BAD CHRISTMAS MOVIES
WITH ALL OF THE MOVIES TO WATCH DURING THE HOLIDAY SEASON, HERE ARE 10 TO AVOID
BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY GOOD HOLIDAY FILMS YOU BE WATCHING, WE’VE COME UP WITH A TOP 10 LIST TO AVOID
The holiday season brings out the best in people. Acts of kindness and charity, warm gatherings with family and friends, picking out the ideal, thoughtful gift for that special person in your life. It’s all very wondrous and magical. In a perfect world. Here in reality, though, the holidays can also reveal our darker sides. Shoppers coming to blows over Black Friday sales, drunken screaming matches across the Christmas dinner table, brats throwing tantrums because they didn’t get the $200 toy they wanted from Santa. It’s all very gross and depressing.
Fortunately, the holidays tend to be much more good than bad, and so do movies about the season.
Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever (2014)
While we’d like to marry Parks and Recreation’s Aubrey Plaza and have all of her beautiful sarcastic babies, we’ll first have to overlook this litter-box leftover featuring the forever-frowning and Internet-famous Grumpy Cat. Not since Bill Murray starred in Garfield has an actor we love lent his voice to such a lame movie about a talking feline. It’s bad, even by Lifetime movie standards. And that’s saying something.
Black Christmas (2006)
The original Black Christmas — the 1974 movie that first gave us ‘the calls are coming from the house!’ — isn’t exactly what you’d call a classic, but it is a weird little Canadian horror gem. And it looks like the work of Alfred Freakin’ Hitchcock next to this limp, brain-dead, terror-free remake, starring people who should have known better (including the original movie’s Andrea Martin), and whose onscreen deaths elicit more cheers than gasps. There are tons of bona fide classics out there, from the original Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story, to some that might not necessarily come to mind when you think of holiday movies, like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard, which remains the best Christmas movie of all time. And no, that’s not open to debate. But if you look just a little bit deeper, there are thunderingly awful holiday movies as well, dumber than Frosty without his magic hat and smellier than Rudolph’s stable when Santa’s elves haven’t cleaned it for a month. Some deliberately strive for badness while others step into it quite unintentionally.
With that in mind, here’s a look at the 10 worst holiday movies of all time. Ho, ho, ho? More like no, no, no.
Santa’s Slay (2005)
While this shot-in-Alberta horror-comedy has kind of an interesting premise — that Santa Claus is the son of Satan and was forced to deliver presents for 1,000 years after losing a curling match to an angel — the diabolically bad writing, acting and production just can’t save it. The opening scene alone — in which Santa (wrestler Bill Goldberg), murders a family played by Fran Drescher, Chris Kattan, Rebecca Gayheart and James Caan — is the stuff of legend — awful, awful legend.
I’ll Be Home for Christmas (1998)
Remember Home Improvement’s Jonathan Taylor Thomas? Yeah, we haven’t thought about him for a million years either. But every time December rolls around, somebody thinks it might be fun to watch this heinous excuse for a comedy — CBC airs it every year, unsurprisingly — and realizes their time would have been better spent pulling tinsel out of Fido’s butt.
Fred Claus (2007)
You might think 2008’s Four Christmases is the worst holiday movie starring Vince Vaughn but — incredibly — you’d be wrong. Vaughn, who hasn’t been too discerning with his acting gigs in the last decade or so, stars as Santa’s less-famous brother in a movie that tries to be funny and sentimental, but lands with a bigger thud than Ol’ Saint Nick coming down a greased-up chimney.
Silent Night, Deadly Night, Part 2 (1987)
Don’t be fooled by the infamous ‘garbage day!’ scene, which might trick you into thinking this is a sobad-it’s-completely-awesome slasher flick. While it does have some hilariously atrocious moments, for the most part this is a terrible sequel to an already bad movie — a movie it flashes back to excessively in a bid to cut its already minuscule production costs — and it’s not worth suffering through just for the odd giggle.
Home Alone 3 (1997)
Home Alone still reigns as one of the best Christmas movies, even if it’s more about an emotionally abused kid staving off a home invasion by two violent men than it is about the spirit of the season. But by the time the third instalment rolled round, star Macaulay Culkin and director Chris Columbus had vacated the premises and this one is a bigger disappointment than finding dollar-store socks under the tree — although it does feature an appearance by an adorable, 12-year-old Scarlett Johansson.
Jack Frost (1997 and 1998)
No matter which version of Jack Frost you watch — the unfunny, unscary 1997 horror-comedy or the following year’s unrelated fantasy drama, starring Michael Keaton as a dad who dies in a car crash and comes back as a snowman — you know you’re going to have a bad time. The Keaton movie, in particular, features one of the most creepy and distracting digital characters since … well, digital characters were still pretty new back then, but it doesn’t matter. Both of these movies snowblow.
Saving Christmas (2014)
Former child star Kirk Cameron has carved out a grown-up career in evangelical movies, but even his most devout fans might have their faith tested with this ham-handed diatribe about how the reason for the season is being corrupted by heathen unbelievers, and how Santa Claus, the Christmas tree and consumerism (yeah!) all have their roots in the Bible. This movie had the distinction of being the worstrated film in IMDb.com history not long after it came out, a full 10 spots below Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2. If someone on your list has been especially naughty this year, now you know what to get them.
Eight Crazy Nights (2002)
Even before Adam Sandler started to suck with the consistency of a Dyson, his foray into animated films seemed like a risky proposition. And rest assured, Sandler’s Hannukah cartoon is awful, even if you somehow look past the childish bodily function jokes, insipid musical numbers and grossly overt product placement. It’s too bad, because there’s a smidgen of genuine heart here (and Hannukah isn’t often represented in holiday films), but it all gets Sandlerized to smithereens.