Reviews
‘Dial Code Santa Claus’: The Horror Film That [Maybe] Inspired ‘Home Alone’
Dial Code Santa Claus (also known as Deadly Games, 3615 Code Father Christmas, Game Over, and Hide and Freak) is a 1989 comedy/horror/thriller from writer/director René Manzor. Thomas (Alain Lalanne) is a very young boy with a large imagination. Resigned to one of the largest mansions I’ve ever seen, Thomas fills his days with Rambo-style antics by working out, building trapdoors, and playing war with his precious dog J.R. His mother, Julie (Brigitte Fossey) manages a Printemps, which is a French chain of department stores. Thomas spends the majority of his time with his near-blind grandfather Papy (Louis Ducreux), due to his mother’s insanely busy schedule. However, it feels like Julie attempts to make herself busier than she needs to be as a way to cope with the recent loss of her husband, Thomas’s father. On Christmas Eve, Thomas uses a Minitel to talk with Santa, only he’s not talking to Santa… he’s talking to a cold-blooded and unnamed killer (Patrick Floersheim). Unfortunately for Thomas, the vagrant finds out where he lives, and he’s ready to spread some Christmas spirit.
Synchronicity in life is always a strange thing to comprehend. Have you ever had a song stuck in your head that happened to start playing randomly in the grocery store? Remember when Deep Impact and Armageddon came out the same year? How about the short time differential between The Illusionist and The Prestige? Do you recall in 1997 when Volcano and (the highly superior) Dante’s Peak came out nearly simultaneously? Sometimes, when one studio hears about one movie in production, they’ll race to get something similar out as quickly as possible. I call this the Asylum Effect (if you aren’t familiar, Asylum creates low-budget-quick-turnaround films that mirror big-budget films, i.e., their version of Transformers was Transmorphers). These incidents aren’t always malicious, rather, they just happen. One thing that seems less like a coincidence is the distinct similarities between Home Alone and Dial Code Santa Claus.
An Overlooked Horror Christmas Classic That Maybe Inspired Home Alone
Dial Code Santa Claus (also known as Deadly Games, 3615 Code Father Christmas, Game Over, and Hide and Freak) is a 1989 comedy/horror/thriller from writer/director René Manzor. Thomas (Alain Lalanne) is a very young boy with a large imagination. Resigned to one of the largest mansions I’ve ever seen, Thomas fills his days with Rambo-style antics by working out, building trapdoors, and playing war with his precious dog J.R. His mother, Julie (Brigitte Fossey) manages a Printemps, which is a French chain of department stores. Thomas spends the majority of his time with his near-blind grandfather Papy (Louis Ducreux), due to his mother’s insanely busy schedule. However, it feels like Julie attempts to make herself busier than she needs to be as a way to cope with the recent loss of her husband, Thomas’s father. On Christmas Eve, Thomas uses a Minitel to talk with Santa, only he’s not talking to Santa… he’s talking to a cold-blooded and unnamed killer (Patrick Floersheim). Unfortunately for Thomas, the vagrant finds out where he lives, and he’s ready to spread some Christmas spirit.
From the description alone, it might not sound like Home Alone, and, going with my belief that these two films are a bit too similar, I think that was purposeful. Home Alone feels different enough to be its own entity, and I would hate to accuse John Hughes of plagiarism–I mean he’s not the Australian author John Hughes. But let’s take a step back and look at the quickest form of elevator pitch that would apply to both of these films: a young boy who is more self-aware than your typical 8-year-old, with rocky familial relations, finds himself at the behest of a home intruder(s) with villainous intent. From that simple description, Dial Code Santa Claus and Home Alone could easily be one of the many outcomes once the pitch was accepted. What’s even stranger is how both films are Christmas films. Did John Hughes take the premise of an “obscure” French film? How in touch with world cinema are Americans [in 1989] anyway? No one will notice.
