Bad Santa

Reviewed by PETER CALDER

Herald rating: * * * *

You may need only to know that this film is based on an idea from the Coen brothers and directed by Zwigoff to decide it is - or is not - for you.

Zwigoff is a brilliantly creepy filmmaker who followed his documentary about the cartoonist Robert Crumb with the anarchic, yet oddly tender, Ghost World and disproved the rule that documentarians can't make features.

Here he takes the Coens' idea and makes of it a movie so gleefully obscene and blackly nasty that even those who - like me - revel in its bad taste will cringe as they do so.

Writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa have made their name writing for kids which is weird, since this nursery nightmare is about as far as might be imagined from a kids' film.

The man in the red suit is Willie T. Stokes (Thornton), a nihilistic alcoholic loser who annually teams up with Marcus (Cox) to play Santa and his elf helper in a department store. Their real business happens after the store closes when they disarm the alarms and rob the place blind.

That, however, is the least of Stokes' offences against good order and sobriety: his finest set-pieces involve his dealing with the stream of children who land on his knee ("That's not a real beard. What happened to your real beard?" one demands. "I slept with an unclean woman and it fell out," replies Santa).

It gets much worse when Stokes is befriended by an obese fatherless boy (Kelly) and moves in to his suburban home. The relationship between the two is shockingly, one-sidedly cruel and abusive but it's all of a piece with the film's iconoclastic concept.

Zwigoff's characters Robert Crumb and his brother Charles, Thora Birch's Enid and Steve Buscemi's Seymour in Ghost World are all wrestling with their demons and there's something intensely moving about them. Thornton's Stokes, by contrast, deals with his self-loathing by snarling at it and spitting existential bile on it and the spectacle is teeth-grindingly hilarious.

Bad Santa is full of delightful supporting performances, too: the late, great John Ritter (this was his last film and it's dedicated to him) is a treat as an uptight store manager terrified to sack the miscreants because Stokes' offsider (a black dwarf) is a double-barrelled potential litigant in a discrimination suit; Graham is a young woman with a very specific sexual preference; Leachman is marvellous as the kid's mentally dilapidated grandmother whose only line seems to be "I'll fix us some sandwiches".

The film is almost derailed by a jarringly sentimental ending (a decision taken after nervous producers' test screenings which Zwigoff bitterly opposed), but it's still a wild and exhilarating ride.

Consider yourself warned that it is not for those who require humour to be subtle and allusive (someone counted 243 separate profanities). But consider yourself encouraged to try it. It may be the most appalling thing you'll see at the movies all year.

CAST: Billy Bob Thornton, Tony Cox, Brett Kelly, Lauren Graham, John Ritter, Cloris Leachman

DIRECTOR: Terry Zwigoff

RATING: R16 (violence, offensive language, sex scenes)

RUNNING TIME: 91 mins

SCREENING: Village, Hoyts, Rialto from Thursday