pizza band has a brand new special on the small screen.
No comments:
Post a Comment