Why Dial Code Santa Claus Stands Out as a Unique Film
Okay, enough talking about John Hughes and Home Alone. The point has been made, and we can all move on. As someone who isn’t really into Christmas or Christmas horror by proxy, it’s no surprise Dial Code Santa Claus flew past my radar. It’s a shame. Dial Code is a genuinely original, odd, and heartwarming tale of resilience and the human condition. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt genuinely moved by a film, and this film hit me hard. However, every vice has its versa, and this film is far from perfect. The consistency of the direction and cinematography vary from scene to scene, creating a fairly messy visual tale…the continuity errors don’t help either. Tonally, Manzor’s script is all over the place. At the drop of a hat, the film switches from comedy to horror to drama without giving the audience a minute to catch their bearings. The majority of the time it’s not overly egregious, but when this happens during major plot points, the film feels a bit confused. Dial Code Santa Claus is charming for how it tells its story, however, how they tell the story will not work for everyone.
It’s the Christmas season. Let’s be jolly and focus on the positives! Unlike Home Alone, Thomas does not find himself home alone. Thomas finds himself in the company of his grandfather, but with his near-blindness, Thomas is the one who must take control when la merde frappe le ventilateur (when shit hits the fan). Having a child lead a film is always a risk, and most of the time it doesn’t pay off. Luckily for Manzor, he found Alain Lalanne. Full of charisma and energy, Lalanne absolutely eats this role up. The emotional turning point in Home Alone is when Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) realizes Marley (Roberts Blossom) isn’t the big bad urban legend he was made out to be. Home Alone tries forcing an emotional connection without really earning it, he’s a privileged little boy who has to learn empathy—big deal. There’s nothing to care about in that character. On the other hand, Thomas is dangerously creative and truly a tragic character. You can empathize with him right off the bat.
A Movie Carried By A Small Protagonist
Thomas is quite an interesting character. Part of me believes after this whole debacle, their family packed up, moved to the States, and changed their last name to Kramer…because this kid is a little Jigsaw in the making. He looks at himself almost as the patriarch of the family. When he has an inkling that his mother might be falling for her coworker Roland (François-Eric Gendron), he fixes her car so she doesn’t have to be chauffeured around anymore. A montage scene of Thomas setting up traps shows how forward-thinking and ambitious he is. Kevin McCallister sets up a few pulley systems and puts a hot rod on a door handle, Thomas literally sets up a tripwire with darts that shoot into the killer’s neck before being led into a literal fire trap. Unlike Home Alone, where the violence feels cartoonish and pointless, Thomas and Papy legitimately are out to kill the invader. (Yes, the Wet Bandits show injuries, but there’s no way in hell your skull isn’t getting caved in from a paint can at that speed.)
Manzor’s script creates a childlike whimsy throughout the film’s first half. It shows us Thomas is a genius with grand ideas and a sense of wonder. It’s not until the film’s second half that that facade slips into true terror. One of the most intriguing aspects is how the film opens versus how it ends. The opening shot consists of a garbage truck running over a snow globe, a true depiction of innocence being shattered. Our first look at Thomas is of him asleep in his gigantic airplane bed with a fan pointed directly at him, simulating wind. From there, we get a montage of Thomas working out, sharpening a [plastic] knife (with a bit too many closeup shots of sweaty child skin), scaling a ledge, and trapping his dog in the floor pit they have for some reason. The final shot of the film is of Thomas covered in mud in front of Santa’s (the killer’s) corpse as his mother runs over and consoles him. Eff around and find out, right? Thomas’s morning routine is an emulation of his military father, doing everything he can to be a macho-man badass and doing things that would give an average person PTSD. Sadly, there’s no way Thomas would have gotten out of this film without extreme PTSD.
