Christmas Bloody Christmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

It is time for another horror Christmas movie. This time it’s the slasher fest Christmas Bloody Christmas from Shudder.

A life-sized robotic Santa has been released to malls and toy stores this Christmas season. Unfortunately, it was based on a military robot and there is a malfunction that reverts the Santas back to their original programming. Tori (Riley Dandy), a record store owner, is spending Christmas Eve out on the town with her employee, Robbie (Sam Delich). Their first stop is to visit some friends who own the toy shop next door. Of course, they have one of the robotic Santas, which goes berserk. It follows Tori and Robbie around town, murdering everyone it sees along the way.

I’m not a huge fan of slasher films but I can appreciate that some people enjoy them. My husband is one of those people. Personally, I didn’t like Christmas Bloody Christmas that much. My first turn-off was the change to a first person point of view during Santa’s first two kills. It was very difficult to see what was going on as he was swinging his axe around. If they want me to know he killed someone, let me see the kill!

The next thing I didn’t like was the pacing. I believe the movie was supposed to be some sort of homage to Terminator , where it’s difficult to kill the robot. However, the beginning of the movie was very slow. There was a long section where nothing happened. We have the first two kills, which no one knows about and is never addressed, then the Santa has to take the long walk to Tori’s house for the next set of kills. When we finally get into the bulk of the kills, they all happen very quickly with little build-up. I may not know a lot about horror movies but I’m pretty sure there’s supposed to be some suspense to heighten our fear before the big event. That didn’t happen here.

Maybe if you are a fan of slasher movies, you might find some sort of enjoyment out of Christmas Bloody Christmas. Personally, I’d go watch Violent Night instead. It’s a much better movie.

The Most Colorful Time Of The Year | 2022 Christmas Movies

Do you remember those EnChroma glasses that went viral like five years ago? The ones that allowed color blind people to see color? Well, Hallmark made an entire movie about them. And, yes, they called it The Most Colorful Time Of The Year.

Michelle (Katrina Bowden) is an optometrist. Ryan (Christopher Russell) is an elementary school science teacher, who happens to teach Michelle’s daughter, Bailey (Ava Weiss). When Michelle finds out that Ryan is color blind, she enrolls him in a study to test glasses that will fix color blindness.

This movie is so ridiculous. When they show Ryan in his color blind state, he literally sees zero color. Everything is in black, white, and grey. That can happen but it is very rare. From Color Blind Awareness: “Achromatopsia is extremely rare, occuring only in approximately 1 person in 33,000 and its symptoms can make life very difficult. Usually someone with achromatopsia will need to wear dark glasses inside in normal light conditions.” So even if he did have this, he probably would be wearing sunglasses a lot. And I don’t think the EnChroma glasses would help him a whole lot.

I also hated that Michelle keeps getting harassed by her ex-boyfriend, Mark (R Austin Ball), throughout the entire movie. When he finally convinces her to talk to him, he asks to go to her kid’s elementary school chorus concert? I’m sorry but that is creepy. For some reason, Michelle relents and let him attend instead of throwing him out of her house. At the concert, Mark asks Ryan how much money he makes? What the hell is wrong with this guy? He really didn’t need to be a part of this movie. There could have been a better misunderstanding than forcing a woman to try to rekindle a terrible relationship.

Despite having a silly plot, The Most Colorful Time Of The Year wasn’t a bad movie. The acting wasn’t terrible, though Russell was a bit of a wet blanket. I know his character is supposed to be a bit Grinchy in the beginning but he never gets any better. Overall, it’s fine to watch if you are interested to see how they handle Ryan’s color blindness. Just be ready to shake your head a lot.

Your Christmas Or Mine? | 2022 Christmas Movies

To be honest, I didn’t even have Your Christmas Or Mine? on my list of movies this year. I do have some other Amazon original movies on the list. I’m not sure how I missed this one.

James (Asa Butterfield) and Hayley (Cora Kirk) have just recently started dating. As they get on their respective trains to go to their respective houses for Christmas, they both make the rash decision to switch trains to surprise the other. Unfortunately, that means that James ends up at Hayley’s family house without Hayley and Hayley ends up at James’s family house without James. They learn way more about each other than they had planned.

Your Christmas Or Mine? was a nice little twist on The Gift Of The Magi story. They both wanted to surprise each other but it wasn’t the surprise they were expecting. And while both families are complete opposites, both James and Hayley had a lasting effect on each of them. My husband didn’t like the movie as much as I did but sometimes he gets nitpicky with Christmas movies.

This one is a nice Christmas movie to watch. It has a little more Christmas and a little less romance as the Hallmark/Lifetime movies but I appreciated the differences. If you are looking for something a little bit different and a little bit British, this would do nicely.

It's A Wonderful Binge | 2022 Christmas Movies

It’s around this time of year that I get burned out on the Hallmark/Lifetime type movies. They all seem the same and they all bore me to death. So I try to filter in some movies from other streaming networks, like Hulu, to break up the monotony and keep me going. I chose the extremely weird It’s A Wonderful Binge.

