A Christmas Carol

I love A Christmas Carol and am generally easy to please when it comes to any version of the story. That said, this is among the worst I've seen. It is consistently bad in all regards.

The performers are mis-cast and bear little resemblance to your expectation. Likewise, the sets don't convey the proper time or place. And the music certainly won't put you in the Christmas spirit either.

I want to like every version of A Christmas Carol I see but that wasn't possible for this presentation (note – I had to fast forward through it while scanning for anything "good" just to see it all the way to the end).

Where does one start. Let's start with Scrooge. i don't know Colin Baker. I guess he was part of the Dr. Who canon. He is just terrible in this. First of all, he doesn't remotely look the part. Bob Cratchet is a well fed, prosperous looking fellow. He actually gives money to a charity. The guy is supposed to be destitute, barely fending for his family. He only has one child, Tiny Tim, who isn't really all that tiny. Where are the other kids? They must have not had any spare cash to hire a couple of them. The ghosts are lame. There are no sets to indicate a place where Scrooge was brought up or worked or anything else. He is hired by Jacob Marley who would be about thirty years older than him. Scrooge has no bite to him and doesn't seem to be the least bit frightening. The ending scenes are so dull. And there is a sappy reunion with his lost love. Finally, there are a series of awful songs that never seem to end. I'm very patient with this story, but this should never be watched.

At the very beginning, this film it is identified as an amateur production. It says "A Movie by...." Professional directors agreed to discontinue that phrase decades ago, because it is presumptuous to claim that the director did it all by his/her own. Nowadays, it is considered proper for a director (like Ron Howard) to say "A Ron Howard Film." not "A Film By Ron Howard"

Anyone purporting to be qualified to review a film on anything other than whether they liked it or not, should take things like the budget, resources et cetera into consideration. The director of this film shows considerable creativity in his use of these resources. That is assuming the amount of the budget quoted went mostly to the narrator.

Other reviewers criticized the sets. The director showed significant creativity in the use of sets, considering the low budget and his singing voice was one of the best in the film. It would be interesting to see what he could do with better funding. Then, he could afford to have better miking, lighting et cetera and could afford to rent a sound stage so the ambient light and sound could be controlled.

In these times, there are people making movies in their living room with their cell phones and are putting them onto YouTube. At least this guy got his product distributed. I admire his effort.

His review was helpful to me primarily because I didn't have to write it myself. Like him, I love Dickens' story in most every telling and retelling but found this unwatchable in every way including the weird gray cast to the...cast. The song Scrooge sings to Marley's picture was where I gave up. It had an almost romantic vibe that would have been far less creepy had it seemed intentional rather than like a repressed and unrecognized impulse on Scrooge's part. Out of curiosity, I watched Kirk Cameron's "Saving Christmas" the other day. It's currently at a 1.5 rating and the second lowest rated film on all of IMDb. While Saving Christmas is not good by any stretch of the imagination, at least it had a kind of hypnotic weirdness that kept me watching all the way through. Frankly, I'd like to sentence everyone who gave Saving Christmas a 1 or 2 rating to an hour of watching this thing to see what Worst can really be.

My wife and I enjoy Charles Dickens' classic tale, A Christmas carol" and like to view the various versions of the story. We came across this offering while scrolling through Amazon Prime and immediately gave it a go. It quickly became apparent that this was a bad decision on our part as the first scene showed that not only did the main actor have no business portraying Scrooge, but the actor has no business "acting." The film is downright amateurish and came across like someone wanted to make a movie and just asked a bunch of friends and whomever wanted to join from the local laundromat and coffee shop. The sets did not remotely look like something from 1842 but whatever the local church had around. The acting was downright painful and my wife and I just kept looking at each other in disbelief at how bad this thing turned out to be.

I then looked it up on IMDb and found out that the director also cast himself in the choice role as Scrooge. Turns out this guy has made several other "adaptions" and cast himself in the lead roles in each one. How much of an ego can one person have to put their own self indulgence ahead of what would be best for a movie project. More so, how delusional can one be to not realize that they lack the acting chops to pull off the role. This guy makes Uwe Boll come across like Cecil B DeMille.

What astounds me is that this movie even rates as 4 stars. The director must have had everyone one at the coffee shop go on here and rate it as high as possible. Beware, this is not close to a 4 star film. Finer things have been flushed down the toilet. In closing, to reference the actual story, where Marley actually HAS the chains of his sins weighing him down, Director Anthony Mann should be wrapped in an ocean liner anchor chain for this crime against cinema for the rest of his days and beyond.