Christmas turkeys…
Christmas aye. Bloody great isn’t it. Hungover and full the whole time. Supermarkets absolutely unbearable. Loads of drunk driving. Terrible music. And this year is even more miserable than ever. Just call me Ebenezer. Colour me Phoebe Cates. Cancel the whole thing. Bah, humbug!
I’m joking, of course. I love Christmas really, and I particularly love Christmas films. I love them so much in fact that for five, long years I endeavored to imbibe 12 Christmas films in 12 days every festive season – a total of 60 Christmas films. This culminated in the definitive top 10 Christmas films list released in 2019. Which leaves us with only one more task before I’m free of Christmas films ever. And that task isn’t pretty…
Let’s begin:
10. Jingle All the Way (1996)
IMDB: 5.6/10 Rotten Tomatoes: 17%
If you showed this film to somebody who had no knowledge of Arnold Schwarzenegger they would be utterly baffled as to why Jingle All the Way ever received a cinematic release.
The highlight of Brian Levant’s film from a technical stand point was when I nodded off for ten minutes and had a dream that I lived in a wooden shack with a lovely, old, loyal dog. I awoke to find one of Arnie’s three facial expressions staring back at me. Truly when you stare deep into Arnie… Arnie stares back into you.
Jingle All the Way is a kid’s film that features a man explicitly trying to have sex with his neighbour’s wife. It takes in a genuinely offensive racial slur (shaking like a dog in a Chinese restaurant). The acting, script and execution are truly terrible all the way through. Possibly Arnie’s worst ever film. Should have jingled all the way to the bin.
9. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
IMDB: 6.2/10 Rotten Tomatoes: 49%
A colour palette that looks like an elf has been sick on the camera, a gurning, grotesque performance from the world’s most unlikable actor (Jim Carrey, obviously), and a script that reads as if it were written by someone who absolutely hates children, Christmas and presents, How the Grinch Stole Christmas is probably the most unpleasant film on this list. It’s also, unforgivably, over two hours long. Disgraceful.
Somehow, director Ron Howard made an origin film about an angry, green dickhead that was worse than both Hulk films. It’s almost impressive.
8. A Christmas Carol (2019)
IMDB: 7.2/10 Rotten Tomatoes: 52%
Ok, technically not a film, but this BBC miniseries was insultingly terrible. I must begin by making it clear just how deeply I love A Christmas Carol. I love the Muppets version. I love Scrooged. I love that little nightcap that Scrooge often wears. I just love the whole damn thing. It might just be the greatest story ever told. A Christmas Carol has it all. Redemption, ghosts, prize turkeys, undigested bits of beef – what more could you want in a story? So, the decision to take Charles Dickens’ mesmerising prose and toss it all in the bin in favour of a total rewrite was never going to sit well with this guy.
I loved Scrooge before watching this version and now he is forever tainted by that hideous scene in which he sexually assaults Mary Cratchit. Absolutely vile.
7. The Christmas Chronicles 2 (2020)
IMDB: 6/10 Rotten Tomatoes: 71%
The only film on the list that wasn’t part of the original 12 Days of Christmas Films run, it sneaks in here by managing to be so abysmal that it simply couldn’t be ignored.
Director Chris Columbus strives to hit every conceivable Christmas cliche going, and in doing so, he crafts a film that surely could only appeal to small children and the simple minded. There isn’t a shred of originality here. The musical numbers are uninspiring and forgettable. The elves unbearable. The acting (Kurt Russell aside) offensive. It is clear that even one sequel is a massive step too far for this franchise, so I dread to think what the crushingly inevitable third Christmas Chronicle will deliver next year. An aberration.
6. Deck the Halls (2006)
IMDB: 5/10 Rotten Tomatoes: 6%
Deck the Halls is basically a rehash of Jingle All the Way, but a little meaner and a little less fun. Also, despite being just over a decade old, this film has aged really badly. One scene in which Danny De Vito and Matthew Broderick slobber over a trio of teenage girls only to find out that the girls are their respective daughters is particularly uncomfortable. It is mentioned earlier in the film that De Vito’s on-screen twin daughters are only 15. Cue lots of ‘jokes’ about how slutty they are. Weird.
