Writer(s): Manzor
Starring: Brigitte Fossey, Louis Decreux, Patrick Floersheim, and Alain Lalanne (as Alain Musy)
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| The perfect movie for the Scrooge in your life. |
3615 Pere Noel first came to my
attention late last year (2018), when some publications mentioned it
was a darker version of Home Alone…made one year before that
holiday classic. Even though it seemed to garner attention in the
media, I still couldn’t find a way to watch it…until this year,
when those darlings at Shudder finally made it available for all to
see.
But let’s just get one thing out of
the way, for those of you who go into a viewing of the movie with the
same mindset my wife and I did, expecting a mostly-lighthearted
holiday romp: this movie is unrelentingly grim. It’s not very
violent, per se, but it almost seems to revel in breaking the spirit
of its characters, whether it be an adult, an elderly man, or even a
child—the end result is a film that’s every bit as heartbreaking
as it is intense.
Alain Musy is Thomas, a particularly
smart 9-year-old who is left at home on Christmas Eve with his ailing
grandfather, while his mother goes off to work as manager of a
department store. The family is apparently atrociously rich, as they
live in a ridiculous castle-style mansion, complete with caretakers
who live on the premises. She is only supposed to be gone for a few
hours, but that’s as long as it takes for Thomas to get into
trouble thanks to their Minitel system, France’s early version of
the internet: he enters an early version of a chat room, attempts to
make contact with Santa Claus, and instead gets the attention of a
ne’er-do-well, who attempts to get the kid’s address before the
connection is dropped.
What he does learn, however, is that
the kid’s mother works for Printemps, a popular French department
store; the vagabond wanders his way over there to apply for a job as
Santa Claus, gets it, and then is promptly fired by Thomas’s mother
after smacking a kid in the face (in his defense, the child did kind
of deserve it). He goes to the personnel department to finalize the
termination, when he overhears the worker—who conveniently has his
back turned to the door—mention details about Thomas being home
alone while is mother is at work. He hops in the back of a Printemps
van, and hitches a ride to the unwitting child’s home, at which
point he kills the delivery driver, in a scene that removes all
doubts about his intentions.
Thomas isn’t just some normal kid,
however: he’s a huge fan of action movies, and spends his free time
playing “war” with his lovable dog, J.R., and keeping his
diabetic, nearly-blind grandfather entertained by using him as target
practice. He’s going to need all of his smarts and cunning to
outwit a madman who seems hellbent only on terrorizing and murdering
anyone he can…
It's a fairly thin setup, which
all-too-conveniently feeds the madman all the information he needs to
know—from several unrelated sources—and without anyone so much as
even noticing he's around, but hey, it's a horror movie, so I suppose
it's par for the course.
The movie definitely earns its
comparisons to Home Alone in parts—mainly the beginning and
end—but the frequent use of the term “fun” to describe this
movie by many critics and cinemagoers alike make me wonder if we saw
the same movie. Sure, there are some stand up and cheer moments when
Thomas gains the upper hand on the intruder, but that sense of fun is
destroyed in the many sequences where he displays genuine fear…an
almost fourth-wall breaking taboo that really brings the film closer
to reality than I was expecting (and, in some ways, hoping for).
Ditto that for Thomas’ childlike sense of wonder, which remains
intact, despite his unusually high IQ, leading to some rather sad
scenes of anguish when his world—and everything he believes
in--starts crumbling around him, including the murder of his own dog
right in front of him as he hides under a table waiting for Saint
Nick to arrive…this clearly isn’t a movie with “fun” on its
mind.
Assuming you can
shift gears, though, or that you're actually prepared for what you're
in for, this is an occasionally brilliant horror tale that definitely
deserves the attention it’s been garnering lately. POV scenes of
legally-blind grandpops struggling to make out shapes and figures
lend some credibility, and intensity, to the proceedings, while the
motives of the evil Santa Claus are just as depressing as everything else in this bleak, anti-Christmas thriller.
Supposedly, the director, Rene Manzor,
sued the producers of Home Alone for “ripping off” his idea.
Whether that was more of a marketing stunt than an actual defense of
his own material is debatable, but it's certainly unfortunate that
this little gem of a movie has fallen into relative obscurity while
little Kevin McCallister, and much of the cast and crew, have
probably pulled in enough royalties to comfortably retire.
RATING: 7.5/10
TRAILER
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