By Maighdlin Mahoney
@maddymahoney
It goes without saying that horrible Christmas movies are a seasonal staple. Is it even a holiday without a fantastically improbable plot and some deeply underwritten characters against the backdrop of three or so Christmas trees per room?
Now, there are always a select few movies that really go above and beyond in testing their audience’s ability to make any sense of them. Yes, objectively we could simply say these movies are questionable and leave it at that. However, in 2020, I think that these ill-conceived Christmas movies are exactly the escapist gems that quarantine Christmas demands. Seeing a third Vanessa Hudgens in The Princess Switch: Switched Again was totally baffling, but did it distract me from my quarantine blues? Hell yeah it did, for a whole hour and thirty-eight minutes.
In honour of the essential services provided by these films, here are my favourite incomprehensible Christmas movies – all available on Netflix –for anyone who’s looking for intense confusion and uncertainty that is fun and fictional, instead of real and terrifying.
Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square
Fans of Dolly Parton’s over-the-top aesthetic will not be disappointed. Set on a thinly veiled soundstage, in a cheery town “in the middle of middle America”, Christmas on the Square follows the Scrooge-like Christine Baranski – or, to use the townspeople’s nickname for her, the “wickedest witch of the middle.”
And the joys of Christmas on the Square extend far beyond it’s surprising amount of star power. We have a Pastor actually named Pastor Christian. We have Dolly Parton magically impregnating a woman who had, up till this point, been barren. We have about 400 songs, a rapid-fire montage of Baranski’s checkered past, and angels-in-training floating amidst Dolly-level glitter.
I thoroughly enjoyed wondering whether Dolly was green-screened in every single shot of this movie, and I hope you will too.
The Princess Switch: Switched Again
This one’s a sequel to The Princess Switch, which, as a quick recap, followed the classic twins-switching-places plot where Vanessa Hudgens plays both a baker from Chicago and a Princess for the fictional country of Belgravia.
This year, they decided to one-up themselves by adding not only a second fictional country – Montenaro – but also a third Vanessa Hudgens. Hudgens now has two different British accents she’s trying to juggle (apparently British is the catch-all for fictional countries), and we have three identical characters in a constant rotation of outfits. It pushes Hudgens to the very edges of her acting chops, and it pushes its audience to the very edge of its ability to keep track of which character is which. A must-watch if you’re up for a challenge this Christmas.
Santa Claws
There is really only one major take away from this one, so I won’t beat around the bush: weird cat CGI. Fans of Cats, this recommendation is for you. Santa Claws stars a bunch of very adorable kittens who take over for Santa after giving him an allergic reaction (I guess Santa is more of a dog person). Very adorable, that is, except when they start speaking. The protagonists are played by real live cats, but a very disconcerting choice was made to use CGI to make their mouths move when they ‘talk’. It’s… well, you have to see it to believe it folks.
Shoutout to whoever CGI-ed the kittens’ little pointed devil tongues – I’ll be having nightmares about that ‘til New Years.
A New York Christmas Wedding
I have a pet theory that sometimes the presence of queer characters in questionable movies is a last-ditch attempt to secure an audience. My anecdotal evidence is that it works on me every time – cue A New York Christmas Wedding.
The premise follows Jennifer (Nia Fairweather) who is about to marry her (male) fiancé, but gets a chance to go back in time and live her best bisexual life by seeing what would have happened if she’d gotten together with her childhood best friend (Adrianna DeMeo). Oh, and there’s a will-he-or-won’t-he subplot about their Catholic priest and whether he’ll shake off his homophobia for long enough to marry them.
Disclaimer: don’t expect a Christmas wedding because, bizarrely, you will be disappointed.
Merry Christmas and happy watching folx!
Maighdlin Mahoney (she/her) is a writer with a background in theatre creation, production, and performance. As a writer, her work can be found in publications like CBC Arts, This Magazine, Loose Lips Magazine, and Shameless Magazine. In theatre, her work includes co-producing, co-creating, and performing in the award-winning Nasty (Toronto Fringe 2017, Feminist Fuck It Fest 2018).
