Directed by Fabrice Du Welz, who wrote it with Romain Protat, this is the story of Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas), a struggling singer who lives in his van as he performs soft rock for nursing home residents. As he drives toward a Christmas concert, his van breaks down and he’s helped by former stand-up comedian and innkeeper Mr. Bartel (Jackie Berroyer), yet if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s never break down in the European countryside, particularly in the kind of town where the locals gather to watch a boy lose his virginity to a pig and the only sign of women are the naked selfies a fan (Brigitte Lahaie!) gave to our protagonist.

Gloria, Bartel’s wife, left him years ago but not before destroying him, sleeping with every man in town, an event that has seemed to decimate everyone in her wake. Marc must now pay for her sins, his van burned, his head shaved and his body wearing one of her old dresses, now on the run from everyone as they chase him through a muddy cemetery and treat him as if he were a dog.

This has a horrifying scene where Bartel screams at the bar in town and says that his wife has come back and no one can have her while men play strange waltz music out of synch and then everyone starts to dance with each other. There’s also a speech about the meaning of the season ended with a bullet through the head and the first time I’ve seen a quicksand death in a movie for a long time.

The director says that there are only two characters in the film, Marc and Bartel, and everyone else is just another version of Bartel. That makes more sense after you watch this. Just you know, maybe save your Christmas viewing after the family has said good night.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know Die Hard was a Christmas movie? Shut up. Let’s talk about Dolph Lundgren fighting aliens over the Yuletide. Also not Dolph’s only holiday movie.

We were just discussing this movie as we opened Christmas gifts, because it has a different title now. Over the last few years, people have started referring to it by its original title Dark Angel, which was changed in the U.S. because there were two movies with that title in 1925 and 1935.

Director Craig R. Baxley started his career as a stuntman before moving into stunt coordination and second unit directing. Since then, he’s directed one of my favorite movies no one ever talks about — Stone Cold — as well as Action Jackson and the Stephen King adaptions Storm of the Century, Rose Red, The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer and Kingdom Hospital.

Jack Caine is a rough around the edges cop — he’s Dolph Lundgren, too — who is at war with the White Boys, a gang of white collar drug dealers who do stuff like kill partners and blow up police stations. They’re led by Victor Manning, played by Sherman Howard, who was Bub in Day of the Dead.

Caine is partnered with a by-the-book federal agent named Arwood “Larry” Smith, played by Brian Benben who you may remember from the HBO series Dream On. If you were a teen when there was no internet and you wanted guaranteed nudity.

Meanwhile, an alien drug dealer named Talec has come to Earth to leech out peoples’ brains. He’s portrayed by Matthias Hues, who is related to Engelbert Humperdinck and took over Van Damme’s role for No Retreat, No Surrender 2. He’s being pursued by Azeck, an alien cop. The guy who played him Jay Bilas, is on ESPN as a college basketball announcer, as he played for Duke University and was drafted fifth in the 1986 NBA Draft by the Dallas Mavericks. He was an assistant coach at Duke and is a practicing attorney in North Carolina.

David Ackroyd, who was in the TV movies Exo-Man and The Dark Secret of Harvest Home, plays Smith’s boss. Betsy Brantley (the body model for Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) is Lundgren’s girlfriend, a coroner who helps him track the alien criminal. Michael J. Pollard has a cameo as a criminal, World Celebrity Chess Champion Jesse Vint (Forbidden World, Deathsport) is Talec’s first victim and Al Leong shows up too, because he has to in any movie with cops and/or aliens.

Screenwriter David Koepp would move from this movie into some real blockbusters, like Death Becomes Her, Jurassic Park, Carlito’s Way, The Shadow, Mission: Impossible, Stir of Echoes (he also directed), Panic Room, Spider-Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and many more. He’s had an incredibly successful career and it all really got rolling here.

There’s been talk of a sequel for years, but at this point, I think only people like me — and maybe you reading this — would care. That said — I’m there whenever it comes out.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on December 22, 2017.

In Italy, Trading Places is shown on TV every Christmas Eve, becoming a classic everyone can love. Here, it’s not remembered as a holiday film. Yet it is — a parable about how much money really matters within a week or so of time within the lives of two very different men.

Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd) has the benefits of a great upbringing and Ivy League education. Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy) is street smart from the wrong side of the tracks.

The Duke brothers, Randolph and Mortimer (Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche), come from old money and have been on the stock exchange since it opened. They debate nature versus nurture and decide to switch the social roles of our two protagonists and bet on the results.

In less time than you’d expect, Valentine has easily accepted the upper crust lifestyle while showing class and manners that Louis lacked. And the richer of our heroes descends into petty theft and alcoholism — again all in the span of several hours. He also discovers what love is all about from Jamie Lee Curtis’ character Ophelia. And Denholm Elliot’s character, Coleman, goes from butler to accomplice to friend.