Moments of Vulnerability in a Child’s Bravery
Rather than giving us Rambo Jr. the entire film, Manzor drops in small moments here and there to remind us that Thomas is still a child. In Thomas’s wake-up scene, we see him scaling a tight ledge, until the camera pulls back to see he is on a balcony. Later in the film, when being chased by the killer, Thomas is forced to scale an actual ledge on the snowy rooftop. During this time, he breaks down, screaming and crying for his mother. After Thomas steals a cop car, understandably, he comes to a face-off with the killer. They stare dead into each other’s eyes. Using the gun from inside the cop car, Thomas directs the barrel toward the killer and cries out, asking why he’s doing this. It is just another one of the heartbreaking moments where Thomas breaks the “manly” and “adult” facade he portrays so heavily.
Killer Hobo Santa Is Legitimately Scary
Speaking of the killer, let’s talk about him. It would have been nice to have him fleshed out a little more. Most people I know who’ve seen this film assume he’s a deranged unhoused person, so we’ll go with that. His intentions are unclear, but we have some context clues to piece together what’s going on. At the film’s beginning, the killer tries to join a group of neighborhood kids in a snowball fight, but they quickly depart from the area. From there he gets hired to be Santa Claus for Julie’s incredibly impromptu Christmas festivities (it’s Christmas Eve, and she’s making her team plan this extravaganza now). As the kids pass with their parents, he throws out candies and treats to the giddy children, all with wide smiles on their faces. Things go south when Marion (Marion Bureau), whose mom is inside the store, approaches him. He strokes her face, yeesh, and things start to feel…icky. Marion yells out that he’s not the real Santa and straight-up slaps her. Contain your laughter.
The Killer’s Descent into Violence
From here on out, the killer is unleashed. Something at this moment clicks in his head. He makes his way to Julie’s home and starts dispatching the help one by one. The killer has these moments of innocence that are entirely eclipsed by his insidious nature. One of the most compelling scenes of his terror comes when Thomas and Papy are chased into the garage and into the car. Thomas eventually gets the car started but can’t bring himself to run the killer over. Set to the tune of an audibly confusing psychedelic techno-rock song, the killer walks up to the car and slams his head smack dab on the windshield, cracking it and his skull. The scene gets even more intense as he attacks the car with a sledgehammer and long metal pipe in a mixture of expertly used slow-motion shots intermixed with higher frame rate impacts.
The Eclectic Soundtrack of Dial Code Santa Claus
Super quick segue: while we’re talking about music, we have to talk about one of the first songs on the soundtrack. When Thomas is doing his morning routine, a song starts playing, and I cannot find it for the life of me. AND I NEED IT. The song is a bastardization of Eye of the Tiger and the lyrics, the intelligible ones, are just funny. It’s a hard rock Christmas song that feels tonally off while working in just the right ways. Oh, they have Bonnie Tyler’s rendition of Merry Christmas, which is fine. Author’s note: if you know the first song I’m referring to, please comment the title and or DM me because I NEED TO KNOW.
Is Dial Code Santa Claus Better Than Home Alone?
Is Dial Code Santa Claus better than Home Alone? Yes. Though, I’m probably biased because I don’t really like the film. Was this film plagiarized off of? I also want to say yes, but I find it hard to believe John Hughes was able to watch this film in 1989 and, with such a quick turnaround, pump out Home Alone. If there were two or three years between the films, I think you could easily make the argument, but it’s hard to say yes. Synchronicity in life is always a strange thing to comprehend.
Why Dial Code Santa Claus Deserves a Spot on Your Watchlist
Dial Code Santa Claus is one of the few Christmas horror films that will go on my yearly December viewing list. Overwhelmingly fun and intriguing, Dial Code brings a new take, especially for 1989, on the home invasion subgenre. Not relegating itself to a single genre, René Manzor created something that genre fans and non-genre fans alike can enjoy. While select scenes feel paced awkwardly, the film does an overly effective job of telling a story and sticking to its themes. Staying away from excessively graphic, but still impactful violence, audiences will find an accessible horror film in this criminally underseen French romp. That is, as long as they know Santa doesn’t exist.
