PATCH TOWN
The film goes a long way on its sets, which are nicely over-designed
It’s hard not to find something to love in a film that mixes elements of Toy Story, Bad Santa, Russian folklore, Cabbage Patch Kids and Les Misérables. The co-writer and director is Craig Goodwill, and this is his first feature; I only hope he has enough material kicking around for a second.
Rob Ramsay stars as John, whose backstory is weirder than most. He used to be a cabbage patch kid — literally, a child born to a cabbage — until he was found by a Russian toymaker, who turned him and many others from his crop into dolls, which were sent out into the world to make little girls happy.
But little girls grow up — you remember what happened to Jessie in the Toy Story movies — and John was eventually abandoned, at which point the toymaker’s evil son Yuri (the wonderfully creep-tastic Julian Richings) brought him back to his northern, Soviet-style toy factory to work on the next generation of dolls.
John breaks free in a quest to find his “mother,” Bethany, who has now grown into a woman (Zoie Palmer) with a child of her own. Yuri is hot on his heels, with his own plan to abduct Bethany’s daughter and turn her into a plaything as well. There’s not much sense in his plan, but evil is as evil does, I guess.
The film goes a long way on its sets, which are nicely over-designed — loved the menorah on the desk of the department-store Santa hiring clerk — and full of retro-futuristic devices, as though Goodwill had raided Terry Gilliam’s storage locker. It also features the occasional musical number — not enough to qualify as a musical itself, but more in the sense of why-the-heck-not-throw- this-inas-well.
The result is messy but enjoyable, and at 85 minutes won’t overstay its welcome. Ramsay does a good job playing a living doll, his exuberant innocence reminiscent of Will Ferrell in Elf, and ably assisted by such lesser-known Canadian talents as Suresh John playing a con man/truck driver, and Ken Hall as an evil minion in a bowler hat. ∂∂∂