The movie begins with Doris Walker, single crabby mother, in charge of making sure that none of the drunks in the Macy’s parade get carried off by the Underdog balloon and she finds Kris Kringle hassling this drunken Santa Clause. Like all those classic movies where the understudy goes on after the star breaks her leg or is just too much of an alcoholic to perform, Kris steps into the roll on a moment’s notice and does a splendid job.

Doris was also divorced quite some time back, so she pretty much hates the world and manifests this by raising her kid (Susan) not to have any kind of imagination and more importantly not to believe in Santa Claus!

Backstage in the Macy’s locker room, Santa has an encounter with a young janitor named Chucky. Chucky is one of those chubby, ugly do-gooders who likes to dress up as Santa and hand gifts out to the kids at the Y. Santa is all for this, since anything is better than having a drunk run around dressed like you and passing out on parade floats.

Meanwhile there is a guy named Fred who has been sucking up to Susan in an effort to get into her mom’s panties. I know what you guys out there are thinking: There has to be an easier way. Well there isn’t, so just buck up and get interested in Barbie dolls and Holly Hobbie.

Susan and Fred work together to get her frigid, I mean reserved, mom to invite him over for dinner. Susan does her part by asking Doris to let her new buddy Frank come over, but then asks Frank in front of Doris if that was the way he wanted her to do it. You’ve probably already gone ahead and identified this burgeoning relationship as one that is going to need a little help from Santa.

Back at Macy’s, they’ve decided to hire Kris on as the department store Santa, since he comes with his own beard and costume. He immediately shows himself to be one of those Santas that plays by his own rules, by promising kids toys their parents can’t find, then telling the parents to go get them at someplace other than Macy’s, and even by speaking Dutch!

The people at Macy’s are a bit disconcerted that the dude they are paying to move overstocked merchandise (there’s a great scene where the scummy store manager is telling him to push the toys they bought too many of) is sending customers out to places with better deals. Before they can put him on suspension though, the customers tell them that they think it’s great that Macy’s has their best interests at heart and that they will be buying all their stuff at Macy’s from now on! (Unless Santa tells them not to of course.)

The higher ups immediately see this as a wonderful public relations opportunity, but Doris has already gone and fired his fat ass!

Through the machinations of the plot too ridiculous to tell, somehow Santa ends up rooming with Frank. This allows Santa to hang out with Susan and teach her the importance of pretending and stuff. She tells Santa that the only thing she wants for Christmas is a nice home in the suburbs.

Complications arise though when Chucky tells Santa about how he’s not going down to the Y anymore because the store counselor told him that the only reason he did those good deeds is because he has a guilt complex and is trying to make up for the bad stuff he did even though he hasn’t done anything bad at all!

Santa is enraged and he goes off to confront the guy and Santa sets him straight, telling him that he has no business playing his amateur head games with poor little Chucky. Then, just to make sure he’s gotten his point across, he whaps the guy on his head! Santa gets hauled away and he intentionally fails all the tests at the mental hospital because it’s obvious that the world has turned into one giant reindeer turd sandwich!

Frank and Santa decide they there are going to fight the commitment hearing and Frank embarks on an effort to prove Kris Kringle really is Santa.

What’s great about this movie is the underlying cynicism that pervades it. Santa has to go to court to prove he’s real, the only reason the judge declares him to be Santa is because he’s concerned about his decision’s ramifications on his re-election bid and Macy’s only puts up with Kris sending people to other stores, not because it’s the best deal, but because it gives Macy’s good publicity!

Even so the movie was enjoyable and its message that we could all benefit from having a little faith is a good one. Thankfully, Santa is well-played by Gwenn and while his Santa is trying hard to make people believe again, he isn’t about to take any crap either!

Natalie Wood also shines as the kid who desperately wants to believe in spite of what her worthless mother has tried to hammer into her. And when you’ve got a Kris Kringle who’s assaulting people, beating the rap at trial, and most importantly sets you up with a sweet new house in the burbs, it’s not hard to understand how she’s able to learn to get some of that good old fashioned Christmas cheer into her!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Despite that, it’s easy to say that it isn’t nearly the Christmas disaster that their previous snow job, Mickey’s Once Upon A Christmas since this time they manage to include some material that wasn’t generated by their “straight to video” division.

Specifically, you’ve got one short from the fifties featuring Pluto and Mickey Mouse and then you have the A Christmas Carol featurette they did in the early eighties. These two segments are the highlight of the disc, but it’s questionable as to whether their thirty or so minutes of material justify purchasing this.

This particular night at the House of Mouse (Mickey’s nightclub) is Christmas Eve. We arrive just as they’re finishing up for the evening and everyone is preparing to go home, presumably for Christmas. I say presumably because of the make up of the crowd.

The House of Mouse is one of these multicultural clubs where characters from all the past Disney animated films gather to relax. You can see the Beauty And The Beast crowd, the Cinderella crowd, the Mad Hatter, and the likes of Eyeore there. I even saw Pete’s Dragon!

Old Man Winter though has gone and snowed everybody in at the House of Mouse and you know what that means! Time for an all-night show of shows with a distinctly Christmas theme!

Aside from everyone being snowed in and forced to sit through these things (I’m guessing most of them were pretty wasted by the middle of the first segment – I know I was), you have the story line of Donald being all “bah humbug” about the holidays and his best buddy Mickey trying to give him some holiday cheer by torturing him with these stories.

And in fact, Donald (and his three nephews) were the subjects of the first little bit involving the building of a snowman and some problems Donald had ice skating. Crudely animated and indifferently scripted, this tale immediately lost my interest as it became evident that it would merely be one of these cartoons where the characters would get chased around a lot.

The next segment, Pluto’s Christmas Tree is instantly recognizable as coming from an earlier time when some effort was put into the backgrounds of the drawings and the characters looked like they actually had some depth to them and the colors didn’t seem as garish.

To be fair, this cartoon is basically one where Pluto just chased Chip and Dale around Mickey’s Christmas tree. There is actually some imagination here though with bits like a chimpmunk hiding as one of the Santa candles on Mickey’s mantle and Mickey trying to light him up.

Following that is a version of The Nutcracker with Mickey, Donald, and Goofy and it goes on too long and features Donald in mouse ears and buck teeth as the bad guy, making him look Count Duckla.

It’s narrated by John Cleese and they try to go for that “too cool for school” bit where the narrator is a smart aleck who interacts with the characters, but it isn’t terribly smart and certainly isn’t funny.

Finally they get to the meat of this thing and pull out Mickey’s Christmas Carol. Released back in 1983 along with The Rescuers re-release, it ended up being nominated for an Oscar in the Best Animated Short category.

