Unlike the MPAA we do not assign
one
inscrutable rating based on age, but 3 objective ratings for SEX/NUDITY, VIOLENCE/GORE
and PROFANITY on a scale of 0 to 10, from lowest to highest,
depending on quantity and context.
Christmas tale about Jack, a skeleton who wants to be
Santa, related by puppets.
SEX/NUDITY 0 - None, really. Jack kisses another puppet, once.
VIOLENCE/GORE 2 - The film is filled with pseudo-scary visuals, but little
actual harm is done. For instance: one character has a hatchet embedded in his head, but
it might just as well be a hat. The characters are mostly toys, or, could be interpreted
as un-dead creatures. Santa Claus is kidnapped and held in a dungeon with manacles.
Oogie-Boogie is a creature who appears to be a walking burlap bag. The bag is revealed to
be full of bugs. Kinda' gross-looking. Jack, dressed as Santa, is blasted out of the sky
with missiles and falls to the ground (he is unhurt). A mad doctor has a skull that flips
open to reveal his brain, which he massages. Later, he removes half of his brain to place
it in a mate he has created. The heroine, Sally the rag doll, has arms and legs that come
off and operate by themselves. She feeds the doctor a soup laced with Deadly Night Shade,
a poison, which knocks him out. The instances of "scary" visuals literally
number in the hundreds, but they are all of the Charles Addams cartoon-variety.
A CAVEAT: We've gone through several editorial changes since we
started covering films in 1992 and some of our early standards were
not as stringent as they are now. We therefore need to revisit many
older reviews, especially those written prior to 1998 or so; please
keep this in mind if you're consulting a review from that period.
While we plan to revisit and correct older reviews our resources are
limited and it is a slow, time-consuming process.
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