People who write letters to newspapers complaining about nudity, cursing and anti-Christmas content in Love Actually (Lobsters in the manger?!  Those heathens!) will die if they see Bad Santa.  It will literally kill them. Their empty heads will explode like popcorn kernels, so be careful who you sit near in the theatre if you're brave enough to watch it.  See, people like that aren't smart enough to read MPAA ratings, and they probably won't even realize they're in for one bumpy sleigh ride when Bad's title pops up on the screen at the same time its titular protagonist christens an alley behind a bar with his rancid vomit.

Bad is perfect counterprogramming for the similarly holiday-themed but PG-rated Elf.  It's about a suicidal, alcoholic and incontinent man named Willie T. Stokes (a perfectly cast Billy Bob Thornton) who teams up with a three-foot sidekick (Tony Cox, Me, Myself & Irene) to pull an annual Christmas Eve robbery of the very same department store that has been employing them, respectively, as Santa and an elf.  But the dynamic duo have to suffer through an entire month of dealing with jam-handed kids in order to get the other 11 months off each year.

Here's a typical scene from Bad:  Kid sits on Santa's lap.  Santa impatiently says, "What the fuck do you want?"  The kid tells him he wants Pokémon.  Santa looks confused and drunkenly shouts, "What the fuck is that?"  Santa also makes surprise backdoor Christmas deliveries to female shoppers in the dressing room of the store's plus-size department (there's a running gag about Stokes rendering his sexual conquests unable "to shit right for a month").

Take your kids to Bad?  You might want to punch the filmmakers for having kids in it.  But here's the thing:  Bad is really good, offering quality behind-the-camera talent ranging from producers (the Coen brothers, who came up with the idea for the script) to director Terry Zwigoff, who made the award-winning Crumb and Ghost World.  Like those two films, Bad is full of sad, ugly people (inside and out) who remain flawed, despite the slightly uplifting ending, when the closing credits roll.  And that makes Bad more real, and gives it more heart and soul than The Grinch and The Cat in the Hat put together.

You could think of it as a modern take on the Scrooge tale, only with the various Ghosts of Christmas being replaced by a criminal mastermind dwarf; a mildly retarded 8-year-old with a perpetually snotty nose; an alcoholic bartender with a Santa sex fetish; a half-dead, sandwich-obsessed grandmother; and a 500-pound black prostitute who complains about the damage Santa does to her pooper.  Not only is there a refreshing lack of product placement for a Christmas film set in a mall, but Bad is also the last time you'll see the late John Ritter on the big screen.  Happy holidays, prudes!

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for pervasive language, strong sexual content and some violence