All that being said, whilst researching this film (yes, this is what my life has become now), I did come across possibly my favourite ever bit of movie trivia. According to actress Gillian Vigman, Matthew Broderick could be found on set shaking his head in disbelief, repeatedly stating “I’ve hit rock bottom.”
Merry Christmas.
5. The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)
IMDB: 2.1/10 Rotten Tomatoes: 27%
For those of you that don’t know, back in 1978 CBS produced a one off Star Wars holiday special around Christmas time that was fully licensed by Lucasfilm. Chewbacca’s family on his home planet of Kashyyyk are waiting for Chewie to return home from his adventures with Han Solo to celebrate Life Day.
For the opening 10-15 minutes or so, the only on screen characters are Chewie’s family who of course don’t speak English, and bizarrely, there are no subtitles. Then, Chewie’s son turns on a hologram game, similar to the one on the Millenium Falcon, that features humans in garish colours performing circus tricks in what can only be described as an ongoing and seemingly never ending nightmare. It is an assault on the senses. I was truly aghast.
A lot of the segments in this two hour (!) special are films within a film, and it is here that things take a truly troubling turn. Firstly, Chewie’s father is fitted with a headset through which he watches a virtual woman talk about their connection, before she sings a really long song whilst looking straight into the camera, and indeed into your very soul.
Later, Chewie’s wife (or mother – it is difficult to fathom) watches an instructional video that could only have been directed by David Lynch and the dark lord Satan himself. This is followed by a soap opera entitled ‘Life on Tatooine’. Can you imagine anything as fucking boring as life on Tatooine?
Frankly, the whole thing is terrifying.
4. The Santa Clause 2 (2002)
IMDB: 5.6/10 Rotten Tomatoes: 56%
The Santa Clause 2 is probably the worst thing that has ever happened to me. It is difficult to fathom why Tim Allen felt the need to birth this grotesque sequel a full eight years after the original, but I’m assuming it wasn’t because of a clamour from ‘fans’.
The plot is bizarrely difficult to follow with Santa Claus (Tim Allen) having to find a wife in three days because of the Mrs Claus ‘clause’ (really). Meanwhile, his son, who is causally stepfathered by Judge Reinhold as if that is normal, has been placed on the naughty list. Because of the Mrs Claus ‘claus’, Santa is suffering from being de-santa’d which means he is slowly morphing back into just every day Tim Allen like some kind of monstrous reverse werewolf. Then things get really, uncomfortably weird…
First off, to cover Santa’s absence the elves produce a nightmarish toy Santa who is also played by Tim Allen. Sometimes, toy Tim Allen and real Tim Allen interact, leading me to question if I had accidentally stumbled into a black hole rather than just put on a Christmas film. Secondly, the reindeer appear and they talk because of course they do. But they don’t talk like you would imagine a CGI reindeer to talk. Instead, they sound like an actual reindeer would if you could somehow manipulate their vocal chords in order to force them to speak. If that sounds like something that would cause the dark lord Cthulu to switch the TV off in a fog of terror and confusion then that’s because it is. It is that.
Now is probably a good time to mention that this movie has 5 credited writers on IMDB. And they thought that all of this madness added up to something that can be described as a film and not an existential crisis. By the end, Tim Allen uses magic and blackmail to trick a beautiful woman into becoming his wife whilst defeating his plastic doppelgänger in the process. It’s difficult to imagine how Christmas can be salvaged at this point…
3. Jack Frost (1997)
IMDB: 4.6 Rotten Tomatoes: 17%
This version of Jack Frost is like the demented uncle of the bizarre Michael Keaton version that came out the following year. That film sees Keaton’s family man come back to life as a cheerful snowman. This version instead features a sadistic serial killer… who comes back to life as a cheerful snowman. To be fair, the scenes in which the comically oversized snowman is killing anyone are mostly wonderful. The problem is that every second that the snowman isn’t on screen feels like an eternity. At one point, I went to make a sandwich during a particularly tedious scene and came back ten minutes later to find that nothing had moved on. The same two characters were just chatting. It’s like they had thirty minutes of film still to use, so they just left it running.
