TOO SOON?

IF YOU'RE ALREADY DONE WITH HALLMARK, CHECK OUT A GIDDY, GOOFY YULETIDE PARODY.

Cup of Cheer

Cast: Storm Steenson,

Alexander Oliver Director: Jake Horowitz

Duration: 1 h 34 m Available: TubiTV.com

There are by my reckoning no fewer than 40 new Hallmark Christmas movies set to air this holiday season, including the simple (A Timeless Christmas), the wordy (Never Kiss a Man in a Christmas Sweater), the quasi-military (USS Christmas, Project Christmas Wish), the confusing (Christmas She Wrote), and the isit-porn-or-Hallmark (Christmas Comes Twice). Also Love, Lights, Hanukkah!, which airs Dec. 20, two days after the end of the Festival of Lights. Oops.

Nowhere in this list, however, will you find a send-up of all this Hallmarkian earnestness, the type of parody that Airplane! once gave to disaster movies, or The Naked Gun to police procedurals. But fear not, because Toronto-based writer-director Jake Horowitz has you covered. Enter Cup of Cheer, a giddy, goofy, yuletide parody that gleefully throws all the holiday rom-com tropes into a toasty, roaring fire.

“I guess I should start at the beginning,” says Mary (Storm Steenson), working at her typewriter just like every other 21st-century writer. “That's when it all started. Funny how these things always start at the beginning.” Mary works in “the big city,” but a Christmas assignment sends her to snowy Heightsville Falls Township (or something like that), played in all its small-town glory by Orillia, Ont.

Once there, she immediately collides with local cocoa-shop owner Chris (Alexander Oliver), who spills a huge urn of hot chocolate on her, because these kinds of meet-cutes need all the help they can get.

With her hotel reservation hopelessly, illegibly damp, she winds up staying with Chris and his brother Keith (Liam Marshall), who also give lodging to a time-travelling British dandy named Authuh, played by Jacob Hogan. Authuh (shades of Hugh Jackman in Kate & Leopold), demands that everyone say his name in the same accent that he does, and they gamely acquiesce. Cup of Cheer is in fact full of character-name gags; I'd tell you Chris's last name but I can't figure out how to spell it.

In the spirit of spoofs (and of Christmas!), Horowitz packs his movie with all manner of silly humour, from running gags to blinkand-miss-it background wackiness, and leaps of illogic. It's also the first movie I've seen make comedic hay of the 1944 Morgenthau Plan for postwar German disarmament. Hilarious!

And because critics can't help but spoil jokes, I give you just one, when a character mentions that a fire was so — “Delightful?” someone chirps. “No; it took three lives down at the bakery. It was awful.”

Check in with Cup of Cheer, the holiday equivalent of a tipsy relative telling off-colour jokes after dinner.

'Tis the season.