DIAL CODE SANTA CLAUS (1989) aka DEADLY GAMES

 "THEY REMADE MY FILM!"

 

That's what director René Manzor gasped when he first saw HOME ALONE.  And it's true that, once having seen "3615 code Père Noël" aka DIAL CODE SANTA CLAUS, HOME ALONE looks veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery familiar.  It's not a complete steal but . . . .well, almost.  Thomas is a very precocious little kid who lives in a mansion with his mother (who owns a huge department store) and his invalid grandfather.  Thomas is a fan of action movies in the Rambo vein and plays soldier around the house; including building elaborate snares and trap doors with which he and his beloved dog play "Rambo"-type games.  It's Christmas Eve and Thomas' mother has to spend it at the department store so Thomas is left alone with his invalid grandpére.  At the store, a strange bearded man gets a job as a department store Santa; when he scares a little girl with inappropriate behaviour, Thomas' mother sacks him.  While going to hand in his costume, the odd man gains knowledge of the owner's home address.  He shows up at the mansion still in his Santa suit, spray-paints his beard white and murders the caretakers at the front gate.  Meanwhile, Thomas has a scheme to catch sight of Santa so he is waiting under the pool table when the killer Santa comes down the chimney and promptly kills Thomas' dog.  The evil Santa chases Thomas through the house.  The boy reaches his grandfather through his series of secret passages and hides him; then proceeds to build various traps and snares with his toys and other equipment in order to incapacitate the evil intruder.  Sounds really familiar.

Basically if you take the inept housebreakers from HOME ALONE and turn them into a homicidal Santa, you have DIAL CODE SANTA CLAUS.  Unfortunately for John Hughes, this film came before his.  Director Manzor and his studio came within a reindeer-whisker of suing but never actually did.  John Hughes always maintained he'd never seen Manzor's film.  We'll never really know . . . . but HOME ALONE is really similar to the earlier French film. 

Alain Lalanne is actually incredibly good as Thomas (and this is coming from someone who usually hates child actor performances).  Lalanne (the director's son) has to handle a range of emotions and does all of them very well.  Unlike HOME ALONE, DIAL CODE SANTA CLAUS is a very dark movie with real threat and violence directed toward a young boy by a psychotic killer so Lalanne is called upon not only to portray a normal kid but also to cry and portray extreme fear -- all of which he does quite well.  The young actor would soon decide he didn't want to act anymore and quit acting but he sure did have the chops in this movie.  Veteran actress Brigitte Fossey (FORBIDDEN GAMES, CINEMA PARADISO) is quite good as Thomas' mother but isn't given a lot to do.  Patrick Floersheim as the homicidal Santa Claus is superb and really sells the extreme threat and frightening evil of the character with almost no dialogue! 

DEADLY GAMES:  DIAL CODE SANTA CLAUS is not your jolly little Christmas film; it's extremely dark in places and has a pretty downbeat ending.  Just the ticket for the dark nights of December.  I'd frankly rather pull my own eye teeth out than to have to sit and watch HOME ALONE so it's nice to have basically the same movie but without a horrendously bad child actor like Macauley Culkin and with a proper Santa Claus -- the murderous kind!  So far this is my one and only concession to Christmas in my movie-viewing this December -- and it may be the ONLY Christmas movie I watch -- owing to the spectacular Vinegar Syndrome slip-cased blu-ray  which looks absolutely gorgeous!