Also making appearances are Donald, Goofy, Daisy, Minnie, Jiminy Cricket, Uncle Scrooge, and even the evil Pete! This is a pretty quick and dirty retelling of Dickens’ story and its twenty five or so minutes go by really fast.

The animation looks good, there’s actually a story, all-star cast, and no horrible musical numbers to mar the Christmas action. A definite winner.

Once Scrooge gets finished becoming warm and fuzzy, we make one more unwelcome trip back to the House of Mouse and everything is wrapped up with one of the worst sugary songs about the season or giving or friendship or whatever that I’ve ever had the displeasure to endure.

Obviously, your enjoyment of Mickey’s Magical Christmas will depend on your tolerance for the stuff on it that stinks, but if you’re just interested in seeing Mickey’s Christmas Carol, you’re best bet is to hunt down Mickey Mouse in Living Color – Volume 2 where you can see it in all its widescreen glory.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

And if that seems like a decidedly un-Christmas-y spirit to be in, then you haven’t endured this cheaply made, cynical holiday cash in, particularly the segment featuring Goofy and his extreme sport loving son Max.

First up though was a tale featuring Donald Duck and his three delinquent nephews. While strictly average and sporting a story as familiar as the Christmas Day that Huey, Dewey, and Louie are forced to relive over and over, this is the most entertaining part of the movie, though you’re left wishing that the writers had worked a little more imagination into their retread story.

Basically, this is the same concept behind the movie Groundhog Day. The kids wake up on Christmas, play with their presents and have a high old time all day and at the end of the day, one of them wishes upon a star that Christmas didn’t have to end.

This results are predictable: Initially, the three of them are excited about this Twilight Zone-ish development, but rapidly grow bored (didn’t they realize they’d be opening the same crappy presents every day for eternity?) and grow to dread seeing Chip and Dale playing with their new train in their tree house every morning, just like the audience in Groundhog Day grew to dread hearing Sonny and Cher on Bill Murray’s radio every morning.

Sure, they try to freshen things up as the Christmases pile up, but their efforts aren’t terribly impressive. (The only thing they could come up with to avoid their tubby aunt’s kisses was to get dressed up in scuba gear?)

They also replace Daisy’s cooked turkey with a live turkey and this ends up with Donald’s house completely wrecked and Christmas ruined. The boys feel real bad about this and resolve to make the next Christmas Day the best ever.

Uh, why would they feel bad? Wouldn’t every thing be back to normal the next morning? Why the sudden attack of conscience in a world where actions no longer have any consequences because you get a do-over the very next day?

For whatever reason (probably so that all the bratty kids watching will learn some kind of lesson) Huey, Dewey, and Louie finally figure out that a strictly secular Christmas experience isn’t just about getting lots of crappy toys, but is in fact about giving.

While that one was okay and left you wishing that someone had cared enough to add some originality to that worn out, but intriguing idea (surely kids that could live the same day over and over and over would do more than use their toys to make Donald drop breakfast, especially since he did that anyway on the original Christmas), the next story involving Goofy and Max makes you wonder just how punishing the full length movies these two were in (A Goofy Movie, An Extremely Goofy Movie) were.

The story in this one is that Max wants a fancy snow board for Christmas from Santa, but once Pete, his jerk neighbor tells him there isn’t any Santa Clause, he loses his faith that there really is a Santa and more importantly, becomes convinced that he won’t get his precious snow board.

It’s up to Goofy to restore Max’s faith in Santa, though good parenting would dictate that it was up to Goofy to tell Max to quit being such a freaking cry baby and that if your entire existence is based around whether you get a free snow board, then you’re seriously maladjusted.

The final episode is a bit of a letdown since it’s only run of the mill boring. It’s Mickey and Minnie in their version of O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi”. We all know how this one goes down: each of them sells their prized possession to get the other a gift related to the prized possession the other has just sold.

Kids who aren’t familiar with the story might be interested, but for everyone else, there’s nothing new in this version save the crappy Christmas songs that Mickey plays incessantly on his prized harmonica. (You’re just counting the minutes until he has to sell that obnoxious thing.)

In addition to the lackluster stories involved in this thing, the animation featured is likewise lackluster, showing all the effort that Disney’s cartoons churned out for television do. Flat, ugly, and generally looking dashed off, any company that actually had some pride in having a reputation for quality animation would be embarrassed to let this out with its name on it or featuring its characters. The best bit of artwork in this thing is the cover of the DVD, but since that’s all you see until you give them your cash, that’s all they probably care about.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Though I would have preferred to know the legend of the thin mint since to me a candy cane is something I’m always pulling cat hair and stocking fuzz off of, I was willing to give this candy cane business a chance because this cartoon promised a talking mountain goat!

It’s not that I think that talking animals are per se amusing, it’s just that with a mountain goat involved I figured I could count on an endless stream of “butt” jokes. Or at the very least, the goat would somehow eat the prize candy cane that little Timmy was counting on to win first place at the town’s Winter Festival to save the orphanage his adopted grandmother runs.

Well, when I heard the word “god” issue forth from my television at just over the two minute mark, I knew I had been had. Some dirty bastard had gone and hijacked this whole candy cane business to advance his Jesus agenda!

Hey, that’s cool with me – free country all that bullcrap, right? But, come on! Isn’t it just a little much to be waging your cultural war in my Christmas cartoons? I’m here for elves, reindeer, and burgermeisters, not a dang sermon!

The real beauty of all this is that these candy cane activists so intent on imposing their religiousosity on my Christmas are not even very effective at it. At the beginning of things they vainly attempt to establish their God-cred by running a montage of Adam and Eve running around, some old coot in an ark, and an even older coot with a long white beard harassing some kid with his shepherding staff.

After that, it’s thirty minutes of flaccid frontier follies as we watch the mysterious blue-eyed stranger with the wimpy Bible-beard roll into town with his talking horse, talking goat, and simpering orphan boy.

The town of West Sage has a bevy of problems for John to solve as he has to contend with one guy settling for a mail-order bride so his daughter will have a mommy, Jane who is hot for the guy with the mail-order bride, Jane’s mean old sister who is most likely frigid, his orphan boy that needs a home (but obviously not with John since he’s got lots of old west towns to annoy with his wispy brand of Bible thumping), and his mountain goat who is afraid of heights.

Holy crap! That’s a mighty tall set of problems for one quietly confident Christian to solve! But don’t sweat it because John is so wise he even knows when to change the tires on his covered wagon to runners so that it becomes a sleigh right before the big blizzard rolls across the amber waves of grain! Heck, I’ve been unexpectedly rained on enough to know we need more weathermen who have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ rather than with the girl who anchors the morning newscast.

