RED CHRISTMAS -- Blu-ray Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 10/17/17

 

We reviewed a barebones advance screener for RED CHRISTMAS back in August (see below) but today (October 17) it comes out on Blu-ray from Artsploitation Films and we've gotten the opportunity to take a gander at it. 

This seasonal slash-em-up is about a highly dysfunctional family (with America's sweetheart, Dee Wallace, as the harried matriarch) getting together like oil and water for an unconventional Christmas celebration with a surprise guest--Cletus, Mom's aborted fetus that survived, grew up, got real crazy, and is now out for either familial love or ruthless revenge, whichever comes first.

Needless to say, it's a raucous affair that serves to bring the disparate family members together at last, even as they're getting picked off one by one.

As for the Blu-ray--not only does it look and sound good enough to put you right in the Christmas spirit, but there are some lovely extras as well.  First up is director Craig Anderson's informal interview with a charming Dee Wallace, who manages to melt our hearts all over again as she speaks of working not only on this film but her previous classics (E.T., THE HOWLING, 10, etc.) as well. 

Next, Anderson and actor Sam Campbell ("Cletus") pop over to Gerald Odwyer's house to chat with him about his experiences playing "Gerry."  Again, it's all pleasantly casual and amusing, as well as informative.

Lastly comes a blooper reel, deleted scene, and brief clip of Odwyer and Anderson goofing around.  The latter two also handle the film's commentary, which is very scene-specific and enlightening.

The Blu-ray is in 2.25:1 widescreen with 5.1 surround sound.  English subtitles and closed-captions are available.

And now, here's our original review of the film itself:

A movie that might also have been called "When Abortions Attack!", RED CHRISTMAS (Artsploitation Films, 2016) is a pretty effective cautionary tale about what can happen if your viable aborted fetus is rescued by the guy who's about to blow up the abortion clinic, grows up into a twisted, deformed freak, and then returns as an adult on Christmas Day to wreak bloody revenge on his erstwhile mother and her comically dysfunctional family. 

Of course, any such film must star beloved genre queen Dee Wallace as the mom, who so desperately wants a traditional, happy family get-together despite having a woefully untraditional, unhappy family with absolutely no intention of getting together.  Her only solace is son Jerry (Gerard Odwyer), whose Downs Syndrome only makes him more special in Mommy's heart.

The rest of the clan includes the rebellious teen girl, her witheringly cynical and very, very pregnant older sister, the ultra-religious sister whose husband is a pious man of the cloth, and Mom's old-hippie brother who is forever puffing away on his medicinal marijuana. 

The prickly interactions amongst this motley bunch, spurred by various family issues and clashing personalities, would be sufficient for a twisted "Big Chill" sort of ensemble dramedy were it not for the fact that their ritual of exchanging gifts around the Christmas tree is interrupted by the entrance of one Cletus, an extremely creepy figure robed in black and wrapped from head to toe like a leper. 

Anyone who watches the abortion clinic prologue and then gets a load of Cletus should have very little trouble putting two and two together as well as mentally mapping out pretty much what territory the rest of RED CHRISTMAS is going to cover. 

All that's left to discover is who's gonna die in what order, how (and how bad) it's going to be, and whether or not first-time writer-director Craig Anderson will be able to make it entertaining for us jaded old slasher-flick junkies. 

Of course, the movie has already proven itself absorbing and fun thanks to good dialogue and performances and a pleasing overall look which includes nicely creative use of color and camera movement. 

Once the axe hits the skull and Cletus starts racking up his body count, the story goes into high gear and keeps us on our toes even though most of the plot's twists and turns cover pretty familiar ground. 
Granted, things start to lag a bit in the second half, but remain generally engaging enough to keep us wanting to see what happens next.  The kills range from teasing glimpses to graphic gore (although this isn't really a gorehound's dream) while our fleeting glimpse of Cletus sans facial bandages drives home the pleasingly retro nature of the film's practical effects. 

The tone is mock serious, with any humor that's inherent in the script kept utterly deadpan and never overt, which I like.  I also like the fact that the premise is so refreshingly different from the usual teens-in-a-cabin or campers-in-the-woods slasher fare while retaining the better elements of such films.

Mainly, though, RED CHRISTMAS lets us enjoy watching the wonderful Dee Wallace giving her all in a great role while fun and entertaining murder, mayhem, and carnage ensue all around her.  It's enough to give horror fans a little taste of Christmas right here in the middle of August.
 


