Mainlining Christmas

Based on the handful of reviews available, I'm pretty sure I liked this more than most who saw it, and I didn't like it. The Open House draws inspiration from various horror subgenres, including haunted house, home invasion, and slashers. Until the end, the movie leaves you in the dark as to which direction (or directions) it's going to break. The conclusion feels like they just picked one out of a hat and went with it, ultimately delivering a film about the existential terror of [checks notes] okay, it's actually just about open houses. Like, having strangers come to your house. That's it.  Perhaps I'm being a bit uncharitable, but for all the setup surrounding being haunted by trauma, fear of rural communities, and family strife, the movie just sort of reveals its big idea was just the obvious one in the title. Some random stranger we never see clearly was in the house all along. Somehow. We never really get much of an explanation on the logistics, just the id...

Await Further Instructions is a low-budget Christmas horror flick exploring themes around surveillance, authority, religion, terrorism and the ways liberalism versus conservativism view these ideas. Despite a small cast and virtually the entire movie being relegated to a single house, there are a lot of ideas being played with, which is a bit of a double-edged sword. The movie is engrossing, but by the end credits it left me a little confused what, if anything, it was trying to say. That's not automatically a problem - movies which pose questions without answering them can absolutely work, particularly in this genre. But this one feels allegorical in a way that left me digging for a message or point I don't think was delivered (or at least not clearly enough to be satisfying). On top of that, the movie chooses to make its characters simplistic in ways that prevent them from having strong arcs. Again, that's not a dealbreaker, but it places more weight on plot reveals to mak...

All the Creatures Were Stirring is a low-budget horror anthology movie released directly to Shudder in 2018 written and directed by Rebekah McKendry and David Ian McKendry, who (as you probably guessed from their names) are married. As is often the case with low-budget productions, any discussion of the movie's quality is going to be riddled with caveats and sidenotes. Depending on what you're comparing this to, what you expect out of it, and how steep of a curve you're grading on, you could describe this as fantastic, horrible, or just about anything in between. The movie features five short films and a frame story, all of which is packed into a brisk hour twenty minutes. Unsurprisingly, that means the individual stories aren't given a great deal of space to breathe. For the most part, the characters are pretty one-dimensional, though that's not necessarily a bad thing here. The collection is basically comprised of short genre stories, each of which serves to offer...

I vaguely recall hearing some positive buzz when this came out, but because it premiered on a cable station as opposed to streaming, it wasn't really on my radar. I'm honestly a little surprised it took this long for someone to point me towards this. Setting aside the fact the tone and style are right up my alley, the first season is entirely set at Christmas, which is obviously why we're discussing it here. I'm glad I finally got a chance to watch this - it'd rank this on my list of favorite genre TV seasons in recent history. As to what genre... well.. that's where things get complicated, because the first season of Happy! isn't easily described. It's an adaptation of a Dark Horse comic book written by Grant Morrison, who also seems to have been heavily involved in the show. I've never read the comics, but I might have to track them down, if only to confirm or falsify some theories. There's sort of a vein in comics that plays with the fact the ...

The Christmas Train is a TV movie based on a novel by David Baldacci released through Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. The story is centered around a former couple, both writers, who bump into each other while traveling across the country. One is working on a movie script for a Hollywood director who's more or less adopted her, and the other is a journalist looking for a story. The movie includes numerous other quirky characters who are also traveling by train and is an exceptionally good... Wait. Hold on. I need to check my notes, because something feels off. Okay, yes. The words, "Hallmark" and "good" both appear on this pad of paper, which... Hold on a minute. These things can be good?!!! Then why the hell have we been sitting through bland, lazy romantic comedies this whole time? No one told me Hallmark was actually capable of putting out good movies! Okay. Let's get back to the movie, which - again - is good. A good Hallmark TV movie. About people recon...

Among our various yuletide pursuits this year, we're trying to catch up on a number of Hallmark movies. Basically, we realized we'd more or less neglected the company for the better part of a decade due to, well, having better things to do with our lives, and - because there's obviously something wrong with us - we decided we should watch a handful of these in an attempt to recalibrate. So far, it's not going particularly well. That's not to say these movies are especially bad; the ones we've seen so far are a modest step up from those we saw back when we started this blog. It's just that I don't feel as though I'm learning much from the experience. I'd hoped to get a sense of the company's output by watching four or five movies, and it's starting to feel like I'd have to sit through forty or fifty before actually understanding what the hell these are evolving into. To be clear, we don't have that kind of time this year. Or at lea...