But how in the world does John save Christmas, solve all the problems, and mosey on to another (hopefully off-screen) adventure with only the power of a single candy cane? Um, because you unwashed pagans, it’s a candy cane on mission from God!

You think a little thing like a rabid wolf trying to eat Jane who fell into a mysterious chasm in the middle of the prairie is going to stop this Confection of Christendom? Can a simple case of fear-of-heights-phobia stand against the righteous vengeance of this two-tone Treat of Tribulation? (And no, I don’t know what half those words mean – I’m just trying to remember stuff from those Left Behind movies.)

Shockingly, it’s just when it seems that there isn’t any answer that John shows this little girl what exactly is in the crates that he’s brought to the storefront he just bought. (Which doesn’t make any sense story-wise since he’s leaving in the morning anyway, but God works in mysterious ways, right?)

It’s a bunch of freaking candy! YES! He’s going to solve everyone’s problems by giving them bad teeth and making them fat and hyper! Chalk one up for the Big Man Upstairs!

Mr. Godbar busts out his magic candy cane and explains its secret origin to the little girl. Something about how the white is purity and the red stripe is sadness and sometimes you just gots to lick all that sadness away just like our Lord and Savior did!

To bolster his airtight case for the candy cane being a divine instrument, John points out how it looks like a shepherd’s staff and – get ready – if you turn it upside down it looks just like the letter “J”! And do you know whose name starts with “J”? That’s right! Judas! Wait, I mean, Jesus!

The voices of Florence Henderson, Ossie Davis, Tom Bosley, and Malcolm-Jamal Warner humiliate the rest of their bodies in this one which comes complete with songs that get progressively worse as the show goes along.

It’s obvious that this is the work of Satan and really, doesn’t that candy cane seem to resemble a striped, crooked dingus sans nads? I know I was really uncomfortable with all that licking. I don’t recall nothing in my Bible that speaks of licking anything, least of all some demonic-looking phallus. As far as I’m concerned, you can keep your kinky sex toys to your creepy self, John Godbar!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Connie’s a war widow who works as a harried single mother and comparison shopper for a major department store. Maybe someone out there who lived back in the time when the Earth was still cooling and men still rode dinosaurs to work can tell me exactly what this comparison shopper job is.

The way it looked to me was that Connie would pose as a shopper, buy stuff, and then report back to her overlords about the price. If she was found out by the rival store, she would be banned forever.

I understand all that, but what I don’t get is why she actually has to go through the trouble of actually buying the stuff. Couldn’t she just say, “how much is that electric toy train” and have Robert Mitchum respond “$79.50, ma’am” then go and make her phone call?

Connie buys this train from Mitchum (his cover in this film is Steve Mason, a much studlier name than Connie’s wuss boyfriend, Carl Davis) and takes it home, intending to return it the next day. We meet her punk kid, Timmy when she gets home and it becomes rapidly apparent that he should probably be removed from the home since she refers to him as Mr. Ennis and he calls her Mrs. Ennis and they hug and kiss a lot.

Even though Connie has tried to corrupt her son with her dark desires, he is still a kid at heart and that means one thing around Christmas time – unadulterated greed! He immediately seizes upon the fact that she brought two packages home and she informs him that the big one has to go back to the store the next day.

The big one is the train. The little one is some crappy clothes for Timmy. You can always tell when we’re supposed to feel sorry for some white trash family because they only get crap presents like sweaters and leg braces instead of toys!

Timmy peeks at the train and becomes very sad when Connie tells him that it isn’t for him. I sure hope she wasn’t planning on calling him Mr. Ennis anymore that night!

She runs into Steve Mason again when she attempts to return it and he gets fired from his hotshot job as seasonal help in the toy department because some prune-faced manager found out that he didn’t report her as a comparison shopper like policy says he has to.

One of those quirky, romantic lunches in the park with the seals follows. During this lunch, Connie and us get Steve’s life story.

It involves him wanting to go out to California and build boats. It may have involved more than that, but that was all we needed to see that he was one of those “creative dreamer” types that women moon over.

The movie settles into a series of incidents that have Connie and Steve running into each other again and again. There’s the packages she left with him while they were going comparison shopping together after their lunch in the park.

There’s the time she was meeting him in the park to complain about the train that he bought for Timmy. There’s the time when she runs into him at the police station after he’s accused of rolling a dude in the park.

And then there’s time she meets him at his flop house room to return the money from the train to him that Timmy so dramatically got back from the head of the department store himself!

Through it all safe boyfriend Carl is still milling around actually believing Connie when she tells him that she’ll marry him on New Year’s Day. Did I mention that Timmy hates Carl? But you probably knew that already. Did I mention that Timmy thinks Steve Mason is the coolest guy since Tom Mix? I’ll bet you guessed that as well.

Carl finally throws in the towel after her last encounter with Steve, but I think it wasn’t Steve’s competition that sent him to the showers so much as the fact that he was bummed out that Connie never asked about the big court case he won the week before that was in all the papers. Uh, if it wasn’t the Scopes Monkey Trial, why would anyone care?

There was an obvious lack of chemistry between Mitchum and Leigh that we’ll have to chalk up to Ms. Leigh since Mitchum is the coolest guy in the movies. Even in a girly movie like this, he’s a man’s man, forcing himself on Connie in her kitchen (just giving her a free sample), giving life lessons to young Timmy (always aim higher than what you’re shooting for and you’ll hit the mark!), and giving a speech at Christmas dinner announcing that Connie should marry him and not Carl!

This guy even fed orphaned squirrels in the park, but was so matter of fact about it, he didn’t come off like one of those pansy animal-loving liberals! The rest of the movie was boring with Carl not being any kind of real threat to Steve and with Connie being an indecisive ninny. Mitchum’s presence is the only thing worthy of your attention in this one.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

It usually starts the day after Thanksgiving. Well, to be completely honest, it actually starts pretty much as soon as Thanksgiving dinner is over: the debate over which family member will be ruining Christmas this year. The only reason is doesn’t start sooner is because the month of November is consumed by speculation over who is going to be the one that ruins Thanksgiving. You see, in our family, ruining a holiday is just as much a tradition as opening up Christmas presents on Christmas Eve or going to church on Easter is for regular families.

