Mainlining Christmas

Early this year Fresh Monkey Fiction released the third wave in their "Naughty or Nice" line of Christmas action figures, and in the process added something fans had been hoping for: reindeer ( I grabbed a couple of those, myself ). In addition to "normal" deer, they also produced a couple variants playing into the "Naughty" side of the line. One, called Rottenhoof, seems to be a companion for Zombie Santa . The other, Gorgon, isn't a deer, at all (or at least its primary head isn't), though it uses the same body. I skipped Rottenhoof due to limited display space but grabbed Gorgon. In theory, Gorgon is a demonic goat intended as a companion (or, if you shell out an extra $20 for the saddle, a mount) for Krampus. He's also got an alternate decaying reindeer head we'll get to when we talk accessories, but neither relates to why I bought this. While I don't know for certain where they drew inspiration for this character, there's a gre...

The best summation I can offer for the tone (and therefore the experience) of The Baltimorons is a cross between a '70s dramedy and When Harry Met Sally . This is an independent production from director Jay Duplass and comedian Michael Strassner. They scripted the movie together, and Strassner plays a character whose backstory is loosely based on his own life, including struggles with alcoholism, attempted suicide, and disappointment stemming from nearly making it big. There's some real drama here, but the movie finds humor within it. This is, after all, ultimately a romantic comedy, albeit one grounded in believable emotion. The leads are deeply flawed, and - like When Harry Met Sally - this understands the goal is to help them come to terms with those flaws and find a way forward together, rather than pretend they can (or should) be wiped away. All of which is a longwinded way of saying I liked it a great deal and absolutely recommend it as a funny, melancholy alternative to...

  Over the past few years I've been looking at action figures from Fresh Monkey Fiction's "Naughty or Nice" line of Christmas-themed toys. Wave 3 arrived in January of this year and for the first time included reindeer. They made four basic deer, and anyone so inclined could order two of each along with a pack of heads to round out the team (and if you wanted to get one extra, the head pack included one with a red nose, as well). That's in addition to a couple alternate versions of the deer (one of which I'll be getting around to in a later review), some optional accessories (which I decided I didn't need) as well as new variations on Santa and Krampus. The deer were around $45 each, which is about what I'd expect given the size. Or rather that's what I'd expect it to cost if it were produced by a larger toy company. I continue to be impressed with Fresh Monkey Fiction's ability to produce collectibles that don't feel like they're p...

There's virtually no information about this on its Wikipedia page, but between the fact this came out in 2022, the isolated setting, and the cast almost entirely consisting of three characters, it seems like a safe bet this was produced and filmed during the Covid lockdowns. It was ultimately released by Shudder, where it received a tepid response from viewers and critics. I can't help but suspect some of that reaction may have been due to exhaustion with minimalist productions at the time - for a few years there, it felt like everything  was made with a couple actors and a skeleton crew to comply with restrictions on crowds. In addition, horror fans tend to react poorly to non-horror movies marketed in that genre, and The Apology is ultimately more a psychological thriller. That's my guess for why this didn't get a better response at the time, because I thought this was quite good as a suspenseful character drama. Just be warned it goes to some dark places... though it...

We probably should have watched this back in 2021. We must have run out of time or something. Or maybe we deprioritized it on the grounds it felt a year late - this Netflix-produced Hallmark-style Christmas romantic comedy constructed around a same-sex couple was released on the heels of several similar high-profile entries from Hulu , Lifetime , and (with caveats) even Hallmark , all of which delivered in this sub-sub-genre a year earlier. And while Single All the Way may be the first gay Christmas romantic comedy produced by Netflix (I've seen that honor bestowed upon it in several places), it's certainly not the first of its kind released  by the streamer. The distinction between in-house productions and acquisitions may mean something to executives, but to those of us watching, it's hard to differentiate between something like this and, say, A New York Christmas Wedding , which came out on Netflix in 2020. Okay, maybe not that hard: Single All the Way is, by virtuall...

This has been my on my list for years, but I kept tabling it in favor of movies that were better regarded or where the holiday connections were (based on the synopses) less dubious. I didn't doubt there'd be Christmas elements in Fitzwilly, but in my experience movies made prior to the '80s where Christmas doesn't feature heavily in the description are often edge cases. This one... no, this is very much a Christmas movie. Unambiguously, unquestionably Christmas. Also, I'm going to deviate from the consensus and say, in my opinion, it's a very good Christmas movie. I'm honestly a little surprised to find this is widely considered somewhat of a middling film. I'm not seeing much online concerning its release, and only a handful of critics seem to have considered it worth reviewing it retroactively. Reviews I skimmed on Letterboxd tend to lean towards "underwhelming," though several acknowledge it was fun. While I can understand where its detracto...

By my reasoning, adjusted for inflation Love Story is the second highest grossing Christmas movie in history in the US and Canada , with only A Hundred and One Dalmatians beating it out (though it's not particularly close). I should also add I'm not counting a couple movies with ambiguous holiday credentials in that ranking: if you're of the opinion Ben-Hur and/or The Sound of Music are Christmas movies, you'll want to push this back two or three spots respectively (hell, Sound of Music would take the top spot). Either way, Love Story beats out Home Alone, if you want a sense of just how successful this was back in 1971 (it opened in New York in December of 1970, but didn't get a wide opening until June the following year). I blame Wikipedia's list of Christmas movies for the fact this one slipped under my radar as long as it did - it's on there but for whatever reason it's currently separated into a category containing only itself. That's absurd, b...

I spent a significant amount of 'R Xmas's runtime trying to unravel what this was supposed to be. There's nothing inherently wrong with a movie refusing to adhere to the conventions of any one genre, but it's the kind of gamble that either pays off or falls flat. This one didn't pay off. Instead of building on various tropes to construct a film greater than the sum of its parts, this wound up landing in a sort of empty void between genres: not suspenseful enough to work as thriller, lacking characters interesting enough to function as a crime story or gangster flick, no real mystery coalescing around the bizarre events until we receive a logical if unsatisfying explanation... it's bizarre. In the end, this winds up feeling more like an odd drama masquerading as the genres above, and the drama here just isn't all that compelling. The movie tries to make a point about crime and government policy, but there wasn't much substance to what it was saying then a...

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 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...