Mainlining Christmas

Call Me Claus is a made-for-TV movie about an aging Santa Claus recruiting a home-shopping network executive to take his place. The concept, as these things go, could have been worse. The execution really couldn't have been. The executive is played by Whoopie Goldberg, and Nigel Hawthorne plays the old Santa. This was Hawthorne's last role: he passed away a few weeks after this premiered. It's really hard not to make a joke right now. The movie opens in 1965. A young girl asks a mall Santa to bring her father, who's serving in the military, home for Christmas. He waffles, but lets the kid try on his hat. The hat glows, but no one notices. When the girl returns home, a pair of army officers are waiting to give her mother some bad news. This entire sequence was shot with all the emotional resonance of an online tax tutorial. Maybe less, now that I think about it. The story jumps ahead to the present day. Well, it jumps to 2001, which used to be the present d

Okay, we already watched the Christmas episode in season three . Here's the rest of them.   A Girl and Her Cat (1996) First we have to backtrack to episodes in seasons one and two. In this episode Salem throws a hissy fit (pun intended), stays out to make the family worried, and ends up catnapped by a little boy who wants a pet. There's a painfully obnoxious montage in this one as well, as Sabrina and her aunts (Hilda and Zelda) search for Salem. The highlights are references to Salem's backstory (he was originally human, but turned into a cat for trying to take over the world), and a scene where Sabrina steals Salem back by dressing as Santa and teleporting into the kid's closet, knowing no one will believe him. Also, Coolio has a cameo as a poster brought briefly to life. Oh, if you've never seen this show, you might not know that Salem is played at times by a truly ugly puppet cat and at times by a real cat. It's very strange. Sabrina Claus (1997)

I watched this show back when it aired, and I remember enjoying it. So, it's true, you can never go home again. This incredibly long-feeling half hour had a unnecessarily complicated plot. I'm going to sum up. Sabrina, being a teenager, isn't feeling the whole happy-family Christmas vibe Her aunts decide to double down on cheesy Christmas activities Cue montage that starts funny and goes on too long Sabrina is invited to a Christmas Eve party in the magical realm She goes, only to find out that it's an anti-Christmas party about mocking the holiday (The fact that she doesn't seem to know anyone there doesn't make much sense either.) She stops them from spying on and mocking people celebrating on Earth and storms out Only to discover that she has inadvertently deleted the holiday entirely She tries to convince people to remember Christmas Cue montage that doesn't start funny, only goes on too long She finally visits Santa/Father Christmas,

Watching movies for Mainlining Christmas is an enlightening process. We have become professionals. We are resistant to all but the worst writing, acting, directing and design. Today, I’m pleased to share some of our tips for keeping your mental health while watching holiday dreck. The defense mechanisms we’ll be practicing in this session are “Plausible Alternate Plot”, “Identifying Fakeconomics” and “Advanced Foreshaming”. A Princess for Christmas is a Hallmark Original movie that never believes in subtlety when you could be describing your emotions out loud, and is a great training ground for all of these techniques. Early on, the movie is full of easy targets for Identifying Fakeconomics. Main character Jules works in a small antique store in Buffalo, New York. She is the primary caretaker of her deceased sister’s two kids, Milo and Maddie. Even with survivor’s benefits of some type, there is no way she could maintain that large, well-appointed house and a full-time nanny on o

The Swan Princess Christmas is the third of four direct-to-video sequels to The Swan Princess, a movie which failed to make ten million dollars during its entire theatrical run and has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 44%. This is the first and only installment of the franchise I've ever seen, so I can't attest whether the abysmal writing, direction, and animation were par for the course, or if this fails to live up to the series's pitiful legacy. Assuming Wikipedia is right, this was the first in the series to be computer animated. For the majority of this movie's run time, the plot is essentially incomprehensible. The two leads, Derek and Odette, are getting ready to spend their first Christmas together. They have three talking animal sidekicks who almost never interact with them: a puffin, a turtle, and frog trying to get women to kiss him. And there's a cat who's working with the ghost of the villain from the first movie. To get a Christmas tree, Derek goes