The incidents are legend, stretching back as long as I can remember or at least until I started drinking heavily on holidays. There was the time the power went out in the house on my sister’s birthday. Somehow or other this ended up with my dad stepping on her birthday cake, though for some reason the electrician who came over to fix things is often given the credit for ruining that day. And who could forget that one Easter when us kids decided that our pet gerbils would enjoy Easter morning more if they were let out of their cages to stretch their little legs a little. Our parents should have been glad I never got that pet tarantula I whined continuously about for several years.

More recently was the epic confrontation at a Thanksgiving that saw two members of my family fight over who was going to walk out on the other first! And respect for the dead prevents me from bringing up another Thanksgiving that saw one of my sister’s friends wreck things with a lack of social graces that was matched only by a commensurate lack of personal hygiene. But she got killed a little while after that, so I won’t talk about what an uncouth stinker she was.

The Man Who Came To Dinner is a story about a guy who ruins Christmas, but since this is Hollywood, he also manages to save it in the end. And unlike the majority of my family, Whiteside’s consistently caustic manner and maddening self-absorption is fairly amusing, though the guys that wrote this understand the rudimentary elements of comedy and thus we are also treated to penguins periodically running around loose in the house. There is also an octopus and a mummy case. And an actor who impersonates a stuttering English nobleman. And an axe murderer. And Jimmy Durante. There’s even a love affair that Whiteside first attempts to sabotage and then has to try and repair!

I know that you’re thinking that there’s no possible way for all of this to end up making any sense, but that’s because you’re using your 21st century brain on a 1940s movie. Nowadays, we are very advanced in the field of comedy and understand that all great comedy involves TV shows where fat lazy guys are married to skinny nagging broads and that these TV shows have to be named after the fat lazy guy. Back then, they didn’t even have TV so they had to make do with stuff like wild animals, razor sharp banter, and Bette Davis.

Monty Woolley plays Sheridan Whiteside who is a thinly-veiled version of Alexander Woollcott, a critic famous in his day for all the things that Whiteside engages in during the course of this film. (Except for the stuff about hurting his hip, getting stuck in some crappy town in Ohio, and meddling in everyone’s life there. I’m pretty sure that Woollcott ruined Christmas at some point in his life though.)

Bette Davis plays his secretary, Maggie Cutler, a smart cookie who somehow manages to tolerate Whiteside’s irascibility and doesn’t mind his mistreatment of everyone until she becomes the target for his egomania. Together, they spend the Christmas season in a small town in middle America after Sherry hurts his hip falling down some stairs.

The gimmick of this play-turned-movie is that Sherry immediately takes over the household of the people that he is staying with. This results in lots of wacky antics involving the aforementioned penguins, octopus, and Sherry’s various actor friends who drop in as needed by the plot. The gimmick doesn’t really make any sense since I’m unaware of any hip injury that would be severe enough that you couldn’t leave the house, but don’t have to go the hospital. I mean, they carried this guy’s carcass inside from the front steps didn’t they? Why can’t they carry his impolite ass back out the front door to a hotel?

The implausibility of the gimmick aside, this is a pretty funny movie. Whiteside spends close to two hours unleashing a torrent of insults, snide remarks, and name dropping that leaves most of his small town victims unaware that they’ve even been put down. Most of them are either in awe of the celebrity in their midst or are cowed by his puffed up self-importance. Some of you goobers out there from the middle of the country may be a bit put off by the portrayal of you hayseeds in this film, but that’s just because you aren’t sophisticated enough to appreciate the high art that folks on either coast can. Don’t worry about it. Just try to laugh when your smart relatives from out of town do.

Since Sherry is going to be laid up through Christmas, he is going to have to give his Christmas broadcast from his new home in Ohio. This is one of the big ironies of the film – that a guy as obnoxious as Sherry is known nationally for his treacly broadcasts, especially the sappy Christmas one he does every year. That may help explain the ending of the movie when he turns all good and does everything he can to save his secretary’s relationship with the editor of the local newspaper. Maybe, he just uses all the nasty comments as a form of armor because deep down he’s just insecure. Or maybe Sherry calculated all the outcomes and thought he might have the best chance of retaining Maggie’s services if he lets her go her own way for awhile, instead alienating her with a more obvious gambit like bringing in Ann Sheridan as a famous sexy actress to try and steal away Maggie’s budding-playwright boyfriend. Or maybe, the movie just needed a happy ending.

The love story here is pretty weak. When newspaperman Bert Jefferson talks about how he and Maggie kind of started their relationship when she changed a typewriter ribbon for him, I was wondering if he was referring to a scene that had been cut from my copy of the movie. I mean, one minute they were meeting each for the first time when she and Sherry arrived at the train station and the next thing I know, they’re yucking it up while ice skating and he’s giving her a yucky charm bracelet for Christmas.

It doesn’t help that Bert is a bland drip, who is completely oblivious to the machinations of Sherry’s actress pal Lorraine, whom Sherry has imported for the express purpose of breaking up Bert and Maggie. It’s like I keep trying to tell my married buddy. As a man, your job is to hate every other woman even more than your wife does. How tough is that to figure out? But for some reason Bert just can’t understand why Maggie is all crabby and emotional while he’s out drunk all night with Lorraine working on his play and then gleefully announcing that he can hardly wait to spend three weeks with her in Lake Placid doing “rewrites.” I was never too sure exactly why Maggie was interested in him, beyond the generically handsome looks that would later carry actor Richard Travis to parts in such movies as Mesa Of Lost Women and Missile To The Moon.

The movie doesn’t rise and fall on Maggie mooning over Bert, since it’s merely the excuse to move Sherry through a variety of increasingly convoluted situations culminating with him and Jimmy Durante trying to figure out how to get rid of Lorraine before Sherry is tossed out of the house by sheriff’s deputies in fifteen minutes. (Not to spoil anything, but in a movie like this, the late arrival of a giant mummy case can only mean one thing.)

The movie does runs a bit longer than you’d like and some of Sherry’s comments come off more mean than amusing, but overall this is a nice cynical antidote (ending notwithstanding) to the usual sappy holiday movies foisted on us, so it’s worth a look.

© 2008 MonsterHunter

If you heard the concept of the opening of the presents, you might be deceived into thinking that it would be at least entertaining. After all, everyone sits and watches one person open one gift and then the person who gave it has to chime in with the “story behind the gift” while everyone continues to feign rapt attention. And yes, it would be entertaining if the story was something along the lines of how so and so had to travel to Idaho and engage a blind woodcutter to make Aunt Blabby’s peg leg or how Junior’s bicycle helmet was really a modified German helmet that Great Grandad pried off a dead Kraut while fighting the Kaiser. But usually, it involves how they had to trample a bunch of people at Wal-Mart at five a.m. to get that twenty-five dollar DVD player or how they had to kick some old lady in the nuts to nab that last blue Care Bear at Target.