It has been a few years since we've done more than a smattering of Hallmark Christmas movies, so this year we're taking a relatively random sample to see what's been going on in the most generically inoffensive place on earth.  This movie has a predictably bonkers premise, although the execution was surprisingly low-key. I can't decide whether or not that was better than the alternative.  The movie centers on Haley, your stereotypical workaholic go-getter. (In the opening scenes she literally tells her assistant that she's canceling a date because she wants to concentrate on work.) She works in branding/marketing, and she wants to land a new account with a big toy company - part of her plan to land a big promotion. Her boss, however, says that the toy company is all about holiday traditions and Haley doesn't understand those, so she sends Haley to "Christmas Camp."  Christmas Camp, it turns out, is a one-week special event run by an inn in Western Mass...

La Befana Vien di Notte is a live-action Italian fantasy/superhero/comedy/adventure/children's movie about Befana. I probably shouldn't assume everyone reading this is familiar with Befana: she's a legendary witch who delivers gifts to the kids of Italy on Epiphany Eve (January 5th). The easy explanation is she's "like Santa," which isn't inaccurate, but feels reductive. There's a lot of debate over just how old the legends are and where they come from: I'm not going to get into any of that here. What's important is this idea isn't invented for the movie, and in Italy this would come across like a big-budget Santa Claus movie. The problem we ran into trying to watch La Befana Vien di Notte is that this isn't Italy, and the film hasn't received a proper US release. Amazon has a version up, but the language options are limited. There's of course a dubbed English track, but... Okay, side note. I'm pretty firmly entrenched on th...

Feast of the Seven Fishes is a low budget, '80s-period Christmas dramedy based on a graphic novel written thirteen years earlier by the movie's writer/director. The year of release seems to be up for debate - I'm going with 2018, based on when it appears to have first debuted in festivals, as opposed to its official release a year later. The movie seems to have been fairly well-received critically - it's at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes, albeit with only 16 reviews. I'll put my cards on the table now and say this is going to be a dissenting opinion. I'm not sure if critics are seeing something I'm missing or simply grading on a curve, but Lindsay and I had a hard time sitting through this one. It was partially salvaged by some great character work around minor characters and what I assume is an accurate representation of an Italian-American tradition, but that wasn't enough to make up for the movie's shortcomings. Which brings us to the plot and premise. Wh...

The worst thing I can say about the DuckTales reboot is that nothing about the show feels particularly revolutionary. Obviously, there's no reason it should, but it's the only thing that differentiates it from any of the best animated shows of all time. It's not subversive and dark like Batman TAS; it's not shocking and cerebral like Mystery Inc.; it's not progressive like Steven Universe or as profoundly optimistic as Phineas and Ferb. It's just... nearly perfect in every way imaginable. I apologize for being so harsh. So is this just the level of quality we should expect going forward? If so, I'm not complaining - the DuckTales reboot is fantastic, and I'm loving every minute. It's just... I'm kind of bewildered. Given the significance of the IP coupled with the money thrown at this (I mean, just look at the voice cast), shouldn't this have been shredded through meddling studio notes or something? How the hell did this series not only r...

I'd better open by recommending this movie, because if I start with the premise, you'll probably dismiss it without reading through the review. Also, it's worth seeing unspoiled - it's marketed as a drama, but it's got more than a little suspense mixed in (think In Bruges, minus most of the dark comedy), and knowing where it's going would undercut the impact. So if you like drama, suspense, and/or good movies, stop reading and go watch it. It's really not hard to track down. I'll warn you in advance the synopsis for Ben is Back is going to read a lot like an afterschool special, so you'll have to trust me when I say this is something exceptional. The titular Ben is a recovering addict who leaves rehab to spend Christmas with his family. His mother, Holly, is both overjoyed to have him home and terrified he'll relapse. Some of the family is more cautious - the oldest of his siblings doesn't trust him, nor does his stepfather. Apparently, incid...