In the year 2027, all drugs and alcohol have been outlawed in the United States. But once a year, the population can binge all the want with no repercussions. This year, it’s happening on Christmas.

OK. Stoner comedy is a love it or hate it thing. Thankfully, while this is stoner comedy at it’s core, they layered a few things on top of it to try to open it up to people that aren’t into it.

There’s a guy, Andrew (Eduardo Franco), who has an It’s A Wonderful Life adventure with Angel (Danny Trejo). Then there’s Hags (Dexter Darden) who wants to propose to his girlfriend, Sarah (Zainne Saleh), but the ring he was going to use (given to him by Sarah’s grandmother) was accidentally donated to an orphanage and now he has to try to get it back. In attempt to attract tourism to their town, Mayor Spengler (Kaitlin Olson) got a Christmas Owl then promptly lost it so she sends her daughter, Kimmi (Marta Piekarz), to retrieve it. And all the while, the entire town is high as a kite.

All of this definitely gave Binge a little more oomph than a regular stoner comedy. I found myself laughing more than once. Sure, it was a dumb comedy but sometimes you need to sit back and laugh at an owl flying around town attacking anything it finds. So, if you are looking for something light-hearted that doesn’t require a lot of brain power to watch, this is perfect. And you just mind find yourself getting closer to your family somehow.

Scentsational Christmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

Lifetime’s Scentsational Christmas sounded stupid when I wrote it on the calendar months ago. Little did I know what I was in for.

Ellie (Nazneen Contractor) develops scents for perfumes. This year she decides to go home for Christmas to help her father with the family’s candle-making business. When she arrives home, she finds that her father has rented the cottage to Logan (Mykee Selkin), a writer who is looking for inspiration. Together, they try to find the secret to the famous Christmas scent of the holiday candle.

Not only was this a staggeringly boring movie, this was also just dumb. The big conflict comes when Ellie submits a “Christmas scent” to her boss for a famous client. Then the famous client finds out that Ellie’s family uses this “Christmas scent” in their holiday candles because Logan wrote about it on social media. While I can understand not wanting to steal a scent from another company, it’s still Ellie’s scent! They could have easily marketed this as some sort of collab between the client and the candle company. Or just use the scent for the perfume anyway. There was no reason to throw a fit over it. Guess what…there are only so many scents out there and it’s not like the client was making candles. They are completely different products.

No, don’t watch this one. The plot is dumb, the main couple has zero chemistry, and there really isn’t anything redeeming here. Throw this one out with grandma’s perfume.

Merry Textmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

Merry Textmas may be the weirdest Christmas movie I have watched this season. I’ll try to explain…

Gaby (Ariana Ron Pedrique) lives in Austin, TX and develops apps for a living. As she helps her family plan for their Christmas trip to Mexico to visit her grandmother, she accidentally adds the phone number for Alex (Rodrigo Massa) to their text chain. Since Alex was planning on spending the holiday alone, Gaby’s family invites him to go to Mexico with them.

The biggest thing I hated about this movie is the ADR. For those that don’t know, ADR (or Automated Dialogue Replacement) is when actors re-record their lines in a studio while watching their film footage. That is why you’ll get normal sounding lines then all of a sudden all of the background noise has dropped out and you can hear the actor crystal clear. They did a lot of ADR in Merry Textmas but it wasn’t done well. I don’t know if there was a lot of background noise in the scenes or someone thought the actors’ accents were too thick or what but it was very distracting.

I honestly think this movie would have been better if it was entirely in Spanish. The big conflict happens because Alex doesn’t speak Spanish but they could have easily fixed that by having him speak a different dialect of Spanish or something. Or that he speaks Spanish badly. I appreciate that, since this aired on Lifetime, they felt that it had to be mostly English but I think the movie suffered for it.

While I really want to recommend Merry Textmas, I don’t think I can. I love that it highlighted Mexican Christmas traditions but it didn’t spend nearly enough time on the traditions and the ADR was so bad. I’m sure there are better movies that show off Mexican traditions.

Fit For Christmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

When I was making my list of Christmas movies this year, I pretty much listed every movie on every channel that I could find. Do I have all of these channels? No. That means there are a lot of Christmas movies I will not be watching this year. But I was able to watch CBS’s Fit For Christmas.

Audrey (Amanda Kloots) is a dance fitness instruction living in New York City. When her business fails, she comes home to Mistletoe, Montana for the holidays. But when she gets there, she finds that the town council is about to vote on closing the community center and selling it to business man Griffin (Paul Greene), who wants to turn it into a ski resort.

There are definitely some cute moments in Fit For Christmas. Any time Griffin is in Audrey’s dance fitness class? Total win. Especially when Audrey’s boyfriend, Bradley (Stephan Miers), shows up. I was laughing when they were trying to outdance each other.

