By Tyler Wilson
Originally published by The Spokesman Review, December 2017
Good Christmas movies warm the soul. They tap into a holiday spirit few of us can probably recreate in real life.
In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” a lifetime of kindness and self-sacrifice rewards George Bailey in the end. “A Christmas Story” captures the feeling of being a kid and opening the perfect present on Christmas morning.
While an argument can be made about just how many Christmas movies reach classic status, most would agree the list is short compared to the abundance of mediocre and genuinely terrible holiday-themed movies.
Cable networks like Lifetime, Hallmark and Freeform provide an onslaught of new Christmas movies every year, and Hollywood serves up at least one or two theatrical releases each season (in 2017, the sequels “A Bad Moms Christmas” and “Daddy’s Home 2” fill the quota).
Cable movies generally operate with the intention of being familiar and comfortable. If you’ve seen one Candace Cameron-Bure Christmas movie, you’ve essentially seen them all, and the plots are straight-forward enough to follow even while wrapping presents or preparing baked goods.
They’re usually romances in which a saintly protagonist slowly falls in love with a person they underappreciated or even outright hated at the start of the film. Magic can be involved – often imitating a classic holiday trope – a Santa Claus hidden in plain sight, various “Christmas Carol” scenarios, or often “Groundhog Day” style repetition of some kind (“Groundhog Day” isn’t technically a Christmas movie, but it’s snowy, stealthily heartwarming and perfect).
Most of these films are, technically, bad. They too often rely on thin characterizations and lazy storylines, and outside of the Holiday Movie Superstars (yep, Cameron-Bure counts), the acting leaves much to be desired.
Almost none are inherently rewatchable, at least not how we typically rewatch our favorite films for the memorable dialogue, nifty action scenes or favorite performances. They’re comfortable distractions, and cable networks understand this. They know audiences will likely sit through the “new familiar” than rewatch the same movie.
Every now and then, a cable movie can tap into what bad movie enthusiasts enjoy about some of the worst (and unintentionally entertaining) Christmas movies. The attributes of a good bad Christmas movie follow the same criteria that separates “The Room” and “Troll 2” from the deliberately cheesy junk like “Sharknado.” The most entertaining bad movies are made unironically. They are made to be good, but then something goes horribly wrong.
The key good bad movie attributes include:
- Unintentionally funny technical shortcomings
- Unearned or overly saccharine sentimentality
- Plotlines that don’t conform to any basic semblance of logic
- Performances and dialogue intended to be taken seriously but misses the mark in spectacular fashion.
With bad Christmas movies, another attribute often appears – the intention of celebrating the holiday spirit while accidentally proving the opposite.This especially applies to one of the ultimate bad Christmas movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Jingle All the Way” from 1996, which exaggerates the consumerism of the Christmas season to the point of absolute insanity.
In the film, Schwarzenegger plays a busy dad who forgets to buy his son the hottest toy of the Christmas season – a “Turbo Man” action figure. Schwarzenegger battles vicious crowds, corrupt mall Santas, and an especially deranged mailman (comedian Sinbad, at the peak of his awful, awful powers).
The film ends with an especially confounding climax in which Schwarzenegger and Sinbad engage in a slapstick battle at a town parade while dressed as Turbo Man and his archnemesis. It’s impossible to see this tone-deaf finale coming, which makes its drastic shift into cartoonish antics all the more (unintentionally) hilarious.
“Jingle All the Way” tries to tack on a message about the kid not needing the toy so long as his dad participates in his life, but it’s one line of dialogue that instead confirms the frivolousness of pursuing the garbage product in the first place. At least in “A Christmas Story,” the BB gun lives up to the hype, even after the “you’ll shoot your eye out” premonition comes to fruition.
The wrongheaded message of “Jingle All the Way” represents the core reason why (some) movie lovers are attracted to bad Christmas movies. While we may never experience the magical Christmases of the classics, we can certainly do better than Schwarzenegger and Sinbad.
There’s comfort in knowing that while Christmas isn’t always joyous and romantic, at least it isn’t as superficial or as artificial as what Hollywood gives us in its worst products.
The Five Best Worst Christmas Movies
- “Jingle All the Way,” 1996
Though it serves as a demerit against its bad movie status, the late Phil Hartman manages to be legitimately funny as Schwarzenegger’s “perfect Dad” neighbor. Luckily Jake Lloyd (little Anakin Skywalker) tips the movie back into the negative column.
- “Christmas with the Kranks,” 2004
This film contains an especially high quotient of desperate slapstick for a film that doesn’t really offer anything for children, minus its PG rating. “Kranks” stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Tim Allen (a repeat bad Christmas movie offender) as empty-nesters who try to abandon their typical holiday traditions in favor of a luxury tropical cruise. The neighborhood reacts with unseemly aggression, muddling the festive message they so devoutly preach.
- “Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July,” 1979
You may never be able to look at the original “Rudolph” and “Frosty” specials the same way after seeing this baffling sequel featuring some truly disgusting-looking stop-motion animation. It includes Rudolph accidentally stealing money, a struggling circus, and a villain named Winterbolt who threatens to melt Frosty’s family. It only gets crazier from there. Technically not a movie but too crazy to omit.
- “Deck the Halls,” 2006
Danny DeVito battles Matthew Broderick for outdoor lighting supremacy in a movie about terrible people doing terrible things in the spirit of Christmas. In its lowest of lowlights, Broderick’s character accidentally catcalls his own daughter with an especially disgusting uttering of “Who’s Your Daddy?”
- “Elves,” 1989
You could do a whole list of bad Christmas-themed horror movies, but nothing really matches the cheap, unintentional hilarity of “Elves.” The film’s awful dialogue sounds especially batty coming out of the mouth of hero Dan Haggerty (“The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams”) playing an ex-cop-turned-mall Santa who takes on a tiny, rubber, neo-Nazi elf.