Mainlining Christmas

Christmas at the Women's Hotel Daniel M. Lavery, 2025 New Release! I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.  This is a holiday-themed spin-off from a longer novel (titled simply Women's Hotel) imagining the lives, loves, tragedies, and triumphs of a group of women living in a fictional women's hotel.  The real-life women-only residential hotels were a phenomenon created by a specific time in history, from about the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. Young, single women wanted to move to a city to get work, but they didn't have family to stay with. Enter the women's hotel, seen as a safe, respectable place for unchaperoned middle-class secretaries and assistants to live (until they marry and move to the suburbs). I read half of a nonfiction book about one of the most famous women's hotels years ago and found the concept fascinating. I hadn't heard of the original Women's Hotel novel, but I am a fan of Daniel Lavery from back...

Okay, here's the disclaimer: I watched the version of The Christmas Martian that was readily available to me on streaming, which was a mangled, outdated US release. In addition to being badly dubbed, this version features scenes with what appear to be jaw-droppingly bad exposure, washing out entire sequences to the point they're barely discernable. There is now a better option - the movie has been remastered and released on blu-ray through Vinegar Syndrome, and if you're planning to watch this... Actually, why exactly are you determined to watch this? I don't mean that in a snide way way. Literally, what is inspiring you to track down this micro-budgeted, presumably drug-fueled children's movie (or maybe special) from Canada? Because if this is something you remember from your childhood or want to see for academic reasons or anything of the sort, by all means spend the money to get the good version - because it absolutely  matters. But if you're looking for some...

I've reviewed quite a few of these over the past few years, so by now I'm assuming you know the drill. But in case anyone new is joining us, Fresh Monkey Fiction is an independent toy company catering to collectors. They finance their releases through presales, and for the past three years they've been producing Christmas action figures in a 6-inch scale. Mostly these have been variations on Santa and Krampus , and the subject of today's review is no exception. Father Christmas, of course, is England's version of Saint Nick. Well, sort of. Okay, it's a little complicated, as it's not clear how much of his genesis was inspired by Saint Nicholas of Myra as opposed to alternate traditions, and for a while he became something of an unrelated political symbol opposing Puritanism, but over the last few centuries depictions of Father Christmas converged with other yuletide gift-givers, and now he's as likely as not to just look like Santa, red suit and all. Re...

I've had this one on my watchlist for ages, but it never seemed to be streaming on services I was subscribed to. Netflix recently picked it up, so I figured late is better than never. If they'd started streaming it a bit earlier, I'd have included it in my October horror reviews, but I never said I'd review horror only during that month. At any rate, Wind Chill is a 2007 horror movie very much in the "Christmas ghost story" wheelhouse. There are times when I'm unsure if that was intentional, but this was produced through a British company, and if there's any country I trust to be conscious of that tradition, it's Great Britain. This one seems a bit divisive: I've seen it defended as one of the better Christmas horror offerings, and I've seen it dismissed as uninspired and dull. Unfortunately, I'm inclined to side with the latter group. For what it's worth, I suspect a lot of the difference in opinion is due to expectation. This was ...

This was one of a handful of adaptations of "A Christmas Carol" that were on my list when I binged fifty or so of these back in 2022, but I was unable to get to it at the time. I've been meaning to rectify that since, but it never seemed to be on the right streaming services at the right times. Well, that finally changed, so at long last I was able to sit down and watch it. The movie is quite a bit more ambitious than most low-budget versions. The story is set in what was then the present-day, song and dance numbers are added (though the music is diegetic, save for when the source is explicitly supernatural), and the majority of characters - included Scrooge himself - are gay. Several characters are gender-flipped to accommodate this: nephew Fred is now niece Freda, Belle becomes Bill, and so on. Sequences and minor characters are added to expand on this idea, however the core of the story is unchanged. In fact, in several respects this adheres closer to Dickens's blu...

A Tale of Winter is to Sleepless in Seattle what Dial Code Santa Claus is to Home Alone . Okay, that's probably unfair to Sleepless in Seattle, which I don't actually think is a knockoff of Tale of Winter, but the parallels are interesting: French movies exploring similar ideas released a year earlier that are (in my opinion) significantly better than their American counterparts. A Tale of Winter is the second Christmas movie I've seen written and directed by French New Wave auteur Éric Rohmer, who also made My Night at Maud's  twenty-three years earlier. I should also mention A Tale of Winter is the second of four films each representing a different season. At the very least I should probably have seen the first of those before attempting to write about this, but... well... I'm busy and have too many other Christmas movies to get to. Just in case it wasn't obvious from that "better than their American counterparts" gag, I liked this quite a bit. Tha...

