Review: Dial Code Santa Claus (1989)

 Dial Code Santa Claus (36.15 code Père Noël) (aka Deadly Games) (1989)

Not rated

Score: 4 out of 5

36.15 code Père Noël, which roughly translates to Dial Code Santa Claus (other American releases call it Deadly Games), is the French thriller said to have inspired Home Alone, to the point where writer/director René Manzor threatened to sue, claiming that John Hughes had remade his movie. While the plot descriptions are broadly similar, the commonalities end very quickly once you get into the meat of the film. It has more in common with movies like You're Next and Better Watch Out that have satirized and parodied Hughes' holiday classic through a very R-rated lens, showing what might actually happen if the Wet Bandits stepped on nails or got cans of paint swung into their faces, though this film has the unique position of predating Kevin McCallister's adventures by one year, meaning it's doing them without thinking about how it's gonna be compared to a different movie. What this is, in fact, is a pure thriller with a few moments of dark comedy scattered about that don't so much provide levity as they do gallows humor, the sum of its parts adding up to an intense cat-and-mouse game between a young boy and a home invader. Add in one of the rare depictions of "advanced" technology from the '80s that still holds up today (retro aesthetics aside), and you've got a hidden French gem whose best moments are enough to make up for things like a few extraneous subplots and a few moments of tonal uncertainty. If you wanna make a cool action-packed Christmas double bill with Die Hard or Lethal Weapon, and you don't mind reading subtitles, seek this one out on Shudder.

Our protagonist Thomas de Frémont is an adolescent boy who lives in a mansion, his widowed mother Julie being the manager of a high-class Printemps department store. His wealth lets him buy every toy he could possibly want -- and what he, a kid obsessed with American action movies, wants is to be like Rambo, dressing up in a comical action hero outfit and rigging the house with various booby traps and loudspeakers so he can live out his Cannon Films fantasies, much to Julie's occasional frustration. I fell in love with this movie within the first ten minutes, from the moment it introduced me to Thomas via a scene of him working out and "gearing up" set to a song that sounds a lot like "Eye of the Tiger" that calls to mind similar scenes from any number of '80s action flicks, the main difference being that a scrawny kid putting on camo and slinging a toy gun over his shoulder, his arms coated in baby oil to get that sweaty look, doesn't look nearly as cool as when Arnold Schwarzenegger did it in Commando. Thomas is shown to be a very smart kid who's managed to build all sorts of gadgets, but also a fantasist who still believes in Santa, and who it's implied only has friends in school because he's rich and everybody wants to play with his vast collection of toys. There's a subtext lurking here about a pampered boy who's grown up on fantasies of muscle-bound Hollywood action demigods who kick ass and take names suddenly being forced to live out that sort of movie for real, and while it's not particularly in-your-face about it, by the end of the film you definitely feel it in the air as Thomas grows increasingly traumatized by his fight with "Santa". It helps that Alain Lalanne was great as Thomas, somebody who's clearly a kid dropped into what he might've once thought was his dream but which he struggles to respond to for real, especially as his infirm grandfather also finds himself caught up in the mayhem. He makes mistakes, big ones, that might've come across as stupidity in another film but here are made to feel like his delusions running head-first into a far more terrifying reality.

And Père Noël makes for quite the antagonist for Thomas to face. A drifter with no backstory (one plot description says he's an escaped asylum patient, but that never comes up in the film itself) and seemingly no motive, this man gets in touch with Thomas through an online chat room where kids can send wishes to Santa Claus, a plot point that feels like it could've been written thirty years later with little change except the name of the service they use. (Thanks to a videotex service called the Minitel, France had what was basically the internet in the '80s, which meant that they got to be the first people to learn about its hidden dangers.) The drifter finds out where Thomas' mother works, which turns out to be enough information to track down Thomas after he heads to the department store, gets a job as a mall Santa for their Christmas Eve celebration, and snoop on some of his new co-workers talking about Julie bring Thomas home a Christmas gift. Patrick Floersheim nails just the right tone as the evil Santa, somebody who you can guess just from looking at him is definitely a madman and may possibly be a pedophile on top of it. Sleaze just oozes from his performance as he stalks Thomas through his house, making what are already some intense stalking and chase scenes that much creepier as you dread what might happen if he catches his prey. Even if the film never gets quite dark enough to outright say what Santa wants to do to Thomas, it certainly made me feel it.

The supporting cast here was its main Achilles' heel, the divergences from the deadly game that Thomas and Santa were playing often slowing the film down once it got rolling. Thomas' mother Julie, his best friend Pilou, and the de Frémonts' housekeepers are given a fair bit of development early on, but none of them leave much of an impact on the plot, with everything important that happens being related to Thomas, his grandfather, and Santa. Julie spends the entire movie on the sidelines (her only impact being that she sends to the home a cop who proves as useless as horror movie cops often do) until the very end after everything has been wrapped up, Pilou is out of the picture after one scene, and both of them felt completely extraneous to the plot, feeling like their subplots had been thrown in simply to pad the film's brisk 87-minute runtime. I would've liked to see them have a bit more impact on the plot, perhaps by having Julie be the one who saves the day at the end, or Pilou bailing Thomas out of a tight jam at an important moment.

The Bottom Line

36.15 code Père Noël is an offbeat Christmas choice that's most definitely not for kids, but certainly has something to offer for action buffs looking for a more twisted (and French) version of Home Alone. I certainly enjoyed myself.