While teenagers love Billy Bob Thornton's turn as a drunken, swearing Santa Claus, younger children (and parents) could be in for a shock, writes Kathy Sheridan.
Everyone has a breaking point. For this wussy viewer, it was when the camera dwelt long and lovingly on the aftermath of a snotty-nosed child's explosive sneeze over Santa's face. My (obscenely expensive) nachos were laid to one side.
For others, it may be the scene where Willie, the department store "Santa", is enjoying vigorous anal sex - conveyed by the grunts and feet-positioning - with a "fat chick" in a changing room. Indelicate, to be sure, although there is still time to gallop any swivel-eyed children out of the cinema before the appearance of the nice young barmaid with the Santa fetish, whose repetitive chant during sex is "F**k me Santa".
Then again, you may not bother. For anyone who has stayed this long, Santa's image is already in the toilet (metaphorically speaking). The demented children will already have seen Santa vomiting (too much alcohol), Santa repeatedly "pissing" himself in his suit (ditto), Santa using his knee as a weapon to keep the kids moving smartly along, Santa working up to a "profanity" count of 147 F-words (according to the staggeringly detailed "parental review" section of the American website Screenit.com). It breaks them down as "five used with 'mother', and 18 used sexually, as is the term 'boned'. It goes on to chart: "62 S-words, six slang terms used for genitals, two using female genitals, two for breasts, 26 asses, three S.O.B.s, two damns, 18 uses of G-damn, eight of Jesus Christ, five of 'for Christ's sakes', two each of Christ, 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph', and 'Oh my God' and one use each of 'Oh Jesus' and 'Sweet Jews for Jesus' (or something close to that)".
Meanwhile, Willie/Santa will move without a by-your-leave into a strange boy's house, where he will later attempt suicide, while his criminal sidekicks (a black dwarf with a couple of amusing one-liners and a busty, grabby girlfriend) deliberately crush another nasty between two vehicles.
Bad Santa was a virtual bonanza once bad boy Billy Bob Thornton (born for the part) agreed to star. What was indispensable to the pay-off, however, was the shock factor. And the one-joke "shock", of course, is that Billy Bob is doing all this vomiting, urinating, cussing and ejaculating in a Santa suit, and, furthermore, does a lot of it in full view of young children and their boggle-eyed mammies. Boom, boom.
Anyone familiar with The Twits, Roald Dahl's story about the couple whose disgusting personal hygiene and habits have sent delicious shivers up generations of little spines, will recognise the strategy. If Dahl had gone for the money and taken Mr Twit to the next level, he might have wound up with Bad Santa. Or hey, why bother with a plot . . . let's just put Mother Teresa in a lap-dancing club. It's as transparent and cynical as that.
And of course, adolescents love it. It got a 15PG cert from the Irish film censor, which means it is considered suitable for 15-year-olds and up and "may also be seen by younger children provided a parent or adult guardian accompanies them".
Mark Halligan, a 16-year-old Transition Year student at CBC Monkstown, who went with two companions, sums it up: "It won't win the Palme d'Or. It's crude, schoolboy humour, definitely our age group, and it's very funny . . . You just turn your brain off and laugh. It's all centred on Willie saying 'f**k' and, because he's in the Santa costume, it's funny because that's something you'd associate with happy children and Christmas."
His two companions think it's "brilliant". "I have to admit that it's all the kind of stuff we go round talking about at lunch," says Mark, with commendable honesty. Ciara Madden and Claire Harrington, 14-year-old students at Loreto on the Green, went with an adult and agreed it was very funny. "There were a lot of swear words but I think that's what made it funny," says Ciara. "At first, I was shocked but when he kept doing it, it wore off . . . It was nothing that you wouldn't hear out of the ordinary."
So, in other words, it barely rates up there with Dumb & Dumber, even among adolescents. Yet, on the film's release in the US last Christmas (and its current European release), the grown-up critics bought into it with fervour, breathless in their admiration for Billy Bob, panting to show how right-on they were. "An achingly funny and corrupt dark comedy," swooned the New York Times. "Bad Santa is a tasteless, vulgar, savage assault against everything that is good and decent in the Christmas season. I think you are going to like it," said the San Francisco Chronicle. "Just the cup of rancid black-comedy eggnog for anyone fed up with holiday cheer in all its manifestations," declared the Boston Globe.
Even more enthusiastic were the columnists, who perceived it to be "hilariously subversive", a two-fingered salute to the "watchdogs of the faithful", as Bad Santa "defecates, vomits. . . on Christianity's most sacred festival". The writers' target, of course, was the Christian right, which would come out in droves for Bush a year later.
Those ordinary folk who are neither left nor right, who just like Christmas and family and Santa (with the notion of thankless giving) have to take it on the chin.
And maybe that's really what people were upset about this week. Ostensibly, the film censor John Kelleher (who classified it as 15PG), was the target. And it's fair to say that several people in their 20s and 30s, interviewed by The Irish Times as they emerged from a screening, were shocked by the content.
"I wasn't expecting that now," said a young man repeatedly. "I saw the trailers and I really wasn't expecting that now. Thank God we didn't bring the children."
What shocked a young woman more was the presence of a boy of about eight or nine and a few smaller children sitting with adults. "Once I saw him I cringed the whole way through. The worst thing about it was that the adults didn't just get the children out of there when they saw what it was about."
People are clearly wandering into this movie unwittingly, lured by the fairly innocuous trailers (shown before movies classified for 12s) or the title. A movie called Bad Santa, released around Christmas - can it be that bad? On the other hand, should the film censor restrict a movie to 18s simply because some people fail to check things out for themselves or lack any sense of parental responsibility? All our young critics recoiled at the notion of bringing younger children to Bad Santa, "even when, like my 11-year-old brother, they've figured out about Santa", as 16-year-old Mark put it. "It's rated 15PG. People really should pay attention. 15PG means 15PG."
Perhaps part of the problem is that - misleading critics and ambiguous titles aside - adults rarely bother to see the movies made with the adolescent market in mind. It's not the film censor's job to legislate for taste. Dumb and Dumber, American Pie, There's Something about Mary . . . all have scenes and themes guaranteed for maximum embarrassment if adults and adolescents are watching them in each other's company. But that's hardly sufficient reason to restrict them to 18s and over.
In any event, Bad Santa has far deeper problems. A paper-thin "moral" revealed close to the end, when Willie "seems to suddenly grow a soul", in Mark's words, fails abysmally to make it the movie about crass, immoral commercialism it purports to be.
But that's hardly unusual for Hollywood. It may be that our real problem with Bad Santa is that no one can stop the movie moguls tramping across our memories, however precious, or mocking our clumsy efforts to pass them on to our children.
Bad Santa treads on our sweetest dreams - and our children are rewarding him in spades.