BoJack Horseman is a Netflix animated series about a washed-up actor with a horse's head who had a successful sitcom a few decades earlier. I have, to date, seen exactly one episode, and that's this one. After watching it, I have no plans to watch any more. To be fair, it was difficult to get a read on the series from just the Christmas special, which - based on episode descriptions on Wikipedia - seems to be extremely different from the rest of the show. This one almost entirely consisted of two characters watching a Christmas episode of BoJack's old show. Given the premise is that the sitcom in question was abysmal, you can probably guess how that went. The frame story just focused on BoJack and his roommate at Christmas. BoJack's depressed, his roommate eats giant candy canes, and... that's about all you get until the end, when BoJack suddenly realizes the importance of spending the holiday with someone. Heart warming, I know. The sitcom episode concern

We came across a crappy-looking DVD titled, "Chanuka & Passover at Bubbe's" on a shelf of Chanukah (/Chanuka/Hanukkah) books at the local library and decided to throw ourselves on the grenade and save some poor kids from the experience. Naturally, we didn't bother watching the Passover section (we're Mainlining Christmas, not Mainlining Easter), but we sat through the forty-two minutes of low-rent puppetry constituting the Chanukah portion. I should mention that this thing has neither a Wikipedia page nor an IMDB entry, though it seems to be up on YouTube (at least at the moment), and it has at least one fan . We're not 100% sure of the date - the end of the credits cites 1988, but we're not actually sure whether that's when it was released, aired, or finished. Like a lot of children's entertainment, this is more premise than plot. It centers around two puppet children bringing their friend to their grandmother's for Chanukah. For rea

I am not a fan of Grumpy Cat. I know that the cat is fine, healthy, and as happy as you can consider a cat to be, but I find the actual cat off-putting because of the same physical differences that have made her an internet star. I am a fan of the smart people who are making lots of money off their mutant cat. You do you, and put your kids through school. Congrats. I’m proud of my maturity that I can say that, even after watching this…. thing. Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever is “of the moment” in the worst possible way. The filmmakers plainly knew that not a single person would care about this movie in six months, and so they stuffed it full of in-jokes and winking, nodding references to the meme, internet culture, and the movie’s own stupidity. I’m not talking subtle, here; I’m talking the cat asking the camera “Why are you still watching?” The problem is that constantly calling out the fact that the movie is stupid doesn’t actually A) make it somehow not stupid or B) absolv

The Nutcracker Scoob is notable for being the final episode of The New Scooby-Doo Mysteries, which is primarily significant for being the last time the character of Scrappy-Doo was inflicted on audiences as a series regular. As such, it was a tad anti-climatic. At the very least, they could have re-enacted the resolution of Old Yeller than turned on the laugh track. Now that would had gotten some ratings. Instead, they told a relatively straight-forward Scooby-Doo tale centered around a Christmas pageant at a children's home. Of course, the place is in danger even before the faux ghost shows up: a cruel, oddly Victorian businessman named Winslow Nickelby is trying to force them to sell him the building on Christmas Eve. It would be easier to feel for the owners if there was some indication the home contained anything other than a theater. Pretty soon, the monster of the week shows up. This one is called the "Ghost of Christmas Never," and she's cloaked in whit

I am unprepared for this review. It's not easy for me to admit as a writer, but I'm just not ready for this: my language skills aren't up to the task. So I'm going to need you to give me a moment. I just have to duck out of this tab, go over to Thesaurus.com, and look up as many synonyms as I can find for the word "stupid." Alright. I think we're ready to get started. The opening credits are in a font that's supposed to mimic a child's handwriting, but the bright green color makes them nearly indistinguishable from comic sans. At this point, we thought we had a pretty good idea what kind of movie we were sitting down to watch, but we were wrong: this montage was, inexplicably, the most thoughtful section of the film. Everything that came after was significantly more idiotic. We're introduced to the movie's star, played by Amy Acker making the most dunderheaded decision of her career. She's portraying Crystal, a vapid and naive d