Along the way, the film has plenty of great character roles, too. Paul Gleason continues his career-long mastery of playing complete dicks. Jim Belushi shoes up at a party, Jamie Lee’s sister Kelly (who is also in Michele Soavi’s The Sect) shows up, as does Frank Oz, Bo Diddley and Al Franken, years before he’d go into politics and take inappropriate photos.

The leads work so well together that you wish they’d made several films together. It’s a natural, breezy film, one that continues to deliver on its basic premise. This movie is a success on every level, with Roger Ebert favorably comparing it to the comedies of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. The only misstep it takes is in the backward 1980’s usage of homophobic slurs — they really take you out of the film.

Clay Kaytis started as an animator at Disney — he worked on Pocahontas, Hercules, Tangled and more — before directing The Angry Birds Movie and The Christmas Chronicles. He co-wrote this with Nick Schenk, who has worked with Clint Eastwood on movies such as Gran Torino, The Mule and Cry Macho. The story comes from Schenk and Peter Billingsley, who of course played Ralphie in the original A Christmas Story.

For those of you worried that this movie is a sequel to that film with only a few of the original actors, this is the eighth — ninth if you count the live TV movie — film of Jean Shepherd’s Parker family. This is the first without his voice or based on his writing. Melinda Dillon, who played the mother, has since retired from acting and Darren McGavin sady died in 2006.  Returning characters include Randy (Ian Petrella), Flick (Scott Schwartz), Schwartz (R. D. Robb), Scut Farkus (R.D. Robb) and Grover Dill (Yano Anaya).

Instead of Cleveland, this was shot in Hungary and Bulgaria.

33 years after A Christmas Story, Ralphie Parker (Billingsley) has moved to Chicago, married Sandy (Erinn Hayes) and has two children, Mark (River Drosche) and Julie (Julianna Layne). He’s taken a year away from work to try and sell his science fiction novel but time is almost up. Yet it’s Christmas and he’s waiting for his mother (Julie Haggerty) and The Old Man to show up, but then he gets the news that his father has died.

This was a hard movie to watch, as my father passed away a few days before it came out and I feel like I’ve lived the hardest moment of this: Ralphie must find a way to write his father’s obituary and explain just how special he was.

Heading back to Indiana, Ralphie tries to give his kids — and his grieving mother — the Christmas that he remembers. The town hasn’t changed so much — at first — with the Bumpkis family and bullies still next door while Flick owns the neighborhood bar and Schwartz is the one running up a tab. Higbee’s is still open and there’s still a line to tell Santa what you want.

There are still thinks that have changed — what has happened with Scut Farkus is inspirational — and the realitization that he has now become the Old Man to his children is sobering. I love that the story that Ralphie tells his family leads directly into the original movie.

There are also some nice nods to Shepherd, with the casseroles in the Parker refrigerator having the names of haracters mentioned in the original film, as well as Shepherd’s other stories. There’s also the sign in Flick’s Bar that says, “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash” which is the name of Shepherd’s book that the stories “Duel in the Snow,” “The Counterfeit Secret Circle Member Gets the Message,” “My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award That Heralded the Birth of Pop Art” and “Grover Dill and the Tasmanian Devil” were in, the four short stories that were adapted and turned into A Christmas Story.

I was cautious of this movie and while I realize there’s no real need for it, I didn’t regret the time I spent with it. So much of Shepherd’s work is looking back at the past and seeing the good that you didn’t see at the time and trying to bring that into your present. That’s a hard thing to do with loss is so new and raw and real. There are times that I watched this through tears, remembering how many times I watched the first A Christmas Story with my father who always referred to this movie as simple Ralphie. I hope that what I wrote about him was as thoughtful as the obituary in this.

If you love A Christmas Story, avoid this movie.

Six years later, fifteen-year-old Ralphie Parker (Braeden Lemasters) wants a 1939 Mercury Eight convertible, not a Red Ryder BB gun, but he crashes the car when he goes to look at it. That means that he, Flick (David W. Thompson) and Schwartz (David Buehrle) must get jobs including working at Higbee’s.

Directed by Brian Levant (who made the sequels Problem Child 2, Problem Child 3, Beethoven’s Big Break and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas — to be fair, he also made the first Beethoven and The Flintstones — and written by Nat Mauldin who had the sheer balls to pull a Jean Shepherd and narrate this, A Christmas Story 2 is everything the original movie is not, a film that just plays up moments like rememberberries and cheapens them.

