Welcome to the 2025 Heistmas Advent Calendar, a daily drop of pop culture Christmas icons, oddities, and joy. Check back every day from now through December 25 for each daily entry!
“Snowy Bing Bongs Across the North Star Combat Zone” is, beginning with its very name, fully ballistic. I mean this in both senses of the word. Calling the humor of the title (and the film itself) “offbeat” is a near-criminal understatement — so “ballistic” — and then there are beach ball projectiles, mostly implied ballistics, from beginning to end.
Truthfully, they had me at “bing bongs.” Read it once, couldn’t stop laughing. Everything else was just a bonus.
This 2017 short film, described by its creators as "a dance comedy space odyssey,” stars the Cocoon Central Dance Team trio (Sunita Mani, Tallie Medel, and Eleanore Pienta); is written and directed by Rachel Wolther and Alex Huston Fischer; and — this warrants all caps — is EXECUTIVE PRODUCED BY THE DANIELS, WHO BROUGHT YOU EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. It is abstract and goofy, and, like Die Hard, arguably not a Christmas movie. (I mean, there’s no Christmas in it at all. Just a lot of snow.)
Sheep who are also humans (I think), through the power of dance, sketch comedy, and posing, defend their arctic home from an onslaught of invading beach balls.
This is the closest way to describe the “plot,” such as it is, of “Snowy Bing Bongs.” But trying to assign a plot is almost unfair to the piece itself. It’s a series of vignettes through which a story emerges — but you perceive this story vaguely, an outline of something a few feet away from you in the middle of a blizzard. I believe this film just happens, and that’s part of its hilarity. There’s snow, there are three women (or sheep? I guess that’s kind of Christmas-like), and there are beach balls that seem to be antagonizing them; you just have to laugh and allow the rest to happen. This thing is expertly crafted, precisely performed, and maybe the most intelligently stupid thing I have ever seen.
What else can I say? I certainly don’t want to drop any spoilers, and dissecting it scene by scene would ruin the humor anyway. So all I can do is tell you to watch this! Like so many of us, I love the classics (what’s up Home Alone and Miracle on 34th Street (1994)), but “Snowy Bing Bongs” is beginning to feel equally as necessary in the rotation. It’s probably even funnier to watch immediately after It’s a Wonderful Life anyway.
Check back tomorrow for even more Heistmas Advent Calendar Goodies!
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