Oh, right. That era when Disney tried capitalizing on every movie they'd ever made by producing an endless sea of direct-to-video sequels and spin-off TV series: I remember that. The original Lilo and Stitch movie is pretty great, though it's always seemed derivative of The Iron Giant to me. Not this episode though: it feels derivative of Dora the Explorer. The premise of the series, according to the internet, seems to involve Lilo and Stitch trying to locate a bunch of experiments, like Stitch. Apparently, this was connected to the direct-to-video sequel no one saw. I guess that sort of fits what I just watched. Sort of. The episode opens with Lilo explaining Christmas to Stitch. The results are less humorous than depressing. Also, it seems like like Jumba and Pleakley are living with them, for some reason. Also relevant is Gantu, who has an experiment pellet wrapped as a gift. Again, I'm not entirely clear on why he did this. Fortunately, I don't care in the l

In this world, there are bad horror movies. There are crappy horror movies. Then there are horror movies so unbelievably awful you honestly can't tell whether they were intended to be comedic or not. Since those categories aren't mutually exclusive, it shouldn't come as any surprise that Elves is all three. I first heard about this on Red Letter Media's Christmas Special . I immediately rushed to Netflix to add it to the yuletide queue, only to discover that Netflix has never heard of the movie. It turns out this isn't too surprising, since - as far as I can tell - it has never been released on DVD. Unfortunately, someone had converted an old VHS copy and uploaded it to Youtube. The movie is about a girl named Kirsten, whose grandfather is a Nazi scientist who impregnated his daughter to create a pure woman, so that one day she could be mated with an elf and give birth the master race and/or the Anti-Christ (the movie is slightly unclear on this point). Th

You might think a direct-to-video sequel to A Christmas Story would have no chance of living up to the original, but I thought it was a worthy successor. Granted, I consider the original one of the most overrated pieces of crap ever produced, but I think it says something that WB's home entertainment division was able to meet the same level of quality. Specifically, it says they're two-bit hacks who could barely figure out which way to point the camera, and even then I spent most of movie wishing they'd get that wrong and save me from at least a scene or two of utter agony. Watching this on DVD is enough to make one nostalgic for the days of televised movies, where you at least get the soothing respite of a commercial break to dull the pain. A Christmas Story 2 , referred to in its trailer as  A Christmas Story 2: The Official Sequel is set 6 years after the original, and Ralph is about to turn 16. If such a thing is possible, the plot is slightly less defined than it

Do you remember the scene in the first Home Alone movie where Kevin tied a bucket of paint to a rope and swung it at the robbers? Have you ever stopped to consider what the entire movie would have been like from the perspective of the paint inside the bucket? I mean, I assume it would have started absolutely still and sat that way for hours on end, before being slightly jostled. Then, a few hours later, it would have sloshed around, before splashing against the wall. Finally, it would have settled again. Mostly, it would have just been still. It would probably have dried a little as the movie progressed. Not a lot and certainly not quickly, but an imperceptible quantity of paint would have dried up. While that's not the plot of the fifth Home Alone movie, I think it offers a nice encapsulation of the experience of sitting through the film. That's another way of saying this movie isn't as shockingly awful as its predecessors. And that this improvement is a very, ver

This movie can best be described as a pretentious art film trying to masquerade as a cult hit. The vast majority is in black and white and attempts to duplicate science fiction films from the 50's and 60's. They actually did this pretty well, setting aside the copious cursing. Oh, and the marching band with vaginas for heads. Sorry. Probably should have put a *spoiler* warning before that. At any rate, most of the visuals were in line with old movies. Based on still images, you could even be convinced you were getting ready to watch something campy or at least interesting. Instead, imagine a dimly-lit empty corridor made to look like a 60's SF set. Now imagine someone walking down it slowly while looking downcast. That's about two-thirds of the movie. God! I'm sorry. Again, I forgot that *spoiler* warning. There's very little narrative glue holding this together, and it's a bit of a stretch calling the malformed story line a plot at all. With tha

