SANTA CLAUS CARRIES heavy cultural baggage. But unlike another perennial star of winter's biggest holiday, he isn't a sacred figure. The first installment of the Silent Night, Deadly Night slasher series remodeled him as an axe-wielding murderer, Homer Simpson has tried on the signature red and white, and David Sedaris's scabrous Santaland Diaries is an NPR fixture. At this point can any attack on Kris Kringle's public image generate shock? That's one of the chief dilemmas faced by Terry Zwigoff's Bad Santa, which casts Billy Bob Thornton as Willie T. Stokes, a self-described "eating, drinking, shitting, fucking Santa Claus."

The second and fourth activities on Stokes's list get special attention. His Santa isn't above converting the dressing room of the women's big-and-tall section into an anal sex den. After a mock-Capra, it's-a-terrible-life intro replete with voice-over, Bad Santa's title credit arrives while Stokes upchucks his nonstop liquor diet in an alley behind a bar. This alleged representative of the North Pole is a grifting grinch. On Christmas Eve, once the lights go down in the department store where Stokes works, a display snowman springs to life, slides down the side of an escalator, smashes a mannequin, and disarms the alarm system. The snowman turns out to be Stokes's elfin partner in crime, Marcus (Tony Kaye, whose twangy, elastic line readings owe a debt to Wanda Sykes).

Emptying the safes of U.S. consumerist palaces, Stokes is certainly a criminal, but this is a Terry Zwigoff movie: such thievery doesn't make him a villain. Whether documentary or fictive, Zwigoff's films usually sympathize with a malcontented male outcast, and it isn't a stretch to suggest that an ornery shopping-mart Santa makes an apt mouthpiece for the director while he's positioned in the heart of Hollywood. Viewers can discover crumbs of past work in Zwigoff's latest, biggest picture of ugly America: the film's female caricatures alternate between a certain comic book artist's bodacious beauties and greedy hags, while Stokes haunts the food courts, parking lots, and mall stores skewered by Ghost World. Zwigoff is an anti-Spielberg; in his eyes, nothing is as hideous as a suburban home with Southwestern interior decoration. Except the neighborhood that surrounds it.

Still, Bad Santa is also a crossover bid. A hilarious shot heralding Stokes and Marcus's annual return to work also signals that Zwigoff wants to raise hell in Arizona, much like his executive producers Ethan and Joel Coen once did: as Santa and elf arrive on the scene, hallucinatory heat waves rise from the asphalt. Playing a senile grandmother who returns from death's door to fix sandwiches, Cloris Leachman might have accidentally strayed from a Farrelly brothers set. John Ritter is here in his last film role – as a Ned Flanders-like mall manager – even if Mary Hart won't be raiding Zwigoff's cutting-room floor for "touching" moments on Entertainment Tonight. Both Bad Santa's tabloid-headline title and the nonstop bickering of its dialogue echo Serial Mom-era John Waters, though in its most formulaic moments, John Requa and Glenn Ficarra's fuck-motored screenplay suggests an illiterate macho brother of Waters's alliterative wit.

The core of the film's vintage-throwback approach to comedy – and its appeal – is the relationship between Stokes and the Kid (Brett Kelly), a hulking mass of sweaty baby fat crowned by golden Shirley Temple curls. Bad News Bears-style boozer renegade parenting already had a comeback this year with School of Rock, but Bad Santa harks back further – to Walter Matthau's Wallace Beery-era birth date. Kelly's designation as "the Kid" links Bad Santa to Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan, yet the most apt throwback reference might be W.C. Fields. Stokes, similar to Fields, likes his children fried. During a showdown at the Christmas corral, he meets his match in the dedicated Kid, who answers each insult with a maddening question. Pickled in alcohol, Stokes ultimately gets the Christmas gift he deserves from his devoted admirer. It isn't store-bought – it's bloodstained and phallic.

Writing about Ghost World in these pages a few years ago, Edward E. Crouse praised the film's "near-bluesy rhythms." Bad Santa is equipped with another record collector's treasure trove, but its heart isn't in sync with the yuletide schlock soundtrack, and the beat of its editing is a bit erratic. When Zwigoff aims for a counterpoint effect – Bobby Sherman's "Jingle Bell Rock" becomes a party anthem for robbery – some sequences take flight with cartoon kineticism, while others sputter and clumsily fade to black. It all ends with a Bing (Crosby's "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas") and a bang as Santa sentimentalists bite the bullet and the whole audience gets the finger. Happy holidays!