Santa Baby 2: Christmas Maybe (2009)

It's Santa Baby Times 2: Compounding the Felony!

Santa Baby 2: Christmas Maybe (2009)
Director: Ron Underwood
Writers: Garrett Frawley, Brian Turne

Former Playboy Playmate and current vacuum-skulled anti-vaccination crusader Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg is “Mary Class,” who I assume is a successful businesswoman, because she has all the earmarks of a Made For TV career: a perky gay assistant who shows up in her kitchen at dawn to make her pick typefaces for fake products, sudden bouts of business-savvy inspiration (“Helvetica!”), and an obvious need to learn the true meaning of Christmas sometime in the next 95 minutes. She also has a scruffy but handsome boyfriend, Luke, who she’s too busy to kiss goodbye, because one of her competitors might steal a march on her by getting to the office first and suggesting Bordeaux Roman Bold, or even Gloucester MT Extra Condensed.

But Luke has his own problems. One, he’s a mailman who loves the holidays, which suggests he’s struggling with mental illness, and two, the residents of Manhattan constantly fail to meet his exacting standards of festivity. When he pushes his little U.S. Postal stroller into a crowd of New Yorkers waiting for the light to change and chirps, “Merry Christmas!”, he is baffled and crestfallen when they ignore him and just cross the damn street. Then a short time later, a young woman whose mail he apparently steams open isn’t nearly as excited about her Christmas cards as he is, suggesting that one day soon, he’s going to snap and make them all pay. But it’s an ABC Family movie, so I’m probably getting my hopes up for nothing.

Jenny is hosting a Christmas party for her clients, and scheming to merge with a firm owned by a man we’re supposed to believe is British, because his name is “Colin Nottingham,” although he’s played by an actor who sounds like he was Kevin Costner’s dialect coach on Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. Also, he shoehorns the word “London” into the conversation whenever he can. (“London! Nice wide chimneys,” Jenny says in a weirdly sexual tone that makes me think this is how the Dick Van Dyke character from Mary Poppins would have talked if he'd been played by Sir Mix-A-Lot.)

Luke shows up and embarrasses Jenny by telling Colin of Nottingham that he’s a mailman, and the owner of a small dogsledding business (which sounds like a moronic venture for someone based in New York City, but after the Blizzard of ’87, I would have happily paid the Iditarod a hefty tip to deliver my damn Chinese take out).

Jenny’s party goes fake tits-up when she discovers her dad, Santa, wearing Ray-Bans and slapping a stand-up bass in the band. She asks why he’s not at the North Pole getting ready for Christmas, while he demands to know why she's not at the North Pole, since he turned over the family business to her so he could at last be free to pursue his dream of playing jazzy versions of “Jingle Bells” and smoking a post-gig doob while getting a hummer from a chubby-chasing groupie. And just to make Jenny seem less grating by comparison, we get to meet Santa’s band manager, Skip the Elf, who sounds like a Bee Gee being strangled to death in a helium-filled zeppelin.

Luke takes Kris Kringle to the Paramus Mall, where he gets in a fistfight with a department store Santa and winds up in jail, still jolly, as he teaches shiv-wielding cholos to sing a close harmony version of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” Santa is on the verge of being recruited into the Aryan Nation and getting his first teardrop tattoo when Jenny shows up to bail him out and haul his ass up to the North Pole, because apparently the Claus Crime Family has no compunctions about leaving an honest bail bondsman holding the bag.

Luke, who is originally from the North Pole, and has known Jenny since they were kids, just wants to get her into his cabin and make the roast beast with two backs. But Jenny is afraid that the elves were left unsupervised for too long while Santa was off banging chicks with back stage passes, and she needs to focus on crushing their urge to unionize.

Pert young Teri, who replaced Luke as the North Pole postal carrier, is pulling an Eve Harrington, flirting with Jenny's boyfriend and undermining her authority with all the elves. Meanwhile, Santa has bought a black leather jacket and a snowmobile and is riding around pretending he’s in Sons of Anarchy. So if you’re a kid, I’d advise you to spend less time hoping for that toy you requested and more time trying to figure out your Dad’s computer password, since online porn is free, and largely unaffected by Santa’s midlife crisis.