The movie is like that, too. The concept appears to be ripe with all sorts of humorous possibilities, but there’s nary a laugh to be found (except when you see how ugly the babies in this one are). This is like a cake where you dumped all the right ingredients in it and not only did it not rise, but when you went ahead and tried to eat it anyway, it gave you the runs.

Stanwyck plays Elizabeth Lane, a gal who writes a column for a magazine extolling the virtues of a traditional home in the country and who provides recipes and babbles about her family. The funny part (not ha-ha funny of course) is that she lives in the city, has a Hungarian chef named Felix do all the cooking, and doesn’t have a family beyond the stuffy architect suitor (John) she loathes. Her editor knows all this, but her publisher (Sydney Greenstreet) doesn’t and would fire her in a minute if he ever found out.

The movie actually begins with two sailors on a raft with little food. If you threw a priest and a hooker in there with them, you’d have the makings of a pretty good joke, but as it is, this is merely all set up for Liz’s big Christmas problem. There’s an inordinate amount of time spent with these sailors in the hospital after they get rescued all so that we can involve Liz with a crazy “hidden identity, fake marriage, fake kid” scheme.

The set up goes like this: sailor pretends to love nurse so he can get good food at the hospital, nurse falls for sailor and wants to marry him, sailor whines that he’s leery of that because he never had a real home, nurse writes to Liz’s publisher asking for sailor to get a real home cooked dinner at Christmas in hopes that this will somehow trick him into marrying her, publisher tells Liz that she’ll be hosting this sailor at her idyllic country home and cooking him dinner, Liz spazs out because she doesn’t know how she’s going to pull this off and she just bought a mink coat!

A ridiculous beginning to be sure, but at least it had the kind of frantic energy these types of movies require to be successful. When you’re telling me a tall tale, you need to keep up the manic pace and jump to the next lie before I can get around to figuring out how dumb the last bit of hooey you told me was. With this movie, any energy that it had completely evaporated once all the plot had been explained and all that remained was for the characters to be put be through their paces. Nothing particularly exciting or unexpected occurred once we received our screwball marching orders and everything was so subdued that the scene with the most tension was when Liz had to flip a flapjack in front of everyone as if that would either prove or disprove her domestic goddess status.

So how does Liz decide to trick her way out of this one? (Because we all know that in these types of movies, simply saying “sorry, I’m out of town” or “no” is never an option when presented with situations that could blow up in your face.) The boring architect that keeps harassing Liz to marry him just happens to have a country home in Connecticut that is precisely the type of place that she would need to host this sailor. Now, I was never sure exactly why Liz and this guy John hung around together since she pretty much tells his snooty bum to get lost and her real pal Fritz the chef didn’t like him, but I was even less sure why this whole scheme demanded that she actually marry this guy on Christmas Eve!

Sure, I suppose you could make a case that she was settling for him and that he would be a good provider and fawn all over her (when not bragging about how he put jointed pipes and triple insulation in some house he built), but tell me again why I would give a crap about a character who isn’t smart enough to get out of this whole stupid “sailor needs a home cooked meal to decide whether to settle down” plot and who would just kind of throw up her hands and say “okay, I give – I’ll marry you and oh by the way, can we use your house and the neighbor’s baby to trick my boss and this visiting sailor?” If there’s anything I like less than being stupid for stupid’s sake, it’s being stupid for plot’s sake.

Have you guessed by now that once the sailor shows up, he’ll be one of those hunky sailors who can play the piano and sing and is a natural with babies and who doesn’t talk about plumbing all the time? His and Liz’s courtship is rather boring even though it plays out over just two days (Christmas Eve and Christmas) and the “highlight” involves them accidentally stealing a sleigh and getting tossed into jail. Of course, they’re promptly released and laugh about it and get home the same day, so it wasn’t really worth mentioning except that in the meantime Liz’s baby was kidnapped! Except that that was all a mistake because it was really just the publisher seeing the kid’s real mother coming to pick her up after her shift down at the factory.

The supporting cast doesn’t do Stanwyck any favors in this one either. You’ve got the sailor played by some guy we never heard of or even recognize, but that’s okay because his role doesn’t call for him to have a personality beyond “great guy” and that’s exactly what he brings to the role. Sydney Greenstreet’s menacing presence and voice as the publisher are used merely to bellow whenever he wanders into scenes and anytime he and John have a scene together things just sort of die.

The only character that comes close to fulfilling his wacky potential is Felix, the guy who can really cook. Felix is one of those screwball characters with an accent. Guys with accents are frequently used in these farces because people that talk funny are one of the great shortcuts in comedy. Of course, when you’re doling out all the good lines to Felix, you should probably have his accent not be so thick that I miss half of what he’s saying. And he’s wasted messing around with this judge that keeps coming by to marry John and Liz (that their wedding keeps getting delayed is supposed to be one of the running jokes, but I think the joke sort of ran away from that gag).

The movie doesn’t even manage to rouse itself for the finale when Liz’s publisher discovers her deception. There isn’t any buildup to him finding out, not much fallout (oh, he fires her, but Felix tricks him into doubling her salary), and we couldn’t care less if John finally figured out that Liz loves the sailor what with her hating John all along anyhow. Then, like a kick in the head, that stupid nurse that started it all appears! But that was pointless because she eventually announces that she’s married to the other sailor who was also on the raft at the very beginning! The last third of this thing lurched here and there like a stolen sleigh being driven over Sydney Greenstreet. Keep the receipt for this one, because it’s going back on the 26th. Only for old fogies who are too senile to know better and for little brats that need to be bored to sleep on Christmas Eve.

© 2008 MonsterHunter

So where did Tripp go wrong? What was it that tripped him up? What happened was that Paul went and broke one of the basic tenants of filmmaking, nay, of life itself – he had his movie made by a bunch of Italians! And just to make sure that his movie would sink faster than a sleigh loaded up with a fat Italian actor with a fake beard, he hired the star of Frankenstein’s Castle Of Freaks to not only play the villain, but also to direct!

There were many reasons why this movie made me shudder and pray that The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t would somehow turn into The Christmas That I Was Really Wasted and Forgot Everthing That Happened, but the first among them had to be the opening theme song, a little ditty that explained the concept of the movie and was quite catchy in a creepy and completely undesirable manner. Compounding the pain was that it was sung over some of that old time cut and paste Monty Python-style animation I loath. (If I can do it at home with some magic markers and construction paper, I don’t want to see it in a movie.)

