Bam Margera Presents: Where The #$&% Is Santa? (Blu-ray)

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The characters insult one another, talk childishly dirty, roughhouse, and generally bore the viewer beyond reason. They tease, they razz, they cuss, they drink, they fall down, and that's the movie. It's the logical outgrowth of reality television, I suppose, where the idea is simply to point a camera at somebody and hope for the best.

Imagine if your socially awkward teenage nephew and some of his equally inept pals decided to make a movie using a handheld camcorder. That's it. Crude, gross, offensive, and boring, "Where the #$&% Is Santa?" is more depressing than funny. It's unimaginable to me that anyone, no matter what his age or IQ, could actually sit through this thing (except, of course, the occasional dedicated critic, regardless of age or IQ).

Watching "Where the #$&% Is Santa?" reminded me of Fox giving Tom Green a load of money a few years ago to write, direct, and star in his own movie, "Freddy Got Fingered," the movie turning out so badly the comic actor practically disappeared afterwards. Who knows; maybe history will repeat itself.

Video:
Needless to say, the BD's video quality is not what most people have come to expect from high-definition playback. The filmmakers used a Super 16 mm camera to shoot the movie, and the results are variable, to say the least. Using a VC-1 encode and a BD25, Warners reproduce a 1.85:1 ratio image probably as well as they could. Still, the picture looks slightly blurry, with bright, sometimes oversaturated colors, and a heavily contrasted, glossy, glassy look. It is not unlike a standard-def television broadcast upscaled to 1080 resolution.

Audio:
WB use ordinary, lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 to reproduce the sound, which is OK because it's mostly dialogue, anyway, with a continuous background of cacophonous rock music. Much of it is bright and edgy. It's not particularly dynamic, either, so much as it is loud. Worse, most of it sounds like mono. There's a fairly narrow front-channel stereo spread, and I don't think I heard a noise from the side or rear speakers except some very sporadic and very faint ambient musical bloom.

Extras:
The main bonus items start with a series of additional outtakes and scenes totaling about twenty-two minutes and playing just as poorly as the movie itself. Following that is a brief photo gallery of stills. In addition, there are twenty scene selections; a widescreen trailer; English and Spanish spoken languages; French and Spanish subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired.

Parting Shots:
There is nothing about "Where in the #$&% Is Santa," short of the Lamborghini, that I can recommend. And the thing that saddens me most is that while there must be a thousand truly talented filmmakers out there who will never find the financing for their projects, this utter waste of time not only gets a DVD release from a major studio, but a Blu-ray edition as well. Life is unfair.

Now, back to that ceiling.