Rating:

For whatever reason, I assumed that Prancer would be a delightful film loaded with heart-warming fantasy and Christmas jocularity and that I’d totally dig it because it’s about one of Santa’s reindeer and whatnot. I don’t exactly know what I expected the story to be, but I was sure it would lend itself to all those wonderful things that make Christmas movies so enjoyable. But it turns out I could not have been more wrong.

Essentially, Prancer is just a second-rate E.T., with a little girl instead of a little boy, a reindeer instead of a space alien, and utter nothingness instead of charm. From start to finish, the picture is completely flat; it never pulls you in or makes you glad that you’re watching. It’s ostensibly about faith restored and positive holiday lessons learned, but really it’s about nothing. Watching a test pattern for two hours would leave you with the same impression.

Our hero is Jessica (Rebecca Harrell), the only one who believes that the reindeer she’s found is truly one of Santa’s legendary team. When it comes to children, the line between appealing and appalling is a thin one indeed, and this girl comes down firmly on the wrong side of it. She always sounds like she needs to blow her nose and always looks like she needs me to punch her in the throat. What makes a kid endearing is hard to define, but instead of making you want to hug her like Natalie Wood in Miracle on 34th Street you just want to put a pillow over her head until the screaming stops.

First the little girl begins seeing the reindeer in the forest. Eventually, she finds it hiding in her very own barn and so she lures it out with a trail of sweets. Later she shows Prancer to her little friend, Carol, but forces Carol to swear that she won’t tell anybody about the existence of her magical friend, because then people would try to take him away. (A note on Carol: She’s played by Ariana Richards, the girl from Jurassic Park. And she also has a powerful hairstyle, a hairstyle that stands up proud and announces: “The 1980s are here and they’re here to stay!”)

Eventually word gets out about Prancer, and different people want to abuse him in different ways, so Jessica decides her only choice is to contact Santa, then take Prancer to a specific spot in the forest and wait for Santa to fly down and pick him up. Does all this sound familiar to you? It should. Writer Greg Taylor apparently decided that the best way for him to write a script would be to just use the script from E.T. and take out everything that made it good. Seriously, a more obvious rip-off there never was. There’s even a shot where a sillhouetted Prancer flies in front of the full moon. You don’t need a degree in mathematics to solve this equation.

We also get a couple of annoying subplots along the way, in case all that wasn’t enough to make you hate this picture. Carol’s dad (Sam Elliott) is a big mean jerk through the entire movie, right up until about the last thirty seconds when he suddenly decides he needs to be nice. He wasn’t visited by any Christmas spirits and he had no other noticeable impetus for his change of heart. He just decided, “Hey, I’ll be nice.” And he’s not the only one. In a pointless, meaningless and overall baffling subplot, Cloris Leachman as Mrs. McFarland does a similarly unprompted about face. She’s constantly yelling at children. She hates them, they ruin all her stuff. Get away, young people, that’s her philosophy. When young Jessica offers to do chores in an attempt to raise some money, Mrs. McFarland submits her to hours of backbreaking and dangerous labor, all the while grinning madly at the torment she’s putting the child through—and she’s only offered to pay her five dollars for a full day’s work! Then, suddenly, she’s nice and likes to have friends! It’s that quick, I’m serious. Nothing makes her decide to change and we don’t even know why she was so grumpy in the first place, so we don’t care about her change when it happens. Cloris Leachman gets second billing in this movie, and that annoys me most of all; her part contributes diddly-squat to the movie. She could have been completely excised and nobody would have noticed or cared.

So what sounds like can’t-miss-Christmas (Santa’s reindeer, learning to love and believe again) turns out to be a piece of crap. No one was more disappointed than me to find out just how badly this movie screwed up. Even a sequence about a newpaper editorial praising the fact that children still believe (using a twist on a familiar phrase, “Yes, Santa Claus, there are still Virginias”) couldn’t muster up what it takes to warm the cockles of my heart, and it should have because I’m a sucker for that stuff. Skip this one.

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate:

• Mickey’s Christmas Carol
• The Santa Clause 2
• Miracle on 34th Street
• Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town
• The Nightmare Before Christmas