Pottersville (2017)

Christmas movies are an odd thing to look at.  The stereotypical ones are feelgood movies about the holidays and families coming together.  The television Christmas movie market has been cornered by Hallmark and Lifetime who have a plethora of relationship movies where heterosexual couples wear red and green.  There are the adult Christmas comedies with sex and drugs and rock and roll.  And there are also the against type movies where different genres use Christmas to bring their elements.  Action movies set at Christmas.  Horror movies where Santa is a bad guy.  Stuff like that.

But more interesting than any of this are the just plain odd Christmas movies.  These movies are ones where you watch them and wonder why they were even made.  They go so far beyond your typical Christmas movie and into the land of weird writing that makes their stories so darn crazy that you ask yourself what you just watched.  These movies, which include Elves and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, never leave your mind.  They sit there and stew, becoming more than just a simple Christmas movie.  They become a strange legend that you must spread.

Pottersville was one of the odd Christmas movies of 2017.  Maynard Greiger (Michael Shannon) was a shopkeeper loved by everyone in the town of Pottersville.  One day, he left his coworker Parker (Judy Greer) to close the shop while he went home to surprise his wife Connie (Christina Hendricks).  When he got home, however, he found his wife in the middle of expressing her furry instincts with Sheriff Jack (Ron Perlman).  Maynard got drunk and dressed up as a gorilla before running around town in costume.  The other townspeople mistook him for bigfoot, and soon enough, a reality show hosted by Brock Masterson (Thomas Lennon) showed up and teamed with Bart (Ian McShane) to find and capture the bigfoot.

Now, before diving too deep into the story and what made Pottersville tick, one topic must be addressed along with how the movie handled it.  That topic is furries.  Pottersville seemed to want to have its cake and eat it too when it came to the idea of furry culture.  In terms of the story, the movie seemed to want to put down furry culture and treat it like a bad thing.  Maynard walked in on his wife sharing her furry nature with the town’s sheriff.  When the characters were searching the woods for bigfoot, they were shocked to find a meeting of the furries.  The “furry club,” as it was called in Pottersville, was played off as a joke.  It wasn’t something to be taken seriously.  Except that it was.

See, there were a bunch of extras in Pottersville that played part of the “furry club.”  The fur suits that these extras wore seemed to indicate respect towards the furry culture.  Though Connie’s costume just looked like a bunny suit purchased from a costume store, some of the extras had detailed suits.  It looked like time and effort was put into them, which indicates that they were real fur suits from real furries.  This is all speculation, of course, but it sure looked like actual furries were being used for the extra roles.  That kind of respect to include furries in the movie felt like it went directly against the jokes that were being made at their expense.

Moving onto the story, there were two major callbacks to classic films.  The first was in the title of the film.  Pottersville was a reference to the Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life.  In that film, the main character saw what the world would be like if he didn’t exist.  In that world, his town had changed for the worse.  The evil, capitalist boss of the main character had taken over the town and named it after himself.  The town had become Pottersville.  It didn’t seem like a mere coincidence that this movie shared that name.  Pottersville was a Christmas movie.  It was about a nice man who went unappreciated in the town.  The ending had everyone caring for the man after it was shown to him how he had brought his small town together.  These were themes shared with It’s a Wonderful Life, and it makes sense that the name would be another shared aspect.

The other film that was heavily referenced was Jaws.  Both films saw a rough and tough hunting man offering his services at a town hall meeting after scraping his fingernails across a chalkboard.  In Jaws, it was Quint offering to catch and kill the shark that was terrorizing the area.  In Pottersville, it was Bart offering to catch the bigfoot that everyone was so fascinated with.  They even shared the line “You all know who I am, what I do for a living.”  When Bart was tasked with going out to catch the Bigfoot, he teamed up with the Sheriff and the outsider who knew about the monster, much like Quint teamed up with the police chief and the scientist who studied sharks.  It was a comedic Jaws storyline, with Bigfoot and furries instead of a killer shark.

There was so much to take in with Pottersville.  Outside of the furries and the direct references to other movies, there were still a great number of odd, interesting, dumb, and funny moments sprinkled throughout.  Michael Shannon played his drunk so over the top that it was hard to believe he’d ever seen a drunk person.  Whenever Maynard brought up Jack’s wolf costume, he mistook the wolf for a squirrel.  None of the townspeople were afraid of the Bigfoot; they fell in love instantly.  People argued over who had seen Bigfoot the most.  People were selling Bigfoot merch as soon as Bigfoot was first spotted.  It was a bunch of crazy Bigfoot escapades, when Bigfoot was just a man in a gorilla costume.

The last thing that should be mentioned is something that the movie did well.  Though the story might have been one of the craziest Christmas stories that has been adapted to the screen, the structure of it was good.  There were some solid, increasingly difficult obstacles for Maynard to overcome.  First was that when he tried to admit to being Bigfoot, the town was talking about how much Bigfoot meant to them.  Then the reality show host showed up.  Then Bart started hunting.  Everything got worse for Maynard until he was found out.  And this was where the interesting plant and payoff happened, which showed that, although the story was loony, the writer knew what they were doing with their structure.

Plant and payoff involves a specific person, item, or some other thing that is mentioned or shown at the beginning of a story, coming up again at the end in a different light.  In the case of Pottersville, that item was a debt log that Maynard had in his shop.  The town they lived in was an old mill town where the mill had shut down.  Not everyone had the money to always pay for things at the right time.  Maynard would write down what they didn’t pay in his book.  He would never hold the items hostage.  When the town turned on him at the end, because he was pretending to be Bigfoot, Parker used the book as an example of how good a person Maynard was.  She showed them the book where he had written everything.  It was empty.  Whenever people couldn’t pay, he didn’t write it down.  He didn’t want them to owe him anything.  It was a new look at the book from the beginning of the film, and the payoff was to show how truly good he was.  That moment showed the audience and the townspeople that Maynard was always a man with good intentions.

Pottersville came out of nowhere to become one of the modern classics in weird Christmas movies.  It told a strange story about a man who found out his wife was a furry and brought a town together by pretending to be Bigfoot.  It had references to other, better films.  It had a cast who inexplicably signed on to be in it.  More importantly, among these strange things, it had a solid structure that made it fun to watch.  It’s a movie that might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but it’s a well told story.  It could be a movie to revisit, time and time again.

And here come the notes:

• Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (week 4) and Elves (week 106) were mentioned in the post.
• Ron Perlman was in Pottersville.  He was also in In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (week 220), The Ice Pirates (week 128), and Skin Trade (week 146).
• Another returning actor was Ian McShane, who was featured in Death Race (week 9).
• Judy Greer showed up in Pottersville.  She was in a movie called Playing for Keeps (week 21).
• Finally, Michael Shannon has now been in two Sunday "Bad" Movies with Pottersville and Jonah Hex (week 249).
• Have you seen Pottersville?  Did you like it or not?  What did you think about the weird story?  The comments section is open for any discussion.
• Let me know about any suggestions you have in the comments.  Or on Twitter.  I’m always looking for movies I might not know that I should be checking out for future posts.  Suggest away.
• Sometimes when I watch bad movies, I share clips of them on Snapchat.  Add me (jurassicgriffin) if that’s what you want to see.
• Once again, I’m without my schedule, so I’m picking movies week by week until I get that back.  Next week’s movie, which I just picked based on a DVD set that I have, will be Holiday Spin.  The 2012 movie comes from Lifetime, the people behind The Christmas Consultant (week 55).  We’ll see how that goes in seven days.  See you then.