Red Christmas (Official Trailer)

RED CHRISTMAS -- Blu-ray Review by Porfle

CHASING CHRISTMAS -- Movie Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 11/18/10

 

Here's the deal: the Bureau of Yuletide Affairs constantly monitors everyone, looking for people who hate Christmas so that they can send the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future into action. Charles Dickens was one of their former targets, and he wrote a fictionalized account of the experience in "A Christmas Carol", but don't mention that book around the Bureau because they find it an unflattering depiction of their organization.

Anyway, in CHASING CHRISTMAS (2005), the latest focus of their efforts is Jack Cameron (Tom Arnold), a divorced father who despises Christmas because, seven years earlier, he caught his former wife Alison (played by the MILF-tastic Sarah-Jane Redmond of "Smallville" and "Millenium") fooling around with their dentist in the coatroom during their daughter Suzanne's Christmas play. In an early scene, two cute little kids notice that Jack doesn't have any Christmas decorations around his house so they cheerfully give him one of theirs, a happy plastic snowman which Jack gratefully places out in the street so a truck can run over it. At the coat factory that he owns, an employee is shocked to find that he's no longer donating their irregulars to the homeless at Christmas, selling them instead to the Guatemalan army. "They don't care if the epaulets are upside-down or not," he tells her. "They're not a very good army--they'll probably only wear 'em once, anyway."

So, with Jack's Scrooge-ness well established, it looks like we're in store for yet another "A Christmas Carol" variant with few surprises along the way. Indeed, at the stroke of seven on Christmas Eve, the Ghost Of Christmas Past shows up in Jack's livingroom just as he's downing a large glass of Scotch and watching non-seasonal shows on TV. Past is played by Leslie Jordan, who used to be Lonnie Garr on "Hearts Afire" and has appeared in numerous other movies and TV shows ("Will & Grace", "Boston Legal", "Boston Public", JASON GOES TO HELL, HERO). You'd know him if you saw him--he's about four feet tall and he's pretty funny. But when he hurls a reluctant Jack over the couch and launches him down the front stairs to get him motivated, we detect that something seems to be bothering him.

Zipping back to 1965, they visit Jack's boyhood home on Christmas Eve, beginning the usual "A Christmas Carol" guilt-trip cycle. But Past is fed up with all that--he yearns to be human, smoke cigarettes, drink alky-hol, chase babes, and stay forever in his beloved past. So, going off-mission a tad, he smashes his "snowflake of invisibility" in order to become human (don't ask), knocks Jack out with a holiday snowglobe, ties him to a chair with a string of decorative lights, and scampers off into the night. It's at this point, you might guess, that the story begins to veer off from the usual "A Christmas Carol" template and become somewhat less predictable.

The Ghost Of Christmas Present is called into action ahead of schedule and sent to the scene to perform damage control before the timeline is irrevocably altered. But first, her "snowflake of invisibility" must also be smashed so that she can become human, too. (Really, it's just better not to ask.) Present is a tall, blonde babe, which I found to distinctly increase this movie's watchability. She is played by a tall, blonde actress named Andrea Roth, who has also been in a whole bunch of other stuff ("Rescue Me", "CSI", THE PERFECT HUSBAND). Her character doesn't know anything about the past, only the present ("Where's Madonna right now?" Jack asks her. "In the bathroom," she replies.)

In their quest to track down Past across various time periods, she'll experience things she's never known before, such as getting drunk, disco dancing, and falling in love. That's right--she falls in love with Jack, as if you didn't already see that coming. (I think it happens while they're in the hot tub.) And Jack gets to see himself not only as a little boy (played by the hilarious Zak Ludwig in an all-too-brief scene), but during his ski-lodge honeymoon ("I was BORING!" he groans), where he also discovers that Alison was already cheating on him with a low-forehead hunk in the bar while he was in their room watching IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE.

And somehow during it all, Jack learns the true meaning of Christmas, although I didn't really understand exactly how all that frantic chasing around caused this to happen. "God bless us every one!" is shoehorned in at the end, as well as the standard "Scrooge transformed" ending, but I just didn't get that Christmas vibe--which leads me to doubt that CHASING CHRISTMAS will ever become any kind of modern seasonal tradition along the lines of A CHRISTMAS STORY, or even THE SANTA CLAUSE.