There are countless subgenres within subgenres for horror, and one that feels underutilized is workplace horror. Unless you’re one of the lucky few, most people wake up at some point during the day, go to work, and then come home. It’s one of the few things in life that’s nearly unavoidable. While there are countless real-life examples of workplace violence, seeing exaggerated forms of it in film can still be fun. When I pitched covering The Belko Experiment for this month, I actually thought I was pitching Joe Lynch’s Mayhem. I soon found out how incorrect I had been, but figured I’d go along with it anyway.
Mike Milch (John Gallagher Jr.) and 79 of his coworkers are locked inside the towering building they come to work in every day in Bogotá, Colombia. They’re given simple instructions: murder two coworkers within the next half hour. When they fail that task, coworkers’ heads start blowing up left and right. When they’re given the next task, kill 30 people in two hours, they take it…a little more seriously.
The Belko Experiment’s Brutal Premise Sets Up High Stakes
Written by James Gunn and directed by Wolf Creek creator Greg McLean, The Belko Experiment is a painfully by-the-numbers film that offers little more than a handful of entertaining kills. Its futile attempts at commentary regarding work/life balance or just how bad “faceless” upper management is fall so flat it’s comical. Nothing like multi-millionaire James Gunn telling me how awful it is to have to work a real job for a living. Great work. And its one-dimensional characters do little more than create a slight sigh of relief when they’re dispatched without regard.
A singular attempt at cleverness is broached from the beginning when we see a colony of ants in an ant farm on someone’s desk. Oh, look at that, these workers are nothing more than mindless ants! But any attempt at following that slightly clever idea is quickly thrown away. At one point, Barry Norris (Tony Goldwyn), the big boss in the office, attempts to group up who should and shouldn’t be killed; who has the most value outside of work. Gunn had the perfect opportunity to make Barry a deep and more sinister antagonist. If Barry had grouped people into sets from most to least profitable for the company, we would have something. It would show that Barry is a forward-thinking villain who is trying to suck up to the people who get paid even MORE than him!
Missed Opportunities for a Smarter Corporate Villain
I’ll do you one better. After all of that, what if the bad guys that Barry recruited to help him cull his subordinates realized they were just pawns in the game of Big Business? So then they attempt to repent by killing Barry in the hopes that they can find a common means of escape from this hell? Why is there zero attempt at making an interesting story other than this shitty, watered-down Battle Royale with people we don’t give a shit about? Instead of anything interesting, we’re just given a group of baddies who try to get into the security office’s gun safe. The only reason we’re slightly scared of the “bad guys” is because they’re bad guys.
The only slightly interesting performances we get are from David Dastmalchian and Adria Arjona, even if it might be a fluke. As someone who is a fan of Greg McLean and the Wolf Creek series, something just felt disconnected about nearly every aspect of The Belko Experiment. I’ve brought it up before that sometimes it’s okay to have a film that doesn’t tell a great story as long as the kills can carry some of the weight. But to say this film has a story is laughable, and that carries over to how flat this film looks.
Skip The Belko Experiment and Watch Mayhem Instead
It’s weird how sour this film left me. When I was watching it, I found myself grimacing at some of the kills. And I didn’t vehemently dislike it as much as this review would suggest. But as I sat there and thought longer, I just couldn’t wrap my head around what anyone sees in this. Mayhem is an all-around better film that tackles this same subject but in a much better way. So if you ever decide to sit down and watch The Belko Experiment, maybe go watch Mayhem on Shudder instead.
Would it be a month of coverage on Horror Press if I didn’t bring up at least one aughts film? I know the curator of all things Horror Press, James-Michael, is shaking his fists at the sky and cursing the fact that he approved me covering The Hitcher. Of all the remakes that were so pervasive throughout the aughts, The Hitcher is one that slipped completely under my radar. And that’s a damn shame. It wouldn’t be until I found a DVD copy at Bookoff that I finally got the opportunity to watch it. Hot damn, the critics really got it wrong here.
