Well, folks. ‘Tis the season in the lands of the streaming services, and the yearly inundation of dodgy holiday films have landed. Netflix, in particular, seems to have doubled down on the genre. What started with an unexpected hit in The Christmas Prince—a franchise due to get its third film in three years come December—is now bolstered with in-house movies made on the cheap and newly acquired made-for-TV fare all about the Christmas romance
My partner and I aren’t the biggest fan of Christmas, but we do love a trashy film and that love isn’t limited to action and sci-fi projects. We’ve made ourself a list of unwatched Christmas trash and checked it twice, then fired up the ol’ Netflix viewer to make our way through the sixteen holiday films on our radar this year.
Here’s some quick capsule reviews of the stuff we’ve watched thus far.
THE KNIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
The Christmas Prince may be the franchise that started it all on Netflix, but last year saw the streaming service launch Vanessa Hudgens as a franchise player in the Xmas romance space with The Princess Switch. There’s a sequel to that film coming in 2020, but this year Hudgens is back with a time-travel romance that sees a medieval English knight transported to modern-day Ohio in order to fall in love with a high school science teacher and learn a valuable lesson about knightly virtues.
It’s not a particularly ambitious script, but that’s not the point of a film like this one. What’s impressive is the level of care that’s brought to pretty much everything else given the budget and lack of innovation in the major beats. I’m obsessed with the set and costume design of this film, which is so coordinated that subtly eliminates any sense of reality by virtue of everything matching perfectly. It’s set the tone perfectly, because reality has no place here on any level.
Then, of course, there’s the acting. Hudgens has already proven that she’s a dab hand at these kind of roles—The Princess Switch largely rests on her playing to a similarly absurd premise—and she delivers here. Josh Whitehouse’s Sir Cole is more of a surprise, but manages a level of charm that carries the film through some of its absurd beats and narrative revelations. He manages a kind of Heath-Ledger-minus-the-intensity vibe (or, possibly, a Heath-Ledger-On-Home-And-Away vibe, but I don’t remember that era well enough).
Basically, this is Grade-A trash. As my friend Adam would say, this is a qualified recommendation—f you don’t grove on the trash aesthetic, you’re going to hate it. If you do, it’s great. Four out of Five chocolate meads.
SANTA GIRL
Santa’s daughter runs off to college so she can experience the “real world” before going through with her arranged marriage to the son of Jack Frost. While there, she’s a fish out of water who develops feelings for one of her fellow fish-out-of-water classmates, which unleashes shenanigans as Jack Frost and other supernatural beings get involved to try and manipulate the situation.
I’m intrigued by the supernatural world set up here—a place where holidays and mythical beings are essentially private corporations that are engaged in a constant give-and-take as they barter for influence. Casting Barry Bostwick as a hard-assed corporate Santa desperate to hold onto his influence is a great choice, as he’s both effectively goofy and able to sell the idea that this version of Santa—lean and off cookies for his own health–is a natural reaction to the loss of Mrs Clause.
It’s a sweet film with some surprisingly ambitious world-building. Three and a half junk-food breakfasts out of five.
MERRY KISSMASS
The writer behind 2015’s Merry Kissmass, Joany Kane, seems to have carved out a niche with made-for-TV christmas romances. Her first nine writing credits all revolve around the theme of Xmas and kissing, and they make up at least half her credits overall.
What’s intriguing about Merry Kissmass is how it handles the crafting of a romance story where the main protagonist, Kayla, is engaged to someone who is not her happily ever after for the first part of the film. It’s a big thing to work around, and the movie does it by making really, really sure that her fiance Carlton is an awful person who utterly deserves what’s coming. This is coupled with a series of tropes that are all about making sure that the HEA guy, Dustin, is the obvious choice (and I give the movie bonus points for its deployment of puppies in the service of this).
Two hunks covered in puppies out of five.
LET IT SNOW
Adapted from a novel cowritten by multiple A-List young adult authors (Maureen McHugh, John Green, Lauren Myracle) and featuring an ensemble cast of great actors, this feels like a movie that should be a bigger deal than it is. It’s the first film of the season where my partner and I truly diverge in our opinions—she really enjoyed it (largely because it has Joan Cusack being whacky), while I felt like it overstayed it’s welcome and could have had a storyline or two pared back.
If The Knight Before Christmas feels like a movie where everyone involved is working to a level beyond the ambitions of the script, this is a film where the collective competence of everyone involves largely exposes the lack of a strong, beating heart at the centre. Never quite bad enough to be make you turn off, never quite good enough to make you feel like it’s going to be worth the time invested. It suffers an awful lot from the central protagonists who unify the film being a lot less interesting than the small-town-girl/rock star pairing who provide the second narrative spine—-if you swapped the pairings, this would have been stronger.
Joan Cusack is phenomenal, though. As are some of the supporting players, particularly Jacob Batalon and Liv Hewson, who make an awful lot out of the very little the script gives them. Two stolen kegs of beer out of five, although it’s three and a half tinfoil hats out of five every time Hewson or Cusack are on the screen.
