Christmas VODepths: What to See (and Avoid) On Demand This Holiday Season

As always, Christmas brings a bounty of sentiment and ridiculousness to VOD and streaming services, and this year’s fringe holiday offerings include a film-noir Scrooge, a singing animated Santa, homeless grifters, and lesbians both in love and in peril.

Breakup Season (VOD December 6): This glum holiday dramedy begins on a sour note for both the audience and the characters, as seemingly happy couple Ben (Chandler Riggs) and Cassie (Samantha Isler) break up just hours after arriving at Ben’s rural Oregon childhood home for Christmas. Snowed in with no way to travel until after the holiday, Cassie is stuck spending time with Ben and his family, whether she likes it or not. That sounds like a predictable rom-com formula for reconciliation, and it’s admirable that writer-director H. Nelson Tracey isn’t interested in taking the obvious route. But what he offers instead are dour family squabbles, with two main characters whose initial closeness and abrupt separation are equally inscrutable. Tracey clearly doesn’t want either party to be in the wrong, but that just leaves the relationship in a meaningless middle ground in a story that’s meant to be about serious emotional reflection. While the movie avoids a tidy resolution, it also avoids any truly affecting or insightful moments. Grade: C+

Blue Christmas (VOD and Fawesome): Veteran crime novelist Max Allan Collins seems like the perfect person to put a noir spin on A Christmas Carol, but his attempt to turn Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge into a 1940s private eye is woefully misguided. Scrooge stand-in Richard Stone (Rob Merritt) doesn’t even seem like a particularly bad guy. His main flaw is his indifference to the murder of his late partner Jake Marley (Chris Causey), who warns Stone of his dire future if he doesn’t bring Marley’s killer to justice. Cue the arrival of the three ghosts, including Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde fame and, uh, Elvis Presley. Collins stages all of the flashbacks and flash-forwards exclusively within Stone’s office, no matter where they take place, and the production has a sad community theater feel. The acting is shockingly terrible, and no one in the cast is remotely equipped to handle Collins’ hard-boiled dialogue. It’s even worse when Collins abandons noir for sappiness, undermining the movie’s only distinctive quality. Grade: D

The Holiday Club (VOD and Tello): Previous Christmas offerings from lesbian-focused streaming service Tello have been chipper Hallmark-style romances, but this year’s entry is more grounded and more genuine. Christmas doesn’t even show up until the last 15 minutes of writer-director Alexandra Swarens’ low-key dramedy, about a holiday-hating computer programmer (Mak Shealy) slowly falling for her friendly baker neighbor (Swarens). The two become instant friends after a Valentine’s Day meet-cute, but they’re always seeing other people, despite being obvious soulmates. Swarens cycles through a year’s worth of holidays, but downplays the high concept, instead focusing on a genial hangout vibe. She also makes small-town Ashland, Ohio, look like a utopia of tasty baked goods, vintage repertory cinemas, and queer solidarity. Shealy and Swarens have great chemistry, which makes it a bit frustrating that it takes so long for them to overcome the minor obstacles to their love. Still, they’re endearing enough that it’s pleasant just to spend time with them on the way to the inevitable. Grade: B-


Home-less for the Holidays (VOD and Roku Channel): Possibly the most insulting moment of this ugly, condescending Christmas comedy comes at the end, when the narrator delivers a direct-to-camera appeal to donate to homeless shelters. That bit of self-righteous lecturing arrives after 90 minutes of inept bumbling from the ensemble of unhoused characters, led by the manic, mugging Kentucky Joe (pro wrestler Al Snow). Joe and his crew of misfits live under an overpass, where they find millionaire Winston Winterfield (Darren Lee Cupp) passed out at the wheel of his car. Instead of getting him medical attention, they steal his money, buy themselves exaggerated “fancy” clothes and show up at his mansion claiming to be his long-lost relatives. There’s almost no conflict, though, despite opposition from a stuffy butler (John Wells) with a horrendous fake British accent, and some vague redemption for Winston’s alcoholic brother (Douglas Vermeeren). Kentucky Joe’s friends are all cartoonish stereotypes, and every actor is a pure-grade Christmas ham. The strained humor gives way to an even more excruciating extended public-service-announcement wrap-up. Grade: D-

The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland (Amazon Prime Video and Hulu): Two major pieces of public domain intellectual property collide in this cutesy animated movie, when Santa Claus (Gerard Butler) responds to a letter from a little girl in Wonderland. Although Alice (Simone Ashley) makes a belated appearance, Santa’s correspondent is actually the Princess of Hearts, which puts him at odds with the short-tempered Queen of Hearts (Emilia Clarke). The storybook-style animation is appealing, but the thin plot barely covers the 80-minute running time, and it’s padded out by forgettable musical numbers (this Santa both wraps and raps, unfortunately). Even when they aren’t singing, the characters speak entirely in rhyme, which quickly grows tiresome, especially as screenwriter Sara Daddy struggles to deliver key exposition via belabored couplets. Butler plays Santa as slightly daft, with talking reindeer who have to keep him on track, but there isn’t much at stake in his mission to Wonderland, despite the constant activity. The characters rush around spouting irritating rhymes but never do anything worth paying attention to. Grade: C


A Sudden Case of Christmas (VOD and DVD; Hulu December 13): This remake of a 2022 Italian movie comes off like an extended tourism ad, with lavish paid vacations for its name-brand American stars. Danny DeVito brings good-natured paycheck-appreciating energy to his performance as the American owner of an Italian luxury hotel. DeVito’s Lawrence is used to Christmastime visits from his daughter Abbie (DeVito’s actual daughter Lucy), her husband Jacob (Wilmer Valderrama), and their precocious 10-year-old daughter Claire (Antonella Rose), so he’s surprised when they show up in August. Abbie and Jacob just want a comforting environment to break the news of their impending divorce to Claire, but she catches on quickly and insists they have one final Christmas as a family, as an excuse to bring them back together. Rose is charming, but there are far too many adult-oriented subplots for this to work as a family-friendly movie, with a surprising fixation on adultery. The tourist activities overpower the Christmas cheer, and while the Italian countryside looks gorgeous, the people inhabiting it are less compelling. Grade: C

This Is Not a Christmas Movie (Viaplay): Starting with its cheeky title, this Dutch comedy tries way too hard to be the edgy version of a movie about disparate family members coming together at the holidays. Director Michael Middelkoop throws a grab bag of hot-button topics into the various intersecting storylines, including gender identity, workplace sexual relationships, cancel culture, and men’s rights activism. In the days leading up to Christmas, the extended Zwaan clan get entangled in all of these issues, with superficially disastrous but ultimately harmless outcomes. Middelkoop and screenwriters Isis Cabolet and Lotte Tabbers endeavor to balance the satire of both wokeness and anti-wokeness, but the muddled result has nothing to say and mostly makes the characters look like idiots. It’s tough to find any honest feeling in the histrionic whining about privileged nonsense, and having the characters point out their own privilege doesn’t help. The movie ends with a limp joke about Santa and his politically correct elves, turning the entire story into a holiday fable with no moral and no punchline. Grade: C

You Are Not Me (VOD and select theaters December 6): Viewers are likely to figure out what’s really going on in this Spanish horror movie long before the protagonist does, but there’s enough tense, creepy atmosphere to make up for the delay in getting to the obvious destination. The first half is especially unsettling, before writer-directors Marisa Crespo and Moisés Romera lay out enough clues to put together a full picture of the odd behavior that NGO doctor Aitana (Roser Tapias) encounters when she returns to her family home for Christmas. Aitana was previously estranged from her parents, but she now expects a warm welcome when she arrives from Brazil with her wife Gabi (Yapoena Silva) and their adopted son. Instead, she discovers a strange woman who has seemingly taken her place as their beloved daughter, and a house full of even stranger guests gathering for mysterious purposes. Crespo and Romera explore questions of class, race, and immigration within their familiar horror framework, but the mild social commentary is never as effective as the sheer terror Tapias consistently conveys. Grade: B

Josh Bell is a freelance writer and movie/TV critic based in Las Vegas. He's the former film editor of 'Las Vegas Weekly' and has written about movies and pop culture for Syfy Wire, Polygon, CBR, Film Racket, Uproxx and more. With comedian Jason Harris, he co-hosts the podcast Awesome Movie Year.

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