Warning: Will contain mild swears

Hello internet! Who am I? Unimportant.

All you need to know is that every year starting precisely on the 1^st November (or, in reality, when Christmas 24 graces our screens), I watch the best of the worst seasonal movies that Netflix and satellite TV has to offer.

I’m not the first to notice the joys of these Lifetime and Hallmark masterpieces and I won’t be the last. If anything, it’s now seems like an increasingly popular pass time, probably because the world is burning.

Last year, I had several relatives concerned that I had not watched ‘A Christmas Prince’ when it was first circling. It seemed Netflix was more than happy to heavily publicise it  despite its low quality and hackneyed plot. A Christmas Prince was filled with all the glorious tropes that make an excellent bad Christmas movie. Convoluted meet-cute, generically European (presumably constitutional) monarchy, annoying kid, no real reason for it to be set at Christmas etc.  In fact, there was so many it was almost suspicious. As if they noticed a trend among lovers of ‘so bad it’s good’ and wanted to take advantage of the demographic…

(A Christmas Prince, 2017)

Hmmmmm…..

However, I will not stop at the most popular, dear reader! I will delve deep into the complex universe that is low-budget Christmas movies and I will review them all… or as many as I can be bothered to watch in the next… *checks watch* 2 months.

But what makes a good (bad) Christmas movie, you ask?

No?

Well I’m telling you anyway!

And feel free to make it a drinking game with whomever you watch these with. Especially if it’s with Grandma. She looks like she needs a stiff one.

• The hets make a mess of relationships – Main plot or subplot, there will always be a romance involving an actress who was probably  the ‘not mother’ in How I Met Your Mother and a chiselled Lego brick.
• Kids that really want Daddy to bone down – Well, the presence of children seems to be a recurring theme anyway. God forbid. Whether they’re precocious or absolute angels, 99% of the time they’re insufferable. I regret dragging in the one from A Christmas Prince, she had an ounce of character and was kinda fun. And I’m not just saying that because her character is disabled… I swear. STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT. Anyway,  a lot of these movies have kids that are WAY too involved in their Dad’s love life and are only too eager to set him up with an overworked, 30 something white woman. Yunno, like all kids who gone through tragic bereavements and divorces are.
• Doggos… so many doggos – I generally avoid the dog films as I find them incredibly boring (even for made-for-TV movies), but I dunno… a lot of people like dogs I guess. 
• Ethnic diversity, what’s that? – Well this is a tale as old as time. If an actor is going to have the audacity to be not white, they’re going to have been relegated to supporting character. I have never seen a bigger collection of sassy black friends contrasting with a boring white protagonist in any other genre. It’s sad and I really wish it wasn’t the case, but can we really be surprised at this point? (That being said there are a number of these straight to TV Christmas films with all/mostly black casts, but it’s probably telling that for a while this would be one of the few places you would see that… and that Netflix won’t advertise them to me. However, I do have a few in mind I’m going to look at, and by that I mean A/The Christmas Calender cause it seems Netflix really want me to watch it).
• Someone works in marketing or advertising or businessy business– Hmmm… I wonder why that is?
• THE TRURRR MERNING OF CHRUSSSMUSSSS – Look, I shouldn’t lie to you. This is exactly why I am here. I want to tear apart the sentiment these films so meaningfully construct (lol).

When actual Christmas time rolls around, or whatever you celebrate, I will be watching the same things I watch every year. The classic movies that get what Christmas is really about, like family and ghosts and booby trapping your enemies. But for now there are still a sizable amount of pumpkins and Hocus Pocus gifs circling Tumblr, so, in the meantime… let’s watch some garbage. (It’ll have to be from Netflix as we wait for Christmas 24 to oil itself up.)