After a couple of minutes of this guy singing while cardboard cut outs jumped over roofs, the movie finally began in earnest, and that was really the only thing this movie did that was in earnest since everything else about it would have been categorized as quite bland except that everything was so damn squalid. I don’t mind squalid if I’m watching a movie about an undercover cop turned junkie or a movie about life after an atomic war, but I don’t think I’m out of line when I demand that my Christmas movies be bright and cheery.

At the very least, Santa’s workshop should be that way. I understand if some poor kid’s town is under the thumb of a burgermeister who hates Christmas or something and things are a little grey, but at least Santa is always a beacon of hope who romps around with brightly attired midgets and shiny wooden toys. This movie though, had Santa looking like he lived in a flop house with his wife, seven elves, and their foreman.

Seven elves? You got it! I counted the little bastards! That’s not enough dwarves to run a Taco Bell during the slow shifts, let alone staff Santa’s village! And they were nasty looking, too. The dirtiest little carnival refugees you’ve ever seen. They were dirty and had bad teeth and there wasn’t one of the lot that I would’ve turned my back on because even though they were all smiles whenever the big guy was around, you could tell they were seething and just waiting for the right moment use a blackjack on the foreman and have their way with Mrs. Claus.

Mrs. Claus? I’m glad you brought her up. As scuzzy as these dwarves were, Mrs. Claus wasn’t exactly no Tanya Roberts either. This woman had the biggest ass I think I’ve ever seen in a movie and I began to wonder if they didn’t used to have more than seven dwarves, but that these were just the ones she hadn’t sat on or hadn’t gotten lost in the folds of her stomach.

I was glad that Paul Tripp played a guy named Mr. Whipple because whenever Santa and Mrs. Claus were around him, I kept hoping that he would remind Santa not to squeeze the Charmin. Alas, he never did, but we did get to see Mrs. Claus in action at the end of the movie when she accompanied Mr. Whipple and Santa to deliver presents. How she got her big caboose down that chimney I’ll never know but can you imagine having to go up it right after her? Whoa, smells like a reindeer died in here!

Okay, Sam Whipple is a lawyer in an unnamed town and for some reason his only case seems to be the case of “the lawyer who puts up the town’s Christmas decorations while singing forgettable songs about how much he loves Christmas.” Clearly this is a dog of a case and he would be wise to get a client other than himself. As luck would have it, he does get a new client in the form of Santa Claus himself.

This would be one of your less impressive Santas, looking vaguely like a drunken transient in department store garb and whining incessantly about the problems he’s having with his new landlord. He explains that the Eskimos had given him a piece of the North Pole to run his shop out of, but then they went and sold it out from under him to a guy named Phineas T. Prune. Guess what a guy named Prune thinks about Christmas? He hates it! Can you believe it? And further more, he doesn’t like kids and in fact, he himself denies that he ever was a child.

While Prune has some fairly amusing (though a bit predictable) delusions, the reason any of this matters to us is that he’s gone and raised the rent on Santa and is demanding payment in full by midnight on Christmas Eve or come Christmas Day, Santa and his big bootied wife are going to find the North Pole Sheriff dumping all their crap on the front lawn (or front tundra in this case).

Santa has come to Sam for help because Sam was the only kid that ever sent Santa a thank you years ago and promised to help Santa if he ever needed it. Umm, Santa, that’s the kind of thing people say just to be polite. Besides you can’t hold anyone to a contract they made as a kid. Maybe a little less time scouring your old fan mail and little more time studying that lease you signed with your Eskimo buddies, Tubby.

Since Whipple is a lawyer, he does what any good attorney would do in this case. He tells his client that he better go out and get a job and start making that money to pay the rent! Now that’s the kind of legal strategy you would expect from a guy that had to work Santa in between stringing up lights and hanging wreaths around downtown. By the way, this is pretty much the entire movie: Santa needs money for rent, so Santa and Sam go and get jobs to make the money for the rent. Who knew that all those Rankin-Bass cartoons took all the really good “we’ve got to save Christmas from the crabby guy” plots?

So what sort of jobs do these two get? Seasonal work. That sort of thing. Sam becomes a janitor and Santa becomes a department store Santa. Errr. Let me get this straight. You’re a lawyer, but you take a job as a janitor to make some money? Well, at least Santa should be a natural at his new gig, right? Not quite. See, he gets nervous around little kids. No, really, it all makes sense. He’s never been around kids except when they were sleeping. At some point, shouldn’t someone have taken Paul Tripp aside and made sure that Paul Tripp was just his porn name and not his real name? You know – to save his family the eternal embarrassment of being in any way associated with this film.

So now we have to watch Sam coach Santa on how to be Santa. Unfortunately, it involves some more singing and Santa reveals that in addition to being an emotionally closed off clod that he also can’t carry a tune. Or at least the guy that dubbed Santa’s voice can’t carry a tune. I try to be fair in these things you know.

Christmas is saved after an even more embarrassing scheme is cooked up by Sam after Prune ruins their sweet set up at the department store by buying it out and framing them for breaking a bunch of toys. The new plan involves guilting all the little kids in town to chip in and pay Santa’s rent for him. Gawd, Mrs. Claus is going to be so proud!

Following that humiliating development, Prune gets reformed after the elf foreman discovers a letter he lost from Prune as a kid asking for a sailboat. More songs ensue and things come to a close with Prune running around town in his nightgown chasing kids in an effort to demonstrate his new found love of Christmas and/or young boys.

Everything about this movie was really scurvy from the dirty, emaciated actors (except for the bloated Mrs. Claus) to the grungy house that Santa lived in. It didn’t look any better than the dirty and dusty place that Prune lived in (which was supposed to be that way because of his dour attitude). Bad songs and worse special effects (you only get to see the reindeer flying through the air in one scene, but it was way more than enough) combined with the mundane landlord-tenant dispute story make this a most unappealing holiday offering.

I’ve read that there are people out there that love this thing, but they probably only love it because they saw at some impressionable time in their youth like I did with one of my favorite movies, Humanoids From The Deep. Anybody coming into this for the first time today, child or adult, isn’t likely to do much more than cringe during the yawn-inducing yuletide goings on. Once again the Italians demonstrate their mastery of the unbearably bad movie, no matter the genre. For fans of big bootied mature Italian women and skanky dwarves only.

© 2008 MonsterHunter

Okay, I’ll admit it – I like Christmas movies. Or I guess I should say that I like the idea of Christmas movies. It seems like that a lot of times when I watch a movie that features Christmas prominently, it never fails to disappoint, substituting cheap platitudes and artificial sentiment for an interesting story or genuine feeling.

