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.
Of all the horror movies to be described as a runaway train, Rob Savage’s Other Mommy is the first in recent memory to have that quality as a negative. A more focused piece of over-the-top supernatural horror would capitalize on starting at a high speed and just gunning it. It would get increasingly faster, more horrific with its effects and reveals, more stunning and spectacle-filled. But Other Mommy never utilizes the momentum it starts with. It stays at the same steady, uncomfortable pace. And it gets old, very fast.
Other Mommy Is Missing a First Act
The movie begins in what should have been the second act; it never does stop haunting the narrative that Other Mommy feels like it’s missing 30 minutes of setup and 10 minutes of breathing room that would actually get you to care about what’s happening. Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) is a young girl already well acquainted with a creature known as Other Mommy. A supernatural being that can change shape and size to her liking, becoming anyone she wants and then some. The entity only desires one thing: for Bela to let it into her heart and give it a new body.
Bela’s parents, Ursula (played by Jessica Chastain, in a dual role as the Other Mommy) and Russell (Jay Duplass), become aware of the space-bending creature in the film’s very first scenes. Soon, they’re on the run from the creature that’s trying to tear the already strained family apart. But the overwrought family drama of an unfaithful mother and a scatterbrained father forced to hide their struggling marriage from their kid is smothered. Much like Chastain’s performance, it’s drowned out by a barrage of aggressive and unimpressive digital effects trying to milk every single moment for a fright, desperate to keep audiences’ attention.
A Clumsy Digital Effects Showcase That Smothers the Story to Death
Other Mommy is primarily concerned with showing off its titular monster and her reality-bending powers, jumping from one “scare filled”, dreamlike sequence to the next; heavy, heavy quotes on scare filled. You become inured to every trick the film has as it shows you all the most unimaginative uses of a shapeshifting, size changing monster possible. There is no clever framing or use of shadow to obscure it, no restraint at all really. The directing is frenetic and clumsy, but it makes sure to make the monster as clear as possible. It’s all out in the open, plain to see, and bizarrely mundane for a depiction of a demonic interloper.
Every jumpscare-a-minute scene moves too fast and is too overlit to ever scare. The bright and inappropriate atmosphere fails the already rough looking digital effects. What it amounts to is a choppily edited and disjointed assortment of scenes, with weak imitations of Trevor Henderson style abominations center stage. Tall and small and melty variations of a CGI Chastain, none of them work to evoke tension or fear or any emotion other than the occasional eyebrow raise for how goofy some of them look.
There are a few moments where Chastain teases at playing the monster effectively without face and body morphing effects, sporting a genuinely disturbing countenance and creepy voice. But as soon as these fragments of interest come, they’re washed away by warping her into a lanky, slinking monster of ridiculous proportions. What we get out of the dual role is a boring creature for the feature, and a dry, one-dimensional protagonist, both squandering the phenomenal actor Chastain is.
Other Mommy is Full of Dull Performances and Squandered Potential
Duplass offers little with his supporting role, providing flat dialogue and flatter comic relief as a middling SNL sketch’s idea of a clownish father. It’s worth noting Clark actually provides the most interesting performance among the entire cast, a feat impressive from such a young child actor. But even her endearing and heart-breaking time as Bela is too little and too shadowed by the faulty composition of the film it’s trapped in.
The trailer for Other Mommy may have caught audiences off guard at the cinema in the past few months. But ultimately, that trailer showed the movie’s entire hand. Other Mommy is a pasty, crooked collage of elements from the supernatural horror movies producer James Wan made the backbone of the genre a decade ago. That doesn’t make it a throwback; just a rehash of cliches, with no structure and no sense of cohesion. It never amounts to anything more interesting than what the marketing material showed, which is a tragic end for a film, if there ever was one.
Luz: The Flower of Evil is a movie simultaneously charged with and mired in ambition. It’s genuinely comical how overly ambitious of a first-time film it is for writer-director Juan Diego Escobar Alzate: a microbudget, shot on location in the mountains of Colombia, character driven psychological horror film meant to explore the very nature of good and evil while also tackling cults and misogyny.
So, it’s shocking how much of it works. Not all of it works, not at all, but it is cohesive enough to serve as a surprising experience with the colorful aesthetic it employs and incredibly dark places it goes to.
What Is Luz: Flower of Evil About?
After the death of their mother Luz, three sisters in a rural cult community find their faith waning. The three are the centerpiece of an elaborate theology crafted by their cult leader father, a man who is becoming more difficult to deal with by the day. So, when he brings a mute boy into town, chaining him up and claiming he’s the people’s messiah, an already tense situation devolves into outright madness. What ensues is the slow dissolution of the cult, and the torturous end of an already fractured family.
Let this usual synopsis section also serve as a content warning: the film does depict sexual violence very early on, about 25 minutes into the film. It’s not Irreversible levels of horrifically long, but it’s also not particularly brief and still graphic content by its nature. It can be difficult to stomach, so I’m mentioning it now for those who would rather avoid that sort of thing.
A Ponderous Arthouse Folk Horror About Good and Evil
The film has shocking moments, but it’s not very interested in shock value. This is first and foremost a slow burn, a piece of arthouse folk horror that is more about bleeding out than it is about a violent demise. The most obvious comparisons are to The VVitch and Midsommar, but even that feels like an inappropriate mix, even when it leans towards Aster’s commercial darling or Egger’s colonial nightmare.
Fundamentally, Luz is a study about people who mythologize suffering and cruelty and excuse it as being driven by outside spiritual forces rather than their own decisions. It’s about deconstructing harmful religious and cult mentalities, and it wears its philosophy on its sleeve (aggressively so). Alzate creates a visually and textually fascinating meltdown of his characters and the community they find themselves within.
I would say it’s a “descent into madness” if it didn’t feel clear that the characters were already in a tailspin right at the film’s outset. The script, especially through its second act, starts to feel repetitive and a little simplistic, with a somewhat anticlimactic ending and dialog that starts to feel less naturalistic and more tedious. But it’s an interesting dissection of a family, even if it’s rough around the edges.
Hyperreal Sense of Color, But Shaky Directing and Writing
The film’s most obvious and striking feature is its hyperrealist palette, bearing a rich Technicolor aspect that permeates throughout the entire runtime. Colorist Felipe Martinez U paints the mountainous countryside with such vibrancy, a simple but very effective contrast to the dying days of a cult the story centers on; bleak, muddy times, punctuated by vibrant nature all around. Aesthetically, it’s pretty clearly visually inspired by the early works of Pedro Almodóvar and the visual warmth of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man.
Even the naturalistic tendencies of Terrence Malick make an appearance here, though how much of that is just in the gorgeous location scouting and how much is actually emulated by Alzate is up for debate. All around, the film lacks polish. The camerawork is amateurish in some ways, slightly cramped and occasionally uninspired in its framing. Sometimes the oversaturated look of the film can feel a little saccharine and heavy, but the pop of color here feels purposeful enough that I can forgive it as being highly stylized rather than trying to mask the weak points of a first-time director.
Is Luz: The Flower of Evil Worth the Watch?
In the search for great Latin American horror, Luz was an odd duck to stumble upon to be certain. But I’m a champion of strange birds with a lot of character, so you do the math.
Luz: The Flower of Evil is a struggle of a film, hard to watch at points despite how visually appealing it can be. It’s a brutal, bleak piece of psychological folk horror that certainly has a thin audience and will test the patience of even those the premise appeals to. But it does have as much substance as it does style, even when it treads into murky waters, and for that I think it’s worth the watch.
