Mainlining Christmas

Christmas episodes continue to struggle to adapt to the era of streaming. The standard model of dropping entire seasons at once doesn't align with the tradition of planning an episode's release around the holidays. Granted, we've seen entire seasons - heck, entire series - set during the holiday season, but shows with narratives spanning months find themselves in the position of choosing to either ignore December altogether or release a holiday episode along with the rest of the series. Or, you know, just release that as a standalone Christmas special , but weirdly that solution has been underutilized. That brings us to Caped Crusader, a noir-heavy Batman series from Bruce Timm, one of the masterminds behind Batman: The Animated Series, the gold standard when it comes to this stuff. I should note I'm halfway through the second season (I'm writing this right after watching the episode in question), so my thoughts may shift down the road. For now, however, I find th...

The Naked Gun reboot is set during the holidays (mainly New Year's Eve) as a thematic anchor exploring the ways recurrent franchise media intersects with primal, underlying concepts linked to the changing of the calendar, and moreover I am very clearly fucking with you, and in actuality the setting of this movie - to the very limited extent its virtually non-existent continuity permits any kind of temporal setting to be established - is most likely just an excuse to make a visual joke comparing New Year's balls with testicles. Still, it is set just before New Year's, which means it qualifies as a "Christmas movie" albeit on the loosest technicality possible and therefore should be discussed on this site. Also, I'm forced to admit that setting your film around the holidays just to make a joke about balls is - again, on a technicality - a fairly novel justification for the timing, whether I like the joke in question or not. In that particular case... the answer ...

The 1970s remain something of a mystery when it comes to holiday movies. There are, of course, a handful of high-profile Christmas films  from the decade, but on the whole it's probably better remembered now for its   holiday specials than its movies. I'm skeptical that this is an accurate reflection of the era. In recent years, a number of significant '70s movies have gotten attention for being set around Christmas , leading me to suspect it's less a case of scarcity than of lack of attention. All of which is a longwinded preamble explaining why I'm perhaps a little more liberal when deciding whether or not to write up movies with debatable holiday credentials from that decade than more recent ones. And that leads us to Mitchell, a movie that may or may not count as Christmas media. A portion of the movie is definitely set around Christmas, though due to a vaguely defined timeline, it's somewhat unclear just how large a portion we're talking about....

This will most likely be a short review, as well as an incomplete one. I typically write up these reviews the day after watching a movie (if not the same day), but I held off on Death is a Caress for a couple reasons. First, I was busy, but second... this isn't a Christmas movie (at least not using most definitions). I didn't put it on as such, and I've never heard anyone claim otherwise (though I haven't checked, either, so who knows?). The movie only features one sequence explicitly set during the holidays - New Year's Eve, specifically. It's about ten minutes long and is set around two-thirds of the way through the film. My initial instinct wasn't to write it up, at all. But as I digested the movie, my opinion shifted. The holiday's use as a thematic device is rather interesting and worth exploring. I'd still hesitate to call this a Christmas (or New Year's) movie, but it's certainly relevant to the topic of this blog. First some backgroun...

 Ah, November. Time to celebrate American democracy, at least in memoriam. And, of course, time to take a breather between kids extorting candy from us to kids extorting toys. Though around here we need no such respite. Christmas never really ends here, and so it never begins. That's why you won't catch us whining about Fred Meyer selling Santa ornaments midway through October. For us, it's always Christmas, at least as far as content is concerned. Speaking of October, we continued the tradition from last year of posting horror reviews through the month, albeit not as consistently. We did, however, manage to exceed 50%, if only barely, by posting reviews sixteen days last month. So... I don't know... be impressed or something. I'm certainly not committing to maintaining that pace this month. However, I will be posting new reviews when time allows, prioritizing material where Christmas isn't the main draw. I'm talking about movies that don't pass our usua...

So long as you're interested in the journey, no matter how unsatisfying the destination proves to be, the majority of The Legend of Hell House makes for an enjoyably quirky haunted house flick from a time when science (or at least semi-respectable pseudoscience) was considered compatible with the supernatural. To put that another way, this is the kind of thing Ghostbusters was parodying, a world where psychic phenomenon is considered commonplace and spiritual questions can be studied scientifically and associated problems potentially addressed with technology. That's one of several elements that make this entertaining, if not good. Likewise, the story (adapted by the legendary Richard Matheson from his own novel), populates the cast entirely with characters who are professionals in their field. This means the characters reacting (or through the first half of the movie mostly not reacting) to what's occurring around them have incentives to see this play out and unravel the m...