I just saw part of It’s A Wonderful Life on television the other week and I remembered that there was a reason why I hadn’t watched the whole thing and why my DVD copy of it was still shrinkwrapped from when I bought it last Christmas. Something about an angel getting its wings and some townspeople coming together to save the day and Jimmy Stewart ruining his life so his younger and more handsome brother can realize his dreams. All that gooey self-sacrifice didn’t put me in the Christmas spirit so much as it reminded to be on my guard the next time I visited my own friends and family at Christmas.

I liked Holiday Inn and White Christmas fine, except that they’re the same film starring Bing Crosby. Remember The Night had the Double Indemnity team of Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray going for it, but had the completely hokey premise of a prosecutor taking a defendant home for the holidays going against it. Stanwyck did better in Christmas In Connecticut and Robert Mitchum’s Holiday Affair was a fair to middling love story. All these movies also probably get the benefit of the doubt and I don’t hate them as much as some other films because I only watch them around Christmas when they are least likely to offend.

Now, the other film that I give great deference to for no good reason would have to be the old supernatural romantic comedy. You know these movies. Ghosts, spirits, and witches muck around with mortals trying to help out and/or participate in their love lives. You got your I Married A Witch, The Ghost And Mrs. Muir, Blithe Spirit and The Bishop’s Wife which somehow manages to combine the Christmas movie with the supernatural romance. I always liked the idea that dead people have nothing better to do in the afterlife than to hang around dumb old Earth playing matchmaker for lovable losers.

It’s with this background that I fired up Beyond Tomorrow, programmed to like it because it was a Christmas movie and it featured not one, but three ghosts! How could I not like it? It actually turned out not to be that difficult. Kind of like a Christmas miracle. But in reverse.

The movie starts out with a Christmasy enough premise. You’ve got these three old dudes who are successful businessmen. One of them is a “bah humbug” sort of guy, another is a Colonel Mustard type of British chap, and another is a festive, feel good Irishman. For some reason they are all friends and either live or hang out at the same house as this old Russian woman (Maria Ouspenskaya of The Wolf Man) who is some type of royalty and is accompanied by her faithful servant named Yakov or something.

It’s Christmas Eve and the fun loving guy named O’Brien is planning on having some people over for dinner. They cancel once it becomes apparent to them that they would actually be spending their Christmas Eve with three old guys, an ugly Russian broad, and her neutered man servant. This is a bit of a downer and the crabby one of the old guys, George, assumes that they canceled because they heard his grumpy ass would be there. He hastens to add that he was never convicted in some scandal he was involved in. This plays a little bit of a part later in the movie when he dies and ends up going to the “darkness” instead of the “light” because he was never remorseful about whatever it was he was never convicted for.

This O’Brien guy is not about to be denied a wacky and fun-filled Christmas Eve, so he concocts one of those Candid Camera stunts where they all toss out a wallet with a ten dollar bill and each one of their business cards into the street. Then they’ll wait until some appointed hour to see if anyone has the old Christmas spirit in them and returns the wallet with the cash. Once they come in to turn over the wallet, O’Brien will spring the trap and invite them to dinner.

The first wallet gets picked up some rich woman who laughs at her luck and gives the ten bucks inside to her driver and goes on about her gloriously decadent business. The time period that the three geezers had agreed upon is just expiring when there’s a knock at the door. In walks Richard Carlson, several years away from finding lasting fame for battling a guy in a rubber monster suit in Creature From The Black Lagoon. For this film he has traded in his 1950s swimming suit for an equally unflattering Texas accent.

His name is James Houston and he came up to Madison Square Garden with the rodeo and never bothered to go back to Texas. Well, like most hicks in the big city that can’t catch on with the city rodeo, he’s down on his luck, but he still has a good heart because he turned the money back in and is asking nothing in return. The old guys invite him for drinks and the crabby guy takes to him, because he’s from Oklahoma and that means they’re practically neighbors. The doorbell rings again and this time it’s some nerd girl that answers the door with the third wallet and the money. She turns it in and they invite both of these two to stay for dinner which they do.

At this point in the proceedings I am still with this movie. I’m a little leery of the whole “guy named Houston from Texas with the accent that fades in and out like the only UHF channel that I can get The 700 Club in on in my trailer” thing, but there’s snow outside, carolers running around, people doing nice deeds and even George is enjoying himself, so I’m still on this movie’s side.

However, it turns out that in addition to being a loser rodeo guy, Jimmy Houston can really sing! This is where I start to worry about things. You know how these old movies are about characters that sing these awful songs. It usually leads to some type of stab at a professional singing career and the next thing you know, your Christmas movie has turned into one of those cautionary tales about what can happen to a hillbilly that has his head turned by fame, fortune, and show biz skanks. Well, that’s what happens here, but not before we pile on so more feel good moments, and get Jimmy Houston and the nerd girl (she works in a children’s hospital) named Jean (see, I told you she was a nerd girl) all hooked up and lovey dovey!

Before they start the “all show business is evil and can turn even a good guy into an inconsiderate snake” angle, we get a lot of montages with Jean and Jimmy and the three old guys. This shows us that the three old guys really enjoy having young friends and they do crazy stuff like go bowling and visit the children’s hospital. Those are nice scenes since everyone is happy and while the old guys brought the two love birds together, the two lovebirds are showing the old timers that life can be more than just business and acquittals on scandalous (but apparently scurrilous) charges.

Sadly though, all the good times can’t last and eventually the three men have to take business trip to Pennsylvania on a plane. The plane naturally crashes and just as soon as Jean and James show up to tell their friends the news that they’re getting married, they find out that they’re dead. Now, just because these guys are dead, doesn’t mean that we’ve seen the last of them. It turns out that this is one of those deals where their spirits show back up at the house and they hang out and talk for awhile about how they got killed, but are still hanging around.

These ghosts don’t seem to know what to do with themselves because they don’t do much but sit around and talk with each other. Usually these types of apparitions like to take a more active role in things, but they don’t, beyond whispering into some character’s ear something or other that the character either follows or doesn’t depending on what the plot demands.

With their friends dead, James somehow parlays his fame for knowing the dead guys into a shot at stardom singing the classics on the radio. Also singing on the radio is established star Arlene Terry. She’s a famous, beautiful woman that immediately sets her sights on our hero, James, the singing rodeo clown. This is the beginning of a very unconvincing love triangle that sees James begin to ignore his intended for the attentions of the conniving Arlene. Now, James doesn’t ever seem to do much more than practice his singing with her an awful lot, mind you, but this is what passes for a “cheating heart” in this flick.