I need you to understand, before I type another word, that this movie is not normal. That's not intended to imply that this is good or bad - it's my opinion Holiday in Handcuffs exists outside of such a simplistic dynamic. Likewise, I'm not going to retreat to "so bad it's good," as I don't think that's an accurate description of the movie. I submit this movie is, instead, best described as "fucking bizarre." First some background, at least to the limited degree background information is at all available. The movie was produced by "ABC Family," which was something of a competitor for Hallmark in the TV Christmas movie field during the first decade of the millennium, before Hallmark reached a point where calling other entities "competitors" is something of a misnomer. ABC Family tended to be a bit more PG than Hallmark - really, the movies I've seen from them are closer to what Netflix and other streamers are now puttin...

The original Prep & Landing continues to rank among my all-time favorite holiday specials. I love the way it reimagines Christmas elves through the lens of secret agents and high-pressure missions, building to a tense climax with stakes that feel important while still remaining within the scale of the story. Likewise, while Operation Secret Santa was only a short, it manages to capture the magic of the original, giving us the excitement of a life-or-death spy movie in the package of a sweet Christmas cartoon. Good stuff. After that, we got Naughty vs. Nice , a full-length special that sort of abandoned the tone of the original. There are still some good moments in there, but it's missing the sense of suspense. It's more a kid's cartoon playing with spy movie concepts, while the first two were legitimate spy stories told within a world of Christmas specials. But at least it remembered its roots. The third special in the series, The Snowball Protocol (directed by Shane ...

On one level, I appreciate what directors Zac Moncrief and Steve Trenbirth, as well as writer Jon Colton Barry (who co-wrote this with Moncrief), were trying to pull off here. These are all industry professionals - Moncrief and Barry are both veterans of Phineas and Ferb, which almost certainly ranks somewhere on the top ten list of animated series of the last twenty-five years - so this isn't going to be a by-the-numbers exercise in bland, inoffensive kid's media. You can tell they wanted to subvert expectations, push boundaries, and create something with a bit of an edge to the humor. And, again, they have experience in that department. I thought about that a lot while I watched A Chuck E. Cheese Christmas, the new 50-minute special currently streaming in a couple spots (including free on YouTube, in case there was any doubt this was financed as some sort of marketing promotion). I also thought a lot about the writing and the jokes, because... I think the writing might be oka...

The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year Ally Carter, 2024 Premise: Maggie writes mysteries, and she's really good at it. But it's been a year since her husband destroyed their marriage and her life fell apart, so she's not looking forward to Christmas. When her publisher sends her to spend the holidays with her literary idol, she thinks perhaps things are looking up... until she sees who else is invited. This is a holiday-mystery-themed romance novel with a good amount of humor, action, and heart. It does a good job establishing our lead and her current world, while slowly revealing her past situation.  I liked that Maggie's flaws and struggles seemed realistic. She's not perfect, but neither is she dumb or dealing with problems that have easy solutions.  The male lead is a bit more complicated. By the end, he's a lovable, strong romantic hero, but you don't start getting his perspective until around halfway through. Until then, the book did too good a job conv...

  The second figure in the Four Horsemen Studio's line of A Christmas Carol figures is, naturally, their take on The Ghost of Christmas Past. If you missed my review of Marley's Ghost , this line (or sub-line) recreates characters from Dickens' classic as seven-inch action figures. These aren't cheap (the first two figures ran me $70 each), but the quality, attention to detail, and generous accessories go a long way towards justifying that price tag. They've followed the lead of several adaptations in making the spirit female. Dickens' original implies the spirit itself is non-binary, shifting between forms as its light flickers like a candle's (that's also the rationale behind the figure having four arms, an image pulled from the original story). Because the character's always shifting, you could make the case any visualization is accurate to the source material. Personally, I like this interpretation quite a bit. As was the case with Marley, the bo...

The cliche, "so bad it's good," doesn't begin to convey the unprecedented absurdity that is this movie, an experience so unique as to feel alien in its approach to human emotion and storytelling. The existence of this film defies easy explanation. It is blatantly a marketing exercise attempting to promote the brand of Thomas Kinkade, a producer on the film, that inexplicably features a cast including Peter O'Toole, Ed Asner, and Marcia Gay Harden, along with talented character actors such as Chris Elliott and Richard Moll. None of them are phoning this in, either - everyone involves pours their heart into this thing, and the result is almost indescribable. Visually, this pointedly is not stylized to look like one of Kinkade's Candylandesque dreamscapes. Instead, it aims for realism, invoking the style of 70s dramas. Director Michael Campus made a handful of well-regarded blaxspoitation films and seems to have reemerged from a thirty-two year hiatus to make Chr...