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. Catothe Rebecca Pidgeon to her husband's David Mametperforms it as if her only frame of acting reference were Troma's Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell.
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Mike Gravino 06/28/2008 4:36:09 PM
With a review such as the one written by Mr. Ed, I will put this movie on top of my MUST SEE list in 2008! Considering that no one who is in the know reads the Voice any more, I doubt if such a review will matter, but considering how much it has affected Mr. Ed, I will pay to download and watch this film just to have a good time, which the Voice seems to forget, is the purpose of entertainment.