Finally, a holiday movie for people who hate the holidays, hate humanity and hate being alive.

Director Terry Zwigoff (Crumb, Ghost World) has crafted a darkly cynical Christmas film that has more in common with 1970’s underground comics than It’s A Wonderful Life. If you thought Ebenezer Scrooge was a ***censored***… just wait until you meet Bad Santa.

Willie Stokes (Billy Bob Thornton) is a booze swilling, ***censored*** sex loving con man with one skill in life: he can crack safes. Willie is lazy, foul-mouthed and unmotivated. Luckily, the vision is supplied by his pint-sized partner, Marcus.  Marcus has has stumbled across a scam that will allow the duo to pull just one job a year… thus freeing up the rest of the year for Willie to wallow in alcoholic misery.

The scam is this: WIllie and Marcus advertise themselves as a bargain basement Santa and elf to suburban shopping malls and department stores.  They travel from city to city and work for a few days in costume, gathering insider knowledge about the security situation at each store. Then, they spring into action after hours, crack the safe and go their separate ways until the next holiday season.

The only real problem with this plan is Willie himself. He hates kids, he’s uses the f-word compulsively and he drinks until he urinates all over his Santa trousers. They have pulled the scam for many years, but this year Willie is slipping even deeper into his self-destructive habits and is raising the suspicions of the nervous shopping mall manager (played to snivelling perfection by John Ritter). 

Marcus struggles to keep Willie on track until they can pull the heist. In the mean time Willie befriends a seemingly dim-witted fat kid who actually believes that Willie is the real Santa Claus. When Willie finds out the kid lives in a big house with a clueless grandmother who loves making sandwiches, he decides he should move in to their nice suburban house with them. To complete his new domestic situation, he picks up a cute bartender (Lauren Graham) with a fetish for banging alcoholic men dressed up as Santa Claus because they remind her of “daddy.”

Once the premise is set up, Bad Santa works as more of a character study than a comedy or crime caper. Writers John Requa and Glenn Ficarra ruthlessly peel the layers and show us the pitch-black heart of this character. These guys are best know for their screenplays for kiddie flicks Cats and Dogs and the recent Looney Tunes movie, so it’s obvious that they had some venom to get out of their systems.

Zwigoff is the perfect accomplice, because he obviously relishes shredding all the conventions of Christmas movies. From Santa Claus to advent calendars, Zwigoff puts it all on the chopping block. Willie is vomited and urinated on by a procession of annoying brats until he ends up urinating on himself. And in what would be the “cute kid” role in a normal holiday movie, Zwigoff casts a chubby, dim-witted looking kid and encrusts his pudgy face with snot to erase any trace of cute-ness the audience might find in him.

The film does fall apart a bit in the final third as a few new plot threads are introduced and hurriedly tied-up. But the first two thirds of the movie are so caustically funny that it doesn’t matter. I have no idea how Dimension thinks they can market this film to a general audience, but you’ve got to give everybody involved credit for creating this highly original holiday film.

Review by Christopher Sharpe.