Thread: SCROOGED Your Halloween Movie for Christmas

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Someone asked me to transfer this feature from 'the other place'..so here goes..the idea is to come up with Halloween movies for the off season, we are assuming that folks in the house are sometimes rolling their eyes and saying;"Do we HAVE to watch a HALLOWEEN movie AGAIN???" This lets you slip some great Halloween films under the radar that aren't NECESSARILY Halloween movies..
Our first offering..
SCROOGED (1988) Bill Murray does the Eb Scrooge role in this update where the worlds' worst boss is a t.v exec. Great makeup and effects, with decaying corpses, frozen corpses, sadistic ghosts of Christmas past...(watch out for that toaster Bill) and the Rev. Al Green on the end theme.
REAL LIFE BACKSTORY (just so you don't think IT COULDN'T HAPPEN HERE...) a guy who worked at BLOCKBUSTER video used to send a certain magazine that BLOCKBUSTER didn't like the videos for them to review...he was fired just like the Elliot Loudermilk character, the day before Christmas. Blcokbuster is owned by ViaCom...go ahead..take a look, see who own the company that put out SCROOGED...
(Yup, PARAMOUNT...a VIACOM Company...says so right there under the mountain..

oh, scrooged is my favorite christmas movie!!! i can't really think of any right now, but garfield's holiday special DVD is always a good one because you get the halloween, thanksgiving and christmas specials all on one DVD, oh i forgot, edward scissor hands is a good one! theres halloween and christmas scenes.

UncleTor, that "someone" was me, or at least I was perhaps among those asking after you to revisit the "Scrooged" topic over here.

TomAnderson and I have started a "Scrooge's Scream - Alistair Sim 'Christmas Carol'" thread hereabout as well, and I'd be happy to hear your thoughts there, if you're so inclined. And Kallie, if you haven't seen the original B&W 1951 Alistair Sim version of "A Christmas Carol", I highly recommend you give it a viewing. It's really a great ghost story, and a lot of the gags in "Scrooged" will take on some additional fun, by way of reference.

As for "Scrooged" itself, to ping in directly here, well, it is in my opinion the hippest comedic version of Dickens' tale of Christmas terror, and a wicked indictment of modern media culture as well. Bill Murray's portrayal of Frank Cross as a ruthless TV executive totally reenvisions the story, while keeping the, er, 'spirit', of the thing alive with near-wicked glee.

The rest of the cast is brilliant as well; all the "Chosts Of Christmas Past, Present, and Future are great, and the knockdown-dragout-level of brutality between Murray and Kane's TGOCP, is worth the watch alone.

Way cool UT, to point out (at the Other Place) Miles Davis and Paul Shaffer among the street musicians playing in the cold, but I can't recall here who the others were. Hope you'll ping in with that maybe?

Aside from lots of great quotes, one of my favorites isn't in the dialogue, it's in the art direction: in Murray's office there's a motto painted over one of the windows -- "Cross: A Thing They Nail People To" . Wicked cool fun, not just to insinuate how nasty Murray's character is, but also to underscore the Christmas message in a very sly way...

This picture is a must for Halloween-heads during the Yuletide...

The musicians are David Sanborn...who does a mean sax, and Larry Carlton who is no stranger to Saturday Night Live viewers and the guy who did the guitar work for HILL STREET BLUES. On the other post I reccomended KIND OF BLUE for an intro to Miles Davis...BRITCHES BREW (only take out the first r on the first word the filter here doesn't like you to talk about pregnant dogs) is also pretty amazing..the first jazz/rock fusion album...

Sim's scream is the stuff of nightmares, by the way...he gets' totally unhinged and drags it out deep from his soul...the guy was a gifted comedian as well as actor...check out his British comedy work too...SCROOGE, as long as we are talking nightmares...had a rep at the time for causing them...in some countries it had to show with the warning of 'firghtening situations' posted out front...

Interesting to hear about this! I always thought the film was scary as all get-out, actually. Marley's Ghost in particular was so frightful that I often spent the rest of the movie thinking back to that scene...

Concerning "Scrooged," now (itself a great movie but I haven't seen it in some years and I want someone to mail me a copy), I remember one of the Burmans was telling me that when they created the weird puppet creatures living inside the GOCYTC's robe, they took life-casts of people in alginate and allowed these to shrink and distort before tooling them up and remolding them. This shrinkage gave them smaller figures with unnatural-looking, organic distortions. This is a very seldom-used technique; that's why those creatures look so weird in that one shot they appear in.

Very cool story about the figures, I like that..
SCROOGE was actually another breach against the censors in England. Before that, horror movies were pretty hard to come by in the U.K.
I know, everybody remembers Hammer Studios from the 60's, but from the late 30's until Hammer, they had a censor board that was so wooden skulled, Monogram actually thought about not releasing their Bela Lugosi films over there at ALL...
the studio figured (correctly) the censor would be LESS hard on a classic and were right, and were able to use the whole thing as a bargining chip for later disputes ('hey, you let it go for SCROOGE, what's the big deal on a film that they KNOW is gonna be scary?..") Another studio, that usually specialized in comedies...Ealing, made DEAD OF THE NIGHT which also really pushed the limits for horror

Some personal favorite moments from "Scrooged" --

Frank Cross' (Bill Murray's) suggestion to the Prop Man that he "staple" the antlers to the mice.

"Don't plug him in -- !"

Murray's finally caving to the homeless trio's insistance that he's really Richard Burton, and then mimicing Burton perfectly in a rapid fire quote (Shakespeare?).

Bobcat Goldthwaite, every scene.

Cross' dad giving "Young Frankie" 5lbs of veal as a Christmas present.

The Street Musicians playing a jazz cover of "We Three Kings" (and thanks, uncletor, for setting the lineup straight -- I wonder how many people really know who those sidewalk troubadors are...) (and, man, where did you get that dope about Ealing and the "viewer warnings" for "CC" -- fascinating info, that.)

The mouse crawling out of Frank's former Boss's mouldering head...

Also, neat notes about the GOCYTC figure, tomanderson. As a once-upon-a-time puppeteer on "Beetlejuice" who worked with a lot of Creature Shop guys, I've always admired the Bermans' work. And I really dug that his "face" was a static-filled monitor...


"I'm having the WEIRDEST day...!"

My favorite quote is Karen.. Allen, Black.. cant remember her last, when she jumps in the cab and asks the Christmas Past cab driver "can you take me to the ...TV studio" and he says.. "Which floor?" HAHAHAHAHA.. cracks me up each time!

teege

"THE NIGHT THE REINDEER DIED"
("And Lee, you've been an awfully good boy this year...!")

"Eleven seconds." [for Cross to have Bobcat Goldthwaite fired and his office cleared out and dumped in a cardboard box on the curb by Network security officers] "That's a new record."

"Frank, he's your brother."
"Towel."

"Let's be honest, Lou. You PAID for the women."


"I know that Lumpy. That's the 'scared' Lumpy..."


"Niagra Fawls, Frankie..."