In the third act, a shady organisation called The Company are introduced, with one FBI agent commenting ‘watch your mouth’ at the mere mention of them. Hilariously, we never hear from them again. These idiosyncrasies are what ensure Jack Frost’s place in the annals of terrible Christmas movies. It’s a hall of famer.
2. Christmas With the Kranks (2004)
IMDB: 5.4/10 Rotten Tomatoes: 5%
I’ve spoken before about how moral ambiguity is so important in cinema because in real life people aren’t all good or all bad, they are just people. However. In some films, Christmas films, for example, the audience needs to know who to root for. In Christmas With The Kranks every character is unlikable or forgettable. Jamie Lee Curtis’ over-the-top screeching is an insult to everything she has achieved in her illustrious career, Dan Aykroyd’s performance is just plain weird, and Tim Allen is, predictably, Tim Allen. It’s all he knows…
When normal suburban family the Kranks decide to skip Christmas in order to go on a cruise, their friends and neighbours go crazy and start spying on them and aggressively singing Christmas carols outside their house. There is no real explanation for the level of vitriol that is unleashed against the Kranks and then, half way through, they all decide to come together to help the black sheep family of the neighbourhood after all. It’s all very strange. Character motivations change seemingly on a whim with no explanation, the sentimental pay off at the end is completely unearned, and the unsteady mix of mild fantasy and screwball comedy does not blend well. Why does a snowman come to life at various intervals during the movie? Who knows. Certainly not me.
1. The Holiday (2006)
IMDB: 6.9/10 Rotten Tomatoes: 50%
Let’s deal with the cast first. Jude Law is a weird guy. He looks weird. This means that by extension he can play weird. He is brilliant when portraying a robot gigolo or a narcissistic pontiff, but when he tries to play a normal person he looks like he is going to malfunction or power down. Quite frankly he terrified me in this film. Part Patrick Bateman, part T-1000, at one point he puts a napkin on his head to create a comedy character for his daughters. It was literally the most frightening thing I have seen on screen this year. Then we have Jack Black, who I think is trying to be charming, but in actual fact wanders around smiling that smile that people wear when somebody says something to them that they haven’t quite heard. You know that smile that you do when you are thinking, was that a question they asked me? Or were they just making a statement?
Kate Winslett and Cameron Diaz are even worse. There has never in the history of the world existed two women like this. Nobody behaves in this manner. They talk to themselves constantly. They reference their own personality quirks seemingly at random. They make decisions that could only make sense in the midst of a huge mental breakdown. The whole thing is bizarre.
Also, who the hell is this film for? We watch cinema either to escape our reality or to see it represented on screen. If anyone feels like they are being represented by The Holiday please don’t get in touch. I can’t imagine the kind of person that would enjoy a film that is based in the normal human world, but this is so far from what actual people are like that the result is closer to an episode of Black Mirror then a nice festive film for the whole family to enjoy.
The Holiday will ruin your Christmas. You’ll become too afraid to open your advent calendar in case you find Jude Law’s smirking face hiding behind the chocolate. You’ll wake up in a cold sweat at the prospect of Jack Black tumbling down your chimney, smiling that vacant smile, as he crashes his way into your living room like a drunken rhinoceros.
Joking aside though, this is the nadir. This is the very worst one. Out of all the Christmas films I have ever watched, The Holiday is the absolute lowest of the low. Watch literally any other Christmas film instead.
As the final word and indeed the final insult, can I just point out that this film is over two hours long. What kind of world allows that to happen?
Christmas is cancelled. Someone tell Jesus.