But it is fun and fairly entertaining, and I didn't regret sitting through it. I'm a fan of Tom Arnold (although I never understood the whole Rosanne thing) and a non-raunchy, family-friendly Tom is still funny. I like his comedy persona, which seemed to come into full fruition as Ah-nuld's sidekick in TRUE LIES, and which easily keeps this ABC Family TV production enjoyable throughout. Just don't expect to get all misty-eyed and start reaching for the eggnog when he jumps around at the end screaming "Merry Christmas, everybody!"

CHASING CHRISTMAS -- Movie Review by Porfle

A CINDERELLA STORY: CHRISTMAS WISH -- Blu-ray/DVD Review by Porfle

(Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of the Blu-ray I reviewed in this blog post. The opinions I share are my own.)


Originally posted on 10/25/19

 

Much of the success of a "Cinderella" story depends on how much we hate her wicked stepmother and two wicked stepsisters, while at the same time finding them perversely funny. We also have to like the title character enough to root for her to win out over those three harpies and find true love with her Prince Charming.

In that, 2019's A CINDERELLA STORY: CHRISTMAS WISH (Warner Bros. Home Entertainment) fills in the blanks quite nicely, with Johannah Newmarch (POLARIS, "Stargate: SG-1") as stepmother Deirdre Decker, along with Lillian Doucet-Roche and Chanelle Peloso as the jarringly misnamed stepsisters Joy and Grace, horrify us with their selfishness, vanity, and deviousness yet still delight with their comically overdrawn characters and addlebrained bungling.

As Kat Decker, Laura Marano ("Austin & Ally", SAVING ZOE) fills the "Cinderella" role likably enough, going about the thankless task of waiting hand and foot on her step-monsters while holding down a job as a performing elf at Santa Land, all the while keeping as cheerful and upbeat as possible as she dreams of someday becoming a famous singer and performing her own songs for an adoring public.

Romance is another concern, one which is hampered by her becoming an object of internet ridicule when Joy posts a video in her vlog of Kat making a clumsy fool of herself in front of the town's most eligible bachelor, the handsome and charming Dominic Wintergarden (Gregg Sulkin, "Runaways").

As fate would have it, Dominic plays Santa at the store where Kat works, but she doesn't know it's him because he never takes off his beard at work. 

Naturally, they fall in love for all the right reasons, and as we can all guess by now Kat will get invited to a big gala thrown by Dominic's billionaire dad. But as we can also surmise, wicked stepmother finds a way to steal Kat's invitation and crash the party along with Joy and Grace, who all have designs on snaring one of the Wintergarden men as their own. 

All of this is about as lightweight and breezy as can be, and just as easy to take if one's expectations are no higher than your average teen or tween looking for something fun and vaguely identifiable to watch.

The movie looks bright and colorful, the leads are attractive and chipper, and the baddies are cartoonishly evil. (In my case, it helps that one of the wicked stepsisters resembles Miley Cyrus.)

With the help of Kat's devoted best friend Isla (Isabella Gomez, "One Day At a Time"), who assumes the "Fairy Godmother" role by making a beautiful gown for the gala and encouraging Kat every step of the way, our "Cinderella" gets her big chance for happiness when she ends up singing one of her own compositions for the high-tone audience.

Music plays a major role throughout the rest of the story as well, with Laura Marano and fellow castmembers performing a series of heavily-autotuned pop songs which, while totally forgettable, at least keep things bouncing along pleasantly enough.

Director and co-writer Michelle Johnston, an actress and dancer in such films as A CHORUS LINE and CHICAGO, ably follows up her 2016 effort entitled "A Cinderella Story: If the Shoe Fits."

The 2-disc set from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment contains both the Blu-ray and DVD versions of the movie plus a code for digital download. Extras consist of two featurettes, "The Look and Costumes of 'A Christmas Wish'" and "The Mic and The Stage", as well as trailers for other releases.

As teen-oriented musical rom-coms go, this one is about as wispy as cotton candy but equally sweet and easy to swallow.  A CINDERELLA STORY: CHRISTMAS WISH does what it aims to do: make us root for "Cinderella", hate her wicked step-harpies (while laughing at them), and feel good when "Prince Charming" sweeps her off her feet.



#CinderellaChristmas

Region: Region A/1 (Read more about DVD/Blu-ray formats.)
Number of discs: 2
Rated:PG/Parental Guidance Suggested
Studio: Warner Brothers
DVD Release Date: October 29, 2019
Run Time: 93 minutes


TRAILER:





MUSIC VIDEO:

A CINDERELLA STORY: CHRISTMAS WISH -- Blu-ray/DVD Review by Porfle

SNOWMAGEDDON -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 11/7/12

 

There seems to be an entire category of movies on the SyFy Channel in which small Canadian towns double as small Northwestern towns in the USA which are menaced by some kind of supernatural (or super-natural) force, which resides or has its origin in a nearby mountain.  Bad CGI comes as a standard feature; giant tentacles are optional. 