Jenny tries to hold a staff meeting with the toy-making department heads, but they all get distracted by Teri’s cookies and can’t concentrate on Jenny’s PowerPoint presentation. And since the attendees were all inoculated against diphtheria in 1907, this meeting only confirms Jenny’s belief that vaccinations cause retardation in elves.

Teri puts on one of those Peruvian knitted Alpaca caps in an effort to impersonate the lead singer of the Spin Doctors, then seduces Skip with peanut butter cookies and implied poontang. Even worse, she acts as an agent provocateur, fomenting labor unrest. Under her influence, the elves issue a scroll full of demands, then picket the toy shop, demanding Jenny’s ouster (borrowing the hippies’ “Hey hey, ho ho, LBJ has got to go!” chant).  Responding in kind, Jenny calls out the National Guard and suddenly there’s four dead in O-Ho-Ho.

Meanwhile, Teri seductively makes baked goods with Luke, which leads to a rather raunchy climax when he uses a syringe to inject her profiterole with his warm creamy filling.

Jenny takes the hint and goes back to New York, before the North Pole police find the mass graves full of elves with their skulls caved in by axe handle-wielding Pinkertons.  Teri declares the general strike over and appoints herself the supreme executive of the elves’ anarcho-syndicalist collective, so Christmas is back on! Great! Movie’s over right?

No, we cut to Jenny’s apartment in New York, where she’s trying to cheer herself up by listening to a generic version of “Santa Baby” and sipping a mug full of the piping hot tears of her abused employees. Colin of Nottingham arrives with a bottle of champagne and a seductive gleam in his eye, but first he makes her sign some "merger papers," which really makes me glad I left the dating scene behind in the 90s, because casual sex has gotten way too complicated.

Back at the North Pole, Santa resumes control of Christmas, which causes Teri to wig out and creepily sing under her breath, “We wish you a Teri Christmas...!” Okay, so it’s her who’s going to snap and go on a killing spree. That’s fine, I’m not picky, as long as someone starts killing these people.

Jenny watches some old home movies from when she was a child, and notices Teri in the background. She immediately rushes home, where Teri, now strutting around in jackboots, a form-fitting red suit, and a riding crop, has turned into Ilsa, She-Wolf of Santa’s Village. Jenny yanks off Teri’s wig, revealing her to be...an elf!  Everyone gasps, so apparently it’s supposed to be a huge shock? I guess like that Jewish kid who pretended to be a Nazi in Europa Europa? But what does that say about Santa and the racial politics of the North Pole, that the inhabitants are so self-loathing they refuse to follow one of their own; and that any elf seeking power must cosplay her own oppressors, and wear the comforting lie of “humanface”.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Teri steals Santa’s sleigh and holds the toys hostage, and I guess we’re supposed to care that rich kids named Persimmon or Amuse-Bouche won’t get their useless battery-operated crap this year. But it turns out Skip, the helium-voiced Bee Gee is hot for Teri, so she’s redeemed. But it’s too late for Santa alone to deliver all the toys, so Jenny steps up and offers to split the world. Santa delivers toys to all the Christian children, while Jenny delivers smallpox and polio to everyone else, just to prove that vaccines are bullshit.

The End.

P.S. Okay, yes, obviously this is a sequel, but it didn’t seem worth getting into the original, since the two movies are basically the same. Besides the casting director swapping out Great Value Luke for Pick ‘n Save Luke, the major difference is that Kris Kringle is played by George Wendt in Santa Baby, but Paul Sorvino in this film…

…which frankly seems like a lateral move, kinda like when Sorvino replaced George Dzundza on Law & Order.

But you can't really blame Paul. If I were cast in this movie I’d also agree to do it on the sole condition that I be mistaken for another actor.