The movie at this point in time has slowed to a complete crawl, the relationship between Arlene and James not being very interesting and his relationship to Jean just kind of sits in limbo with Jean doing nothing more than frowning and whimpering periodically whenever James calls to cancel on her. If James had actually done anything with Arlene or had shown the slightest interest in her other than as a professional role model, I might have been able to muster up some enthusiasm for this aspect of the film, but so little was going on, I was beginning to wonder if maybe I had died and my ghost had ended up trapped in a real dull house populated by a bunch of dunderheads that wouldn’t heed my whispered entreaties to “pick up the pace!”

What about all those elderly ghosts running around? Well, they all disappear, called to their final resting place, with O’Brien refusing to go because he wants to make sure that Jean and James get back together. There’s a climax here where the action picks up so that things are no longer a complete flatline. Arlene’s ex shows up and shoots James and her. She dies and O’Brien pleads with the higher power to give the guy one more chance.

I don’t know what message the movie tried to show us. James really didn’t do anything to deserve a second chance at love. In fact, he’s only going back to the nerd girl because the sultry singer is dead. The stuff with the ghosts is pointless with George’s choices and predicament wound up way too easily (you can get by just by saying you’re sorry once you find out how awful the darkness is?) and the ghosts not figuring in much of the plot.

The idea that O’Brien would give up his everlasting place in heaven just to see to it that his young friends triumphed in love is compelling, but isn’t given anything but a cursory play here and nothing goes on long enough for you to get too wrapped up in it. A decent start is completely marred by the dull plot twists and uninteresting and unconvincing finale. Just skip it and fire up some version of A Christmas Carol if you insist on a Christmas movie with ghosts that wear Depends.

© 2008 MonsterHunter

And if “Winter Wonderland” is the greatest Christmas song of all time, then “The 12 Days Of Christmas” has to be the worst. In fact, it’s so bad I would even have to rank it below those trailer park Christmas songs like the one where mama was kissing Santa or that other one where grandma was getting run over by a reindeer. White trash sure do have interesting holiday traditions, don’t they?

The reason that “The 12 Days Of Christmas” makes me want to dig my brains out through my ears with a dull spoon is obvious: the insane repetition. By the time they get half way through the song and you’ve already suffered through their grocery list of stupidity, you just know that the next time you have to endure the whole “five golden rings” section where they all take a deep breath before running down the remainder of the song, you’re going to bust out your axe and go all Silent Night, Deadly Night on them.

Ahhh, but you say, this movie is all about the 12 DOGS of Christmas. Right. And that makes it infinitely worse. You see, when you have a movie about the 12 DOGS of Christmas, you also have to have a 98 minute long story to go with it. And though “The 12 Days Of Christmas” may seem to take three to four times that long to complete, it actually is closer to only about an hour or so. And while the song makes you want to punch the singer in the face, this movie will force you to punch yourself in the face just to stay awake.

The movie takes place in 1931 which just happens to be during the Great Depression. To a certain segment of our not-dying-off-fast-enough population, this is what is known as “the Good Old Days.” I guess there’s just something about dirty unemployed bums standing over a fire in a barrel that speaks to the sentimental fool in them.

If you know the song, you’ll know that there are a bunch more dogs than just twelve. According to my calculations such a song would have to feature 78 dogs! I’m thinking that calling it The 78 Dogs Of Christmas would have turned off even the most ardent canine fetishist. And it’s probably a good thing they didn’t since they cheated us out of the final 12 dogs at the end anyway.

There’s this little brat who gets sent to live in Doverville by her bummy father. She’s supposed to be living with her aunt, but her aunt didn’t know she was coming and making matters even worse, this woman isn’t even her aunt, but a trampy hairdresser who apparently tramped around with Brat’s dad years ago. No matter though since there’s bigger problems awaiting Brat in Doverville.

Seems this here town’s got a bone to pick with man’s best friend! For some reason the town has banned all dogs! Egads! Not since John Lithgow had dancing banned in his town during the seminal Christopher Penn epic Footloose have we seen a more heart-wrenching city ordinance!

Of course, in Footloose the dancing ban was eventually explained while in this movie the dog ban never was, but that’s the difference between classic cinema and celluloid rabies isn’t it? Well that and a scene of Kevin Bacon’s body double dancing around in a barn.

If everyone in good old Doverville hated dogs there wouldn’t really be any conflict and thus no need for Brat to save the day. Naturally though there’s this crazy dog lady that lives just outside of town and runs a dog orphanage. What an unlucky break! To run a dog orphanage right next to town that prohibits dogs! What are the odds?

About the same as the odds that the football coach who has to take over the school Christmas program would need the crazy dog lady’s help since she can play piano whenever she’s not flouting her disrespect for the laws of the great town of Doverville.

And also the same as the odds that the Christmas show would be hijacked by Brat, Coach, and Dog Lady to advance their own pro-pooch agenda. As a strong Christian who firmly believes that Santa is the reason for the season, I was nauseated by their blasphemy.

The boredom comes fast and furious as this one stumbles and lurches towards the climatic school concert. The mayor’s brother is the dogcatcher and he’s got himself a crazed assistant and Mad Max-style dog catching motorcycle and sidecar.

He also has himself a little sideline operation involving dogfights which was rudely interrupted when Brat swung into the pit on a rope to save her friend’s pet sheepdog. I think that scene was right up there with the one where Brat and her own dog got locked inside a dog cage together and she started whining to be let out. Maybe someone won’t butt into someone else’s illegal dogfights anymore, huh?

Somehow or other it gets set up so that the Crazy Dog Lady is going to be forced to get rid of her dogs by Christmas Day or else and the next thing you know Brat is leading all her classmates in one of those “lets put on a Christmas pageant featuring a bunch of mangy mutts to save the dog orphanage” schemes last seen during the real 1930s in movies starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.

When I found out that all this doggy-doo was based on a honest-to-gosh book, I did some checking because I figured they must have taken some liberties with it because no book could possibly be this inanely irritating and still have tricked someone into paying money to make a movie off it. I mean, the whole idea is like something a seven year old girl would come up with.

Oh wait, it was something a seven year old girl came up with. This little twerp came up with the bright idea to re-write that horrid Christmas song to feature dogs instead of lords-a-leaping and maids-a-milking. Then some bigger twerp came up with the even brighter idea of using the now doubly-horrid Christmas song as a springboard for a dull, dingy drama that does the viewer dogstyle. It all made me want to go out back and do an Old Yeller to myself.

© 2008 MonsterHunter