One of the latest entries in this curious little sub-genre is SNOWMAGEDDON (2011), a movie whose title pretty much lets us know what kind of movie we're in for.  This time, a rustic burg in Alaska gets hammered by a series of unnatural disasters such as a storm cloud that shoots ice torpedoes which shatter into deadly shrapnel, gaping fissures bisecting city streets and gushing flames, and huge pointy things shooting up out of the ground to spear moving vehicles like shish-kabobs. 

The reason for all this is kept from us at first, lending the film an air of supernatural mystery that's mildly intriguing--until, that is, we find out that the secret behind it all is pretty freakin' dumb.  Suffice it to say that there's this kid named Rudy who plays a role-playing game about dragons and wizards, and he anonymously receives a strange snowglobe for Christmas with a tiny repica of the town in it, and whenever he winds it up, something bad happens.  Somehow, all of this is related to that RPG that he plays.  Why?  Don't ask me.

The destruction is depicted with some pretty good practical effects--the picturesque little town is trashed quite nicely--along with the usual fair-to-awful CGI.  Once the slush hits the fan, the action is split into different little suspense situations of varying interest, including two hapless shlubs trapped in a bus covered with downed power lines, stranded snowboarders who picked the wrong mountain to board, and a mother-daughter duo in a crashed helicopter. 

Good editing helps jazz things up a bit, but it's all just standard time-waster stuff that helps cheapo flicks like this fill in the space between the opening and closing credits. 

Once the kid finally convinces the grownups that his evil snowglobe is causing all the trouble--which, admittedly, might be a bit hard to swallow at first--they follow his sage advice on how to combat the supernatural menace.  Which means two things: one, they've really run out of ideas.  And two, his dad, John Miller (David Cubitt), must make a trek up the now-volcanic peak in order to do what the hero in the game does to stop the evil. 

The acting is about as good as you'd expect from this sort of thing, with Laura Harris (of the late, lamented "Defying Gravity") deserving better as Rudy's plucky mom, Beth.  The dialogue isn't any better or worse than required, save for the occasional eye-rolling exchange such as this:

LARRY: "That thing's straight from Hell itself."
FRED: "Calm down, Larry."
LARRY: "You calm down, Fred."

The DVD from Anchor Bay is in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby 5.1 sound and subtitles in English and Spanish.  No extras.

Really, I can't add any more to this than you can already figure out from the title.  If the word SNOWMAGEDDON doesn't tell you exactly what this movie is all about and whether or not you'll enjoy it, nothing will.  Bottom line: it's a passable, tolerable time-waster.

SNOWMAGEDDON -- DVD Review by Porfle

Yes, Virginia...There Is A Santa Claus

 

(Originally posted on 12/21/14. MoviesAndMore offers are no longer valid.)

 

"YES. VIRGINIA, THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS"

Our Season's Gift To You...
The Iconic 1897 Editorial That Continues to Bring Holiday Joy

On September 21 1897, the New York Sun published what was to become history's most reprinted newspaper editorial. The letter from eight-year old Virginia O'Hanlon of New York City and the quick response from veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has appeared whole or in part in dozens of languages in newspapers, books, movies, on posters, stamps and the internet.


DEAR EDITOR

I am eight years old.

Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Poppa says "if you see it in the Sun it's so." Please tell me the truth.

Is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O'Hanlon
115 West 95th Street
New York City, NY

VIRGINIA, YOUR LITTLE FRIENDS ARE WRONG.

They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.

They do not believe except what hey see. They think nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist and you know that they abound and give your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas, how dreary would the world be if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus? You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your Papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not vthere. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes that noise inside, but there is a vieil covering the the unseen world which not the strongest men, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance can push aside the curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all the world there is nothing else as real and abiding.

No Santa Claus?

Thank God he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

------------------------

This week's features:

It's simple mathematics, really. As the days leading to the holidays become fewer and fewer, stress levels become higher and higher. All the more reason to take a break with some of the most enjoyable films ever made. To name just four of the treats MoviesAndMore.tv has in store.

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Yes, Virginia...There Is A Santa Claus