Mainlining Christmas

AHHHHH. AHHHHH. No. Why. WHY? Just... Just NO. Someone watched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie and then vomited out this horrid direct-to-video thing in about 10 minutes. The writing is uniformly terrible, but it's worse when they half-almost try to write the characters like the movie. I'd rather that they didn't, really. It's awful. The costumes are hideous and terrible, with animatronics that don't work, and they have no feet. The budget appears to have been about $50 and I'm assuming they spent most of it on beer. Also, the costumes are really scary-looking. We're talking horror-movie-possessed-toy scary. The voice “actors” occasionally do atrocious imitations of the movie cast, but it's really uneven. It burnsss... According to IMDB, it looks like either the entire cast and director did this under fake names, or they never worked again. Either sounds plausible to me. The voice syncing is basically nonexistent. T

First of all, I'd like to send a very special "thank you, but I thought we were FRIENDS" to Jeff Burns for sending us the link to this delightful holiday classic. I actually remember seeing this when it first aired.  Hey, I was a child of the 80's, and Alf was a part of that.  I remember Gordon Shumway, Melmac, and even that music video he made for the Tanners' daughter.  I have good memories watching this show as a child. Yes, Virginia, children are stupid. That editorial, by the way, gets read twice during the special.  It's the abridged version you hear everywhere, of course, with all the great fairy references omitted. The "plot" of the hour-long special revolves around Alf getting in a fight with the Tanners and winding up trapped in the back of a van with a bunch of Christmas presents on their way to the hospital.  He winds up getting handed over to a dying girl, who teaches him the true meaning of melodrama in a long, drawn out, sapp

I just got through watching Barbie: A Christmas Carol, and wanted to write down a few thoughts while the movie was still fresh in my mind. My first thought isn't so much a thought, per se, as it is an overall emotional response; a desire, in fact.  Right now, I want to find a Barbie doll - any Barbie doll - and yank its head off its shoulders.  I want to snap every goddamn joint on that thing, and, if possible, I'd really like to feed the pieces through a wood chipper. And before you ask, no: I'm not overreacting.  It was really that bad.  It was worse - WORSE - than you'd expect a direct-to-DVD Barbie reinterpretation of A Christmas Carol to be.  In every imaginable way, it was worse. The animation... oh, God.  Dear, God.  Why?  The characters were less lifelike than the toys they were based on.  They weren't just soulless: it was like some demonic spirit crawled up from the depths of Hell and inhabited these empty, plastic shells and brought them to a stat

At one point during this Lifetime Original made-for-TV movie, Lindsay pulled my hand away from my head to keep me from literally pulling my hair out of my head.  I tried to explain that I knew what I was doing, that it was distracting me from the pain.  She stopped me anyway.  I think, in time, I'll come to forgive her. This one was hard for me.  It's not that I'm a guy: I can take dramas, chick flicks, what have you.  But the thing is, I'm also a writer.  And, as such, there's a level of bad dialogue that will hurt me.  In high enough doses, it might even kill me. Like most Christmas dramas, this was actually a science fiction film, though it buried that fact beneath five metric tons of melodramatic nonsense.  Even so, the plot was a pretty straightforward time jump: the main character, a self-obsessed career woman, jumps forward ten years in her life to find herself a wife and mother, dutifully living out her husband's philanthropic dreams.

Lindsay got her review in first .  Normally, we don't gang up on a movie if we both hate it, but this gets to be a special case. It's Christmas, so I'm going to start this review off on a positive note by finding some nice things to say about the computer animated, direct-to-video film, Casper's Haunted Christmas.  Give me a minute.  I can do this. Got it!  The ghosts were animated with passable CG, unlike the people (more on that in a moment).  Also, the design of the fictitious town this took place in was kind of fun. This concludes the positive section of this review. Going in, I assumed this was going to be bad.  I mean, I bought it as part of a five dollar bargain set from Best Buy - the now infamous "New Christmas Classics " - and it wasn't even featured.  I mean, this is (unfortunately) a full length movie, and the people including it in their set didn't feel like it warranted more attention than a bunch of seven minute Gumby shorts.

Oh. I feel quite unpleasant now.  This is one of the worst pieces of utter tripe that I've seen in a long time. First off, the animation is awful.  The movie is full of creepy CG people who just look hideous.  The ghostly effect isn't terrible, but everything is animated poorly. The plot is utterly arbitrary.  At the beginning it seems that Casper's uncles (aka The Ghostly Trio) are about to get in trouble for scaring a parking lot full of people... but wait, then Casper's in trouble for not scaring people?  Make up your mind. The “plot,” so to speak, is completely imposed upon the characters with utterly no rhyme or reason. They are sent to “Kriss, Massachusetts.” Shoot me now. Then we meet the rest of the characters: a family in which the parents are completely terrifying and utterly certifiable in their obsession with all things Christmas.  I kept hoping they would die horribly.  They have a daughter who starts out okay, at least she hates them.  But of cou

If you thought you'd have to wait a while for something "worse than the Star Wars Christmas Special," have I got a surprise for you.  I stumbled across this dubbed version of an Mexican production from 1959 on Netflix. They also have an Mystery Science Theater 3000 version.  I haven't seen that just yet, but we're planning to get around to it next. What really concerns me - what horrifies me - is that Netflix predicted I'd consider this a three-star movie. I kind of wish I'd visited Wikipedia before watching this instead of afterward, so I'd have known it ranks on the IMDB's top 100 worst movies of all time list . For the record, I would still have watched it; I just wouldn't have done so sober. This is more a morality play than a movie.  Santa is a clear stand-in for Jesus, who gets name-dropped once or twice.  The moral of the story isn't exactly nuanced: do good, and you'll be rewarded in the end - this is actually stated