Adding to the fun, a lot of the side characters were actually fleshed out people and not just cardboard cutouts of random townspeople. It made the movie a lot easier to watch. Especially since a lot of the movie revolved around Griffin trying to convince the people on the town council to vote for the ski resort instead of keeping the community center.

I know a lot of people have cut the cord on cable. If you have access to CBS, you should definitely give this one a watch. (As a note, I don’t have CBS but somehow I was able to watch it for free on my laptop. I don’t know if that is a bug or a feature.) When you are finished watching, go sign up for a dance fitness class. They are a lot of fun!

Undercover Holiday | 2022 Christmas Movies

It’s another movie about a singer! I find it interesting that there always seems to be some sort of theme every year. Is there some sort of writers meeting where they decide these things?

Jaylen (Noemi Gonzalez) is a newly famous pop star. When she starts to get stalkerish messages at her rented home in Los Angeles, her record company insists on sending a bodyguard with her when she goes home for the holiday. However, Jaylen doesn’t want to tell her family that he is her bodyguard. Instead, she tells them that Matt (Stephen Huszar) is her boyfriend.

The general premise of Undercover Holiday is good - needing a bodyguard when a public persona has been threatened. But not telling her family that he is a bodyguard is stupid. I understand not wanting to worry them and I understand that something like this would result in her family nagging her to move home more than they already do. You would think that saying “Hey, there was an incident and this is how we are solving it” would be a good response to that. Pretending that he is your boyfriend is the worst thing Jaylen could have done.

With that said, I did appreciate the amount of music in the movie. Granted, a lot of it was Jaylen singing a few lines while sitting in front of a piano. But it is more than some other movies with singers have given us. And this time we get bilingual songs as Jaylen also sings in Spanish.

Despite thinking the plot of Undercover Holiday is stupid, the movie itself wasn’t too bad. Jaylen’s family was a lot of fun and it was interesting to see Matt try to integrate with them. Go ahead and watch this one. It won’t be the best movie you’ve watched this season but it won’t be the worst.

B&B Merry | 2022 Christmas Movies

In B&B Merry, they could not only solve the conflict by having a conversation, they could also solve the conflict by maybe knowing what the job of a travel blogger is. I don’t think I can eyeroll any harder.

Tracey Wise (Jen Lilley) is a luxury travel blogger. Graham (Jesse Hutch) has invited her to review his family’s bed & breakfast in Silver Peak. At the same time, she is asked to review a luxury hotel, also in Silver Peak, as a sample for a possible job. Can she review both without conflicts?

Uuugghhh. First off, Tracey is supposed to be an established travel blogger. Why she is doing any sort of sample writing for anyone? I have been approached for jobs and asked for free writing samples and I point them to this blog (among my other writing gigs). If my writing history isn’t good enough proof of my work, you can go touch grass. I’m not doing free work just because you don’t want to pay me for it. Tracey should know this by now. Especially since she’s also supposedly a lawyer.

Next, Graham invites her to town to review his B&B. But then he gets really mad when she says she has to review the competition as well. THAT IS HER JOB, GRAHAM. She goes places and reviews them. When she brings up the other job, your answer should be “Yeah, that makes sense.” ARGH.

I understand that family owned businesses frequently need word-of-mouth to help them advertise. But you really can’t be like “Only look at my place and forget the other place exists.” You need to show off your place and show her why it’s better than the other place. I mean, maybe that is why your business is failing. It has nothing to do with the other hotel and everything to do with the fact that you literally bad mouth them every chance you get.

While I can’t say that I recommend watching B&B Merry, it’s fine to watch if you can overlook the things I mentioned. The acting is fine, the script is fine. It’s the plot that is kinda annoying. Maybe just half watch it? Is that possible?

Christmas On The Rocks | 2022 Christmas Movies

Here we are with another Christmas movie with a stupid title. Christmas On The Rocks sounds like it should be about bartending or a breakup or something. Nope. It has nothing to do with any of those. I’m really not sure how the title relates to the movie. And that isn’t the only stupid thing about it.

Jennifer and Sarah (Lyla Porter-Follows) are twin sisters. Sarah is supposed to be the event planner for an important corporate Christmas party at a ski lodge. However, she broke her leg the day before she was supposed to be there. Jennifer pretends to be Sarah and takes her place at the ski lodge.

This is such a dumb movie. At no point in time does Sarah do anything to help her poor sister. We only see Sarah via video calls and all she does is apologize for getting injured. There’s never any suggestions on how to fix problems. As a matter of fact, there’s no reason that Sarah couldn’t have gone with Jennifer to work the event. (Besides the fact that the same actress plays both roles and I don’t think UPtv has the budget for that kind of special effects.) She only broke her leg! Crutches are a thing!

No. Don’t watch Christmas On The Rocks. Throw it into the avalanche and forget it ever existed. And that is being nice.