Mixed Nuts

A fever-dream quilt stitched from celluloid scraps, Mixed Nuts begins inside a shutterboarded nickelodeon where the projectionist—half drunk on absinthe, half on nostalgia—splices together the 1917 one-reeler Nuts in May with outtakes of Stan Laurel’s 1922 Pest, then bridges the gashes with newly shot monochrome interludes. The resulting phantasmagoria follows a nameless vaudeville tramp (Stan Laurel, eyes like cracked porcelain) who escapes a Christmas Eve suicide hotline—staffed by the bickering trio of Max Asher, Dave Morris, and Edward Jefferson—only to ricochet through Los Angeles as if the city itself were a fraying gag reel. He disrupts a funeral, becomes the unwilling accomplice to a pregnant runaway bride, is hunted by a machete-wielding Santa, and ends up cradling a newborn in a manger-cum-pawnshop while the hotline crew, chasing a misdelivered fruitcake, literally crash the Nativity. Every cut feels like a nervous breakdown; every iris-out swallows a laugh and a scream in the same gulp. The film is less a plot than a cardiac arrhythmia of slapstick, despair, and tinsel, daring you to call it comedy.