Safety films, like a lot of things, work best as a story. There's no better way to drive your message home than to wrap it up in something that people can sympathize with--and if sympathy is not your aim you should at least give them something to look up to, to inspire them to change. In some ways, safety films are like propaganda, only there aren't too many folks out there wanting to suppress human rights or blow people up in the name of watching out for loose nails. Though sometimes it certainly seems like it. Most of us have, in some form or another, seen a narrative-driven safety film, through our school experiences, or through the shorts they ran at the start of Mystery Science Theater 3000. These exercises in supreme cynicism often feature implausible characters thrust into easily-written situations which yield horrifying possibilities upon the use of the most rudimentary thought. Through MST3K, the world was introduced to abominations like A Case of Spring Fever and Mr. B Natural, which featured thin stories meant to be used as skeletal supports for the ideas and ideals of the filmmakers. Miracle in Paradise Valley ramps up the narrative a little bit for a safety film, pushing it into comfortable A-List territory--it's also one of the few safety movies of its ilk I've seen that comes close to being a feature, coming up just shy of 40 minutes. On top of that, it's probably a ripoff of It's a Wonderful Life, so there's more than a little to discuss here.
John is a relatively impatient farmer who is working his way back home along a narrow ridge when his tractor engine cuts out. A mysterious man in a suit and bowler hat comes out of nowhere and shows him that if he's not too careful he's going to roll his tractor over the edge. It is here that the man demonstrates supernatural powers, knocking the tractor off the edge and then reversing the event in time--John seems to implicitly understand he's in the presence of a guardian angel. The angel calls himself "Joe, the Special In-the-Meantime Agent"; he takes care of people "in the meantime" before their death. He's decided to take care of John because he "saved him some trouble" by rescuing his fellow sailors during a torpedo incident from World War II. Thus begins John's personal Hell, as Joe begins stalking him, getting increasingly angry as John puts himself in more and more danger, and passes over each incident as unimportant. Joe's invisibility means that John ends up socially isolated when his friends hear him shout at nothing. Eventually, John is taken to a world where his apathy over safety has its consequences--most of his friends are dead, the victims of little things John never thought would matter, like rusty nails, or inappropriate use of kerosene. This leads John to decide to make his town's Safety Fair a huge success, by breaking onto people's property and planting skull-and-crossbone logos all over the place. People mock the Fair when it finally arrives but John's rabid passion whips them back in line, so they finally devote themselves to the proper cause of household accidents, and thus avert the dark future Joe showed to John.
It's kind of amazing just how perfectly this movie fits the archetype of many of the PSAs that would follow it--while also improving on the formula, by trying to give some degree of backstory to the characters by briefly describing their wartime experiences. We have a story of a man whose minor mistakes open him up to the intrusion of a supernatural presence which claims to be benevolent but gives every indication of being infernal. Said presence torments him with illusions and social stigma until he becomes a fanatic pawn of the supernatural being's personal ends. It is incredibly easy to substitute Joe with Coily the Spring Sprite, though Joe at least has a human form for us to contend with, and his concerns are ostensibly with preventing death, which contrasts Coily's mission of punishing those who don't respect springs. However, that Joe claims death as his domain makes him seem very sinister indeed. He acts like Clarence from It's a Wonderful Life, but his involvement with John's torpedo incident makes it clear he's much more like the Grim Reaper. He also says he "has many names," which is a rather Satanic proclamation. True, it's unlikely Satan would be this helpful, but we never quite get the feel that Joe's an agent of God either. He ends up with the line, "It ain't so easy putting people back together, y'know," when he reassembles John's tractor, as if he speaks from experience. Brrr.
But that's just the start. I would argue that refusing to replace one's ladder rungs is hardly a reason to teleport someone to a phantom world where all of their friends died horribly in a single year. They really pour it on once they hit this ghost world, as you might expect, not only killing a woman in a kerosene fire but forcing her husband to give up their girls to the orphanage as well--cue obligatory long-walk down the road to the orphanage door, as sad music plays. This is triggered by John asking, "But what about the kids?!" to which Joe only responds, "Oh, you'll see..." as if we're about to see a pile of severed child body parts.
Then, there's the whole deal of planting skull-and-crossbones all over people's farms. If I found a bunch of skulls all over my farm, and inside my house, I wouldn't assume it was a friendly neighbor promoting a local Safety Fair. I would assume that terrorists were threatening to kill me. Once they arrive at the Safety Fair everyone transforms their fear into bad humor. The line, "Those skulls scared my cow so bad I thought she was gonna dry up," is enough to make this audience laugh for over thirty seconds. Then Joe makes John get up onstage, and John rants like someone deep in grief--which he is, having been forced to endure the premature funerals of his friends. It culminates with John dragging out empty chairs to represent not just the dead, but "the living dead" (!!!)--that is, one person who was blinded by an accident, and another who was apparently confined to bed permanently by one. Ableism: the secret to safety. Because when you're blind or quadriplegic, you might at well be dead, right? Blehhh.
I wanted to set out in this review to dissect the forces that create films like this, but I can't help but wonder if we're witnessing a line of progression here. This movie turns It's a Wonderful Life into a PSA--which in turn may have mutated into A Case of Spring Fever. Doesn't that make a perverse kind of sense? I don't know if It's a Wonderful Life can be cited as the forerunner of this strange undercurrent/pseudogenre of "angelsploitation" but these stories are ultimately compressed and twisted versions of tales like Dickens' A Christmas Carol, wherein supernatural forces do the good which is beyond the reach of man. At least, that's the premise of Dickens' tale and It's a Wonderful Life; Scrooge will never listen to any mortal man when it comes to letting go of his miserhood, and George Bailey's values make it too hard for anyone to negotiate him out of his suicidal emotional state. Here, though, John and his friends are just kind of idiots. They could avoid using large open containers of kerosene in close proximity to burning stoves, but they're apparently just overconfident jackasses. At this point, analysis dies, because we must presume laziness propelled these emergent themes rather than intent.
I do feel rather like I'm cheating here by reviewing this, just as I did with Cyberon. But I want to say here that this movie is pretty hilarious, and while I tried to analyze it, I more wanted to recommend it. At 40 minutes, it's a frightening little chunk of fantasy ripoff that manages to imply more graphic violence than a lot of horror films. Sweet!
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