Imagine that you've built a lower tier theme park in Florida in the late 1960's, just to find out that Walt Disney planned to build Disneyland East 200 miles north. How do you try to stand out and keep your gates open? If you're the owners of Dania Beach, Florida's Pirates World, you hire a producer of softcore porn to make kiddie movies inside your theme park.
Six Flags Tragic Mountain
Pirates of the Plywood-ribbean
Garbage Gardens
A cheaply made "kids" movie filmed at a fourth rate theme park by a director whose normal films feature topless women looked just like you'd imagine. This version of
Thumbelina was a nightmare, with bad special effects and camerawork that was barely more competent than that featured in softcore porn.
"Mr. Director? Is this some kind of fantasy thing?"
Realistic Effects!
The films worked (sorta) but the Trashiest Place on Earth needed more help after Disneyworld opened. Unfortunately, they didn't have enough money to make more films, so they did the next best thing- they filmed a flimsy framing sequence that allowed them to reuse the old footage. Since the new material featured Santa Claus, the film could be sold to theaters desperate for something that could be shown to kids whose parents were busy Christmas shopping elsewhere in the mall.
Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny would reuse the cheap footage from
Thumbelina, only this time, Santa Claus would be telling the story to a group of kids who were community theater rejects.
Donnie Darko's first theatrical role.
The film looks like it was filmed in a dirty vacant lot behind the sleazy Pirates World Theme Park and the "Santa" in this movie looks like a disgusting hobo. (At one point, "Santa" looks like he has soiled himself.)
Travel Advisory: Pirates World guests may encounter inebriated vagrants and undesirables.
The scariest part of the film is saved for the end of the film when we encounter the Ice Cream Bunny. Wearing a musty and disgusting costume that looks like it was dug out of a dumpster behind a mall the day after Easter, the misshapen Ice Cream Bunny is terrifying.
Hey kids, try not to scream...
Despite showing off the sad looking "attractions", the frighteningly cheap "Ice Cream Bunny" and the sad "sights", Pirates World became a casualty of the times. Now just a sad memory, this film is the only remnant of Pirates World, which was bulldozed in the mid 1970's.
