Movies

An appalling mix of bird-brained satire, sub-protozoan thesping, and (non-)direction, Be My Oswald, about the attempted murder of Santa Claus, is a lame attempt at aping the looseness, sincerity, and campy surfeit of Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol's film collaborations. When "B" (Katha Cato), a belligerent vegetarian and paltry master of disguise, persuades the oblivious "A" (Jeannie Noth), a socialite who converses with a plush toy kitty named Muffy, to rent prime real estate that overlooks the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade route, the stage appears set for a diatribe about class warfare and conscience-raising. But any pretense to serious sociopolitical discourse is undermined by director Don Cato's desperate need to style a thriller from a nonsensical succession of visual hiccups. Gunning for Christmas, this grueling swath of Z-grade fringe moviemaking ends with a fanatical B explaining how Santa is a capitalist pig who oils a globalist machine of human-rights abuses. Her argument is convincingly scripted, but Mrs. Cato—the Rebecca Pidgeon to her husband's David Mamet—performs it as if her only frame of acting reference were Troma's Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell.