What Christmas Movies Should Be Riffed

[FilmNerd87]

What are some Christmas movies have you seen lately that deserve a riffing.

I recently watched Christmas Twister (2012, dir. Peter Sullivan) on Tubi. If James Nguyen had decided to pay homage to Jan de Bont's Twister instead of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, this would have been the finished product, complete with on the nose dialogue about global warming. Terrible acting, Casper Van Dien looking like he wants to kill his son while telling him he is proud of what he did with the power tools he stole. Terrible CGI and special effects, over-the-top stereotypes of Texas accents, lame wooden characters who do not know how to duck, characters who randomly appear and disappear, a character screaming "someone open the door" when she could do it herself, and obvious stock footage. And there really isn't much about Christmas in the movie, other than decorations being blown around. There is a reference to Twister when a sign hangs by a thine thread before crashing to the ground a second after our characters have moved. Then it ends with characters in north Texas wearing swimsuits on a sunny Christmas day. UH...anyone from north Texas can tell you that that is impossible.

[Edward J Grug III]

That sounds great

[AmazingThor]

Have they done "Holiday in Handcuffs" yet? It stars Mario Lopez and Melissa Joan Hart.

[FilmNerd87]

Here's a few more that would make great Riffs

Finding Christmas (2024), a teenage boy wanders around the woods being chased by copy-and-past wild animals

Noel (2004), an old man tells a young man "You're my wife." It goes downhill from there.

Christmas at the Royal Hotel (2018), an "epic" war movie shot on a wedding video budget.

[Deep_Hurting]

Considering that it's getting to be "about that time" again, I've got a couple of suggestions. 

But first and foremost, let me just apologize in advance for what I've unleashed upon the world...  You see, last December, I just so happened to come across a mysterious U-Matic broadcast master tape just titled "Whizzo" (actually, it was titled "Whizzo Whizzo") I had no idea what was on it at the time. It could have just been a commercial, news footage, or silent remote footage for insert spots, but imagine my surprise when it just so happened to be a lost episode of Whizzo's Saturday Circus from 1981 recorded the day after Christmas.

It's a glorious trainwreck of an episode, with lots of puppet wiggling, a freaky new mascot assistant that looks like The Candy Lion and Ice Cream Bunny spawned a soulless dead-eyed abomination who definitely can't see out of that mask, and a magician who knows the best way to entertain a crowd of bored 1st graders is to point a gun at them. You can watch the episode in question here, but rest assured a high quality unwatermarked version (that still contains all the unlicensed music they used for the puppet wiggling acts) has been made available to Mike, Kevin, and Bill, should they choose to accept this mission...

[Deep_Hurting]

That said, another Christmas offering worth considering is The Snow Queen (1957)

 It's a crazy nonsensical mess that fits right in with other Russo-Finish classics like Jack Frost and The Day the Earth Froze, in that it's a weirdly padded out version of a Dutch fairy tale... translated into Russian... and then redubbed into English (including the musical numbers). 

The American version begins with a live-action introduction prologue by Art Linkletter, before leading into the original prologue, in which an old man who looks suspiciously like Mr. Magoo (but who's known here as "Old Dreamy") reveals that he has the ability to put people to sleep with his magical "slumbrella" and then invade their dreams with creepy old fairy tales about child abduction. He then begins narrating the movie, which technically makes it a story within a story within a story.

Adding to it's MST3K pedigree, the two main children in the movie are dubbed by the always riffable Tommy Kirk and Sandra Dee (aka "Gidget"). The animation is a bizarre hodge-podge of different styles and no two characters are drawn alike. The children are terrifying dead-eyed homunculus who look a bit like The Little Prince on lithium, but the supporting characters sometimes looks like Disney, sometimes like Warner Bros or Rocky and Bullwinkle, and the Snow Queen herself is straight up anime. It's a strange strange movie.