Daniel Stern plays the Old Man, which is kind of funny because his narration on The Wonder Years was directly ripped off from Shepherd’s voice over in A Christmas Story while Stacey Travis plays mom and Valin Shinyei plays Randy, who dresses like Buck Rogers for most of the running time. It also says that “The Genuine, Authentic, 100% American Christmas is Back” and this was filmed in British Columbia. It takes every genuine moment of the first film and fan fictions it so that everything happens again, all looking horrible and not warm and well-made like Bob Clark and Jean Shepherd once gave us. Everyone involved with this should get coal for the rest of their life.

I own this movie and hate that it is in my house.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on December 24, 2020.

Happy holidays, everyone. To help celebrate, this is the first of two very horrifying holiday options for you to watch. Despite Santa being in the title of this movie, he only briefly appears, but that isn’t why we watched this movie. No, we’re here because this is another film in the career of Herschell Gordon Lewis that we had to check off.

Yes, parents that dropped their kids off at the theater for an all-day matinee in 1967 probably had no idea that just a few years earlier, the man they are trusting with the psyches of their children made Blood Feast.

So how did this even happen? Well, producer J. Edwin Baker was also a spook-show performer known as Dr. Silkini — his act was The Asylum of Horrors — and he hired Lewis to make a movie for his friend magician Roy Huston.

Huston plays Merlin, making this the second baffling holiday movie* I’ve seen where Santa joins forces with King Arthur’s closest confidant. I have no idea why this is a thing, to be perfectly honest.

The film starts with Santa Claus chilling out on the day after Christmas by reading some Mother Goose, which puts him to sleep. This section is tacked on, of course, to the original film so that they could get more money out of it. It’s also so shoddily made that we can audibly hear Lewis yell cut.

As for the movie itself, Old King Cole calls Merlin, a rag doll who is legally never referred to as Raggedy Anne (or Annabelle, for that matter), Prince Charming, Sleeping Beauty, Mother Goose and a ghost who they originally called Casper before an audio edit saved the production from a lawsuit onto the stage for singing, something resembling dancing and the kind of magic tricks that you could have bought from a mail order store to bore your friends with.

Do you remember — if you’re a jerk like me — how much you hated up with people school assemblies? This is just like being stuck at one of those, with Lewis just plopping his cameras down and shooting whatever happened on stage.

There’s so much hand work and goofy acting tics and a witch that gets set on fire and not Raggedy Ann is just horrifying and the real magic trick is that somehow the hour running time of this feels like a hundred years. But hey, it’s Christmas and I have pledged to watch everything the Godfather of Gore ever did, so if you’re going to hit the highs of She-Devils on Wheels and Two Thousand Maniacs! then you’re going to suffer the valleys on the journey.

*The other is, of course, the Mexican mind melter known as Santa Claus.

Tommy Wirkola made Dead Snow and The Trip and somehow, he’s made a Christmas movie — written by Patrick Casey and Josh Miller — that features David Harbour as an exhausted Santa Claus trapped in a home invasion led by John Leguizamo. Just from the trailer, in which Santa destroys a room full of soldiers, you could tell that this would be fun.

It might be a little long, but it’s also inventive, with Harbour totally owning this movie from start to finish. His Santa was once a Viking warrior named Nikamund the Red that found himself part of Christmas magic that he admits that he really doesn’t understand. As the soldiers take over the home of the rich Lightstone family — Beverly D’Angelo is great in this as the matriarch of this spoiled brood — only seven year old Trudy (Leah Brady) is able to reach Santa’s heart and remind him of the magic of the holiday.

That said, this is filled with way over the top violence — a nail in the chin effect actually made me recoil which is a definite achievement — as well as a Home Alone moment where the damage that Trudy delivers to the henchmen is way more horrifying than what Kevin McCallister did to the Wet Bandits.

It ends up pretty heartwarming which is way more than I expected. Who knew the best holiday movie of this year would be the bloodiest?

EDITOR’S NOTE: I love this movie and it was my favorite holiday movie that I watched last year. It was posted on December 23, 2021.

Gabe Snow writes for a tabloid with a very limited audience — The X-mas Times— which is all about holiday conspiracies. The latest is Flight 1225, which was brought down one foggy Christmas Eve by a flying creature with a glowing nose.

To keep this a secret, Clausferantu — a demonic vampire anti-Santa Claus — has unleashed zombie elves, demonic snowmen and an army of ninjas known as the Silent Nights.

It makes sense that this was directed and written by one of the people who worked on the WNUF Halloween Special, Jamie Nash, who created this along with David Thomas Sckrabulis.

There are animated sections, Gremlins flashback stories to horrible holiday secrets, a karate fight with Santa coming back to battle his evil twin, an evil bunny, a horrifying story about pulling out teeth to get money and an SOV aesthetic that I absolutely loved.

This movie has jumped up on my list of favorite weird holiday horror and feels like a spiritual sequel to Elves, which is the highest praise I can give.