The strange lighting, coupled with the almost alien music and meandering story line of Eyes Wide Shut , created a dreamlike effect. And by "dreamlike effect," I literally mean the movie almost put me to sleep, because it was astonishingly, bafflingly, almost unbelievably boring. This was one of the most boring movies I've seen since... well... actually, it hasn't been that  long since I've seen something this boring, but keep in mind I watch a hell of a lot of bad Christmas flicks. But the competition generally goes more than ten minutes without showing naked people: Eyes Wide Shut has no excuse for failing to hold anyone's attention. I heard a while ago that this was a Christmas movie, which I wasn't aware of. Turns out, the movie is Christmas through and through. Christmas lights, in particular, are in damn near every scene that doesn't contain weird sex cults. Half of the film's lighting seems to come from multicolored bulbs. The other half

Well, here’s one for the list, ‘rightly consigned to the dustbin of history’. Elmer is an elf, but he hates being an elf. It’s not that he’s bad at it, he’s just a complete slacker. Ladies and gentlemen, your protagonist. After a few painful scenes after which Elmer should have been summarily fired, he pulls out an Elf manual and discovers that he could become a real boy (just like Pinocchio?) by going to the human world, doing a good deed, and making a wish by noon on Christmas Eve. He semi-accidentally sets off some high-tech gizmos on Santa’s sleigh, and the sleigh brings him to Plantville, USA. Guess what’s in Plantville. Did you say a plant, boys and girls? You win more of this terrible film. A plastics plant, the only thing in town, has recently shut down and the town is on edge. You’ll never know, though, because the characters are all either completely over the top caricatures or completely flat and uninteresting. The villain who ran the plant is introduced randomly

I haven't seen very many episodes of The Brady Bunch , but from the little I remember, A Very Brady Christmas managed to capture the stone and style of the show perfectly. Incidentally, I believe the previous sentence ranks among the all-time most condemning insults I've ever lobbed in a review for this blog. It should be noted that this was produced in 1988, which was about nineteen years after the series had started. By this time, the Bradys had actually expanded into something of a cinematic Universe. Most of the kids had gotten married in earlier reunions and spin-off series, opening up a whole new generation of cloying Brady children. The best description for the plot is that of a blender. What little story exists does so in brief, unrelated chunks. The impetus for the reunion revolves around Mike and Carol Brady trying to surprise each other with a Christmas vacation. The special sets this up as a potential major plot point, before defusing the tension in a scene a

Background information on this special is sparse. It's an animated half-hour story providing a fictitious origin for the song of the same name. It features Phil Hartman, though he's warping his voice to a degree I couldn't even tell which character he was playing (not surprisingly, it's the lead). This is narrated by a partridge and concerns four named characters: King and Princess Silverbell, Sir Carolboomer, and his squire, Hollyberry. If you read those names and thought to yourself they were hilarious, I've got some good news for you: there's a special floating around Youtube you're going to love. Unfortunately, I've got some bad news for you, too: there's almost certainly a two-foot spike sticking out of your forehead that's impairing normal cognitive function. Seek immediate medical help (after watching the special, of course). The plot is thin to a degree that the very term "plot" is a generous overstatement. The special sta

At 5% Fresh, Rotten Tomatoes underrates this movie. Based on similar films, I'd have expected 7% - perhaps even 8% - positive; not 5%. Critics seem to have punished this movie more harshly than it deserves on account of its horribly disgusting message, along with the fact that it does, in fact, suck. But these things all come down to magnitude. Christmas with the Kranks sucks less, not more, than Surviving Christmas , which is far overrated at 7% fresh. If I were the Kranks' two-bit hack of a director, Joe Roth, I'd be angry at this injustice. Let's back up a bit. The movie stars Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis as a couple who decide to skip Christmas. It's based on a book called, "Skipping Christmas." Why the title change? Because it was released the same year as Surviving Christmas , and the names were too similar. Once again, the Universe is a cold and unfair place for Joe Roth. Of course, "Skipping Christmas" is a shitty title,