Bam Margera Presents: Where The #$&% Is Santa? Blu-ray features mediocre video and audio, but overall it's a disappointing Blu-ray release
Superstar skateboarder and prankster Bam Margera grabs Christmas by the bells and pushes it over the edge! Bam and his band of hardcore hooligans take a riotous, rowdy road trip to the Arctic Circle to bring home Santa Claus as a Christmas surprise for Bams wife Missy. With stops on the way to visit their favorite head-banging metal bands, and with a pair of Finnish bad boys as their unruly guides, Bam and the guys wreak gut-busting chaos wherever they go. This hilarious, gross-em-out feature includes insane antics, a rockin soundtrack, and the wickedest yuletide skate-jam EVER. Merry mayhem!
Having seen the Jackass movies and barely surviving the experience, I was not ready for Where the #$&% Is Santa, or its creator and star Bam Margera. I vividly remember being driven close to nauseausness in JA 2, turning my head more than a few times, especially at a certain scene involving a horse and some reproductive liquid. This ladies and gents is not a movie, but a combination of insulting low brow gags, silly ridiculous stunts, with a dose of reality TV featuring tattoo's, body piercings, farts, curse words, drugs and sex thrown in for good measure. It makes for a less than interesting stew of low brow humor that is more appropriate for an immature teenager, than any rational thinking adult. It is a good thing I am not a studio executive, or whatever this is would not have seen the light of day on any disc, let alone the Bluray format. This show is so low brow an ant would tower over it like a giant. Sit back and enjoy this mind numbing immature pleasure fest that is sure to make you either laugh your brains out at its foolishness, or cry like a baby because you have to sit through the whole thing to give it a fair review. Now excuse me while I drink myself smart again, I think I have just killed every brain cell I have ever developed in life.
Bam and his friends decide Missy, Bam's wife needs a special Christmas this year, Santa Claus. Bam finds out that Santa lives in the small town of Rovaniemi in Lapland, Finland in the arctic circle. So he and a group of friends set out for Lapland, abusing each other, pulling cruel pranks, and generally getting a lot of laughs at the expense of each other. When they get to Finland, they visit rock star friends such as the bands HIM and Hanoi Rocks. They are later joined by Jukka Hilden and Jamo Leppala of The Dudersons on their trip north. Back in West Chester Missy and Bam's parents prepare for a big Christmas shindig while Jimmy Pop and Matt Cole schlep around town trying to help Mark with his pick up lines so he can score more girls than Novak will in Finland.
Where the #$&% Is Santa thrusts on to Bluray in the form of a 1080p/VC-1 encode, framed at 1:85:1, is very inconsistent, and looks just mediocre to these eyes. This was shot using a Super 16 mm camera so images do not look clear, are often blurry and slightly out of focus looking. Black levels are deep and stable, but contrast is completely blown out giving the picture this ugly digital haze that gives images this glossy, glassy look. Colors are over saturated in certain scenes, bleeding and smearing in others. There is also a thin haloing around edges in high contrast scenes, and we are treated with digital noise in some scenes as well. Overall this show looks like it has been up scaled from a lower resolution source, but that is something I cannot confirm, but that is sure what it looks like to me. One thing for sure, this will not win an Academy Award for cinematography.
Warner Brothers chose to use lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 encoded at 640kbps for this release, and nothing is lost on this mix. Dialog is always clean, clear, and tightly focused towards the center channel. Occasionally the sound stage will open up to present stereo music, or will fill the 5.1 palette with music and some ambience, but this mix is even less than conservative in my opinion. Surround and LFE usage is spotty at best, only employed for a little music bleed, and some ambience, with the LFE registering a blip every now and then. You can really tell this is a low budget production
Additional Scenes (22 minutes) are not selectable separately from the disc menu, and are quite frankly as dumb and stupid as the movie is. Each scene is chapter encoded, so you can select exactly which you want to see. Descriptions are as follows:
Protracted destruction of Novak's car
Tree dragging followed by Novak baiting/car singing by Hanna and Frantz
April asks for help with Santa ice sculpture, Novak is made up like a Christmas elf, the boys decorate the house for Christmas, they commission a crude ice sculpture that is something other than Santa, and Novak is sent down a steep skate ramp in a kayak.
In Finland, HIM serenades Bam with the song "Dead Lover's Lane" before he goes up north. A question mark and arrow keeps pointing to a big dude with long hair grooving to the music behind Bam
Extended snowmobile bun-geeing sequence
Hot Wax shot drinking competition at the Arctic Circle
Cinematographer complains to his camera about doing time lapse shots of Finnish smokestacks while everyone else is sleeping
Bam throws Novak into a very cold river in Finland and a big dude kicks him out of the trailer where he went to warm up
A drunk Bam gives Novak a tattoo in a coat room.
Multiple shots of skateboard wipeouts at Bam's party and the painful aftermath.
Bam injures himself giving Novak a flying kick to the head on a brick sidewalk
A drunken Andy McCoy speaks some nonsense about publishing in the Finnish-English version of Pidgin Spanish Photo Gallery features 34 stills from the production.
If you are a Bam fan, you will surely enjoy this juvenile crap fest. If you are like me and like humor that is at least street level, and not in the sewage drain, forget this pile of slop. I can not even recommend this to my dog Darnell. This move makes Happily N'ever After, Southland Tales, and Revolver look like Academy Award winners. Even if you are a fan of Bams, I would recommend you rent this movie before you buy it. You may not be able to stomach either.
Warner Home Video has announced that they will bring 'Bam Margera Presents:
Where The #$&% Is Santa?' to Blu-ray on December 2nd, day-and-date with the
DVD release. No technical specs have been announced at this time, but we do
know that it will include 25 ...
Bam Margera Presents: Where The #$&% Is Santa? Blu-ray Screenshots
All countries
