Mainlining Christmas

As someone old enough to remember the kind of movies Y2K is an homage to, this one's kind of difficult to rate objectively. Because on one hand, this is a damn near perfect recreation of a type of late '90s genre/comedy hybrid that permeated the era. Aside from the genre-pivot (which feels like it's reverse-engineered from Krampus ) and some of the gore effects being a little too advanced, this is more or less exactly what this movie would have looked and felt like had it been released in 1999. And making fun of Y2K paranoia was absolutely a popular pastiche as the millennium approached, so this wouldn't have felt out of place in theaters. Hell, I half suspect the only reason something with this exact premise wasn't released was studios, which relied much more on DVD sales and TV rights at the time, would have assumed there wouldn't be any interest in the film after January 1st, 2000. So on one hand, this is the movie it sets out to be, which should be a win. On...

My best five-word description of P2 is " Turbulence in a parking garage," which could almost pass for a complete review. There's very little substance in this horror/thriller, which hinges on its ability to create psychologically believably characters and create a convincing frightening scenario... but ultimately comes up just a little short on both counts. Decent production values, a solid performance from Rachel Nichols, and some well-meaning themes prevent this from being a total loss, but the movie's merits are overshadowed by its shortcomings to a degree that's hard to overstate. The premise is about as barebones as these things get: a woman is trapped in a parking garage on Christmas Eve by the attendant, who she discovers has been stalking her. The two of them are the only characters with more than a minute or two of screentime: this is by design a barebones story meant to focus on the attendant's psychosis and her reaction. But maybe the filmmakers re...

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...

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...

Before I even attempt to describe this 1929 silent German film, it's worth noting this movie is - in my opinion at least - bonkers in ways no movie with synchronized sound I've encountered approaches. The plot seems to be largely pulled from its source material, a pair of plays by Frank Wedekind detailing the life and death of Lulu, a fictional woman whose sexual charisma and liberality seem to bring about destruction. What makes this more than garden-variety misogyny is the fact that while Lulu certainly isn't blameless, virtually every turning point leading to a character's death, destitution, or corruption is instigated by a male character. The film examines the way society blames women for roles it forces upon them. It's not really Lulu who's responsible for the majority of what occurs, but rather those around her. Or at least that's my interpretation. I find silent pictures harder to analyze than the talkies we're all more familiar with due to the i...

It's taken me fifteen years, but I'm ready to make a case for 12 Monkeys being a Christmas movie. That's fifteen years of blog time - like most nerds of my generation I caught this in theaters 30 years ago. It left an impression, too - this is on the short list of my favorite movies of the 90s, as well as my favorite of Terry Gilliam's films (though in the interest of full disclosure, there are several I'm overdue for a rewatch and even a couple I've never seen, so that could conceivably change). If I'm remembering right, I last saw this about ten years ago when I wrote an article about the intersection of science fiction and the holidays , at which time I claimed (incorrectly) it couldn't reasonably be considered a Christmas movie. In the same article, I argued (correctly) that Prometheus could. What I hadn't pieced together at the time is that these are using the holidays for similar purposes, and further that 12 Monkeys is essentially a forerunner...

I've previously mentioned Jurassic World as a movie that challenges (some might say "breaks") my primary litmus test for a Christmas movie : that any movie clearly and unambiguously set at Christmas must be considered as part of the canon. At the time, I brought it up to acknowledge the existence of counter-examples, and I had no intention of ever discussing it in further depth. But as the focus of this blog has expanded, I've come to believe there may be value in a closer examination of movies both on the line and - as I think is the case here - just on the other side of that line. To be clear, my opinion of whether this counts as a Christmas movie hasn't changed on rewatch. While a handful of elements early in the film establish the events are set near the holidays (I'll be more specific in a moment), their use is fleeting, trivial, and somewhat contradictory. It's a detail that seems to be present for tonal and character beats that I can only assume mad...

There's a real possibility this is the lowest-budgeted production I've ever looked at for this blog. Even the term "micro-budget" doesn't convey the experience of watching this. I've seen student films with significantly higher production values. And, for what it's worth, that's all intentional. This isn't trying to be "good" for any meaningful definition of that word. It's very clearly aiming for the sort of movie a group of friends might rent in the late '90s and laugh at. This was, of course, the decade of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (unsurprisingly, both Feeders and Feeders 2 were eventually covered by RiffTrax). The filmmakers behind these movies are twin brothers John and Mark Polonia, credited as co-directors on Feeders 2. Mark is also the star and wrote the script under a pseudonym. The main cast members also appear to be Mark's family, though the kids were credited under different names (possibly his wife, too - she...

Pinning this down to a genre - or even a short list of genres - is virtually impossible. The movie, for better and worse, plays like a barrage of ideas and imagery drawn from Ghostbusters, Blade, Marvel movies (Doctor Strange in particular), The Matrix, Men In Black, as well as more obscure fare - there's a surprising amount of The Frighteners in this. Meanwhile, the pacing feels like it's right out of a Michael Bay Transformers movie, which I promise is only 50% intended as an insult (Nekrotronic, for all its faults, is consistently interesting to look at, which is no small feat on a limited budget). If I had to try to classify this, I'd settle on action/adventure/comedy/horror/fantasy/superhero. More than any of that, this feels like a tongue-in-cheek two-decade-late adaptation of Mage: The Ascension (ask your parents to ask those weird people they knew in college). You'll note something was missing from that long line of genres: Christmas movie. And that's going ...