The Hitcher: A Road Trip Turned Nightmare
Jim Halsey (Zachary Knighton) and his girlfriend Grace Andrews (Sophia Bush) are on a road trip to Lake Havasu in Jim’s gorgeous Oldsmobile 442. An unfortunate run-in with a mysterious hitchhiker, John Ryder (Sean Bean), Jim and Grace find themselves in a fight for life and death. Only, John isn’t their only concern. With the 5-0 hot on their tails, Jim and Grace must escape from a psychopathic man with a death wish and the hot-tempered, hot-faced Lieutenant Esteridge (Neal McDonough). As the odometer grows, so does the body count.
The Hitcher is one of those remakes that does not have the approval of the original’s lead, Rutger Hauer. Which is astounding to me. Sure, the original is good. But it doesn’t set itself apart from the crowd too much. Rutger Hauer’s John is slightly more reserved, and while he has an edge to him, I don’t necessarily find him overly menacing. (Don’t kill me.) Sean Bean’s John Ryder, on the other hand, is furiously terrifying. There’s no question that there are tons of issues with the Platinum Dunes remake, though, for me, the pros significantly outweigh the cons.
Jim Halsey Falls Flat
The biggest issue is the character of Jim Halsey. I love how the roles of Jim and Grace are swapped from the original film. It brings an updated, modern edge to the film and is a great way to throw audiences who have seen the original. Though I can imagine the hyper-masculine fans of the original were not too happy with that. When it was decided to swap the roles of the characters, it seems like any character depth for Jim was thrown out of the window. I think Zachary Knighton is a wonderful actor who does the best with what he has, but he doesn’t have enough to work with. Writers Eric Red, Jake Wade Wall, and Eric Bernt updated the film with tons of epic scenarios and moments, while seemingly forgetting to make the supposed lead of the film interesting.
On top of cardboard Jim, the inciting police incident just feels very forced. Grace runs into a diner, covered in blood, after she and Jim found a family butchered by John. Someone from the diner calls the police, which leads to Jim and Grace being arrested and charged with murder. Whether or not that’s supposed to be commentary on rural police doesn’t matter because it completely fails to do anything other than forcibly push the story forward.
Besides that? I hate to say, but I don’t have many issues with The Hitcher.
Soundtrack and Atmosphere: A High-Octane Experience
First and foremost, The Hitcher’s soundtrack is incredible. We start the film with Move Along by The All-American Rejects. Talk about a shot of adrenaline. And the greatest needle drop in all of aughts horror history is Nine Inch Nails’s Closer during the film’s most wild car chase. It’s hard not to get lost in this film when the music kicks in.
What really sells this film is how intensely they handle the violence and the film’s gorgeous chase scenes. It’s no Death Proof, but these scenes are miles above the Fast movies that were out at this time. In a day and age where chase scenes are overly produced, badly edited, and just plain boring, The Hitcher manages to infuse horror and action in a way that probably won’t be seen again. Watching films like The Hitcher makes me sad for the state of modern cinema. The Hitcher wasn’t made to win scores of Oscars; it was made by people passionate about telling a badass, harrowing story (minus Jim). And they greatly excel at that.
The Hitcher Is a Misunderstood Cult Favorite
The Hitcher falls in line with my running theory of post-9/11 ultra violence. We were a nation scared of what happened, what was happening, and what seemed to be on the horizon–The Hitcher bottles that fear and anger, packaging it into a nasty piece of genre. Sean Bean and Sophia Bush are an on-screen match made in heaven. They wade through harsh lighting, thick film grain, and buckets of blood to deliver a film that critics and audiences unfairly panned. While audiences may have moved along, I sure didn’t. I want to exist in a world of nothing but aughts genre films, but am forced to live in a world of elevated horror. Le sigh.
