Virgins In Your Stocking! A Carol Christmas

There's a reason why Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol remains the most popular holiday themed novel, local community theater play, and plot outline for sitcoms come every December. It's a brilliantly appealing story that can be applied to any subject in any medium, be that a newspaper comic strip or Halloween Roseanne episode.

 

You start with a villain that demands hatred, say, a man who tosses cute bunny Muppets into the snowy streets of London or an executive that fires a family man on Christmas Eve. We have to DESPISE this person (or animated duck) as much as we pity the poor but kind Bob Cratchit.

Hence, who better to cast in such a role than Tori My Daddy Got Me A Lot Of Work Then Disherinted Me From His Will Spelling, otherwise known (to me, forever) as Donna Martin. A Carol Christmas (get it?) is yet another Hallmark stab at Dickens' novella, and since anyone alive today knows the story, allow me to instead present it by breaking down the character list:

 

Ebenezer Scrooge = Carol Cartman, a talk show hostess in the vein of Ricki Lake (does that reference date me? Does it matter when I'm going to refer to Carol as Donna Martin Graduates for this whole review anyway?) who treats her employees with disdain.

Bob Cratchit = Roberta, Donna Martin Graduates' long-suffering single-mom assistant struggling to balance motherhood with her high maintenance, low paying boss

Tiny Tim = Little Redheaded Girl daughter of Roberta. No limp. No crutch. No accent. No bother.

Nephew Fred = Big sister Lindsey who does that annoying family thing practiced in Holiday In Handcuffs of reading Christmas tales out loud while wearing ugly sweaters

Jacob Marley = Aunt Marla, played by Dinah Manoff (lifelong free pass for Soap and being Chucky's first victim), Donna Martin Graduates' overbearring agent aunt who made sure her niece was always the star, even if it meant swiping the Virgin Mary role from a kid with a dead mom at the annual nativity play

Ghost of Christmas Past = Gary Coleman. And yes: I'm just as angry as you are that he's not playing Tiny Tim.

Ghost of Christmas Present = William Shatne moodily coasting as if the entire shoot was purchased on a Priceline deal that ended up costing way more than advertised with taxes and insurance

Ghost of Christmas Future = A limo driver, not unlike the creepy dude in Burnt Offerings

Ex-(Almost) Fiancee

Tall, good-looking and dull do-gooder who works at homeless shelters (i.e., Karren Allen but less interesting). That being said, he's played by an actor I recall from Days of Lives back in the early 90s and my goodness, the man hasn't aged a day. So bonus points for casting a vampire

If you're being reminded of a much better Christmas Carol-themed comedy about a bigwig TV executive, his neglected sibling, homeless helping ex, and put-upon single mom assistant, I assume you have a working brain. Yes, whoever wrote A Carol Christmas was clearly inspired by Scrooged and no, it's not anywhere near as Solid Gold.

Also, it does that obnoxious Christmas movie-on-a-budget thing by taking place in California, thusly sparing the crew from the hazards/annoyance of fake or real snow. How convenient. And lazy.

 

As far as the movie goes, eh. Tori Spelling has never oozed charisma, and her bitchy career woman shtick never truly captures the nasty spirit we look for in a proper Scrooge. What's worse is her after-the-ghost reaction, which should be bursting with the holiday spirit in a manner that's either joyous (think Michael Caine's soft smiles) or insane (BILL MURRAY WANTS YOU TO SING GODDAMNIT!). As Happy Carol, Donna Martin Graduates smiles a little more, gives her staff a vacation to Hawaii, and raises her assistant's salary while offering her second house free of charge. Oh, and in my favorite character decision of all time, Carol announces that after years of turning down lucrative merchandising opportunities, she will now put her name on whatever clothing or cooking product proposed and donate the proceeds to charity.

I really hope there's a sequel where Carol discovers said goods are made under sweatshop conditions. The Olsen Twins could play the child laborers! It'd be meta!

Instead, we settle for blah humbug.

See what I did there?

 

Lessons Learned

You look pale when you’re dead

 

Pop is the sound of Gary Coleman bursting your bubble

There’s not much work for a middle aged actor who’s too small to be a jockey. That should explain Coleman's career choices (including A Carol Christmas)

 

Montage Mania

Donna and Boy Karen Allen enjoy a foggy courtship complete with wine drinking, picnicking, roller skating, and donating goods to a homeless shelter, all set to country music because how else can a TV movie convey falling in love?

  

Token Slapstick

One of Carol's employees just can't stop dropping things. It's hilarious!

  

Coal or Candy?

A Carol Christmas isn't unwatchable, but I can't think of any reason to watch it when Scrooged is playing on AMC or 90210 reruns exist on youtube. Spelling doesn't embarrass herself, but the movie never commits to its self-aware Hollywooddom, nor does it have the energy to truly be a Scrooge reborn. It is what it is, and while it's probably better than ex-roommate Kelly Taylor's A Christmas Wedding Tail, it's also less hilariously bad, making it just kinda there.

  

I think I need to put a little love in my heart now.

Let the Wrong One Live: The 5 Worst Survivors In Horror History

As some of you know and others don't care about, I spent the last year or so contributing to Pop Syndicate, a recently renovated website that lost all its past content (and writers). The following article appeared in 2009 and since you can't find it anywhere else in InterWorld, I'm rerunning it here. Apologies for the deja vu.

Don’t you hate it when the wrong ones get away? While the majority of kill-heavy horror films know the proper hunting formula, every now and then, some undeserving soul smiles triumphantly in the final freeze frame, leaving the audience to scratch their heads and sit through seven minutes or so of badly scored credits, waiting in the hope that the director was saving his final kill for those with patience to spare.

What follows is a spoiler-rich countdown of films that leave us wanting more...blood. Specifically, enough to drain the life out of a survivor or two.

5. Day and Land of the Dead

Some critics have observed that Uncle Romero has softened in recent years, but I take it one step back and argue he’s still burning off the sweetness from eating too many chocolate Bonkers in the 80s. Day of the Dead has a fine collection of Savini packaged blood and guts, but the fact that none come out of the bodies of any ‘good’ character takes a certain depth out of the movie. Likewise, Land of the Dead loses a sympathetic John Lequizamo, but once again, our rather dull heroes get to ride off into the twilight in full force. There’s a reason so many people felt empty at the end of Romero’s quadrilogy finale: very little happened to the people we were meant to care about.  I do realize that Diary of the Dead has a richer body count, but, well...I just didn’t care enough about the living or deceased to really include it here.

4. Kingdom of the Spiders

There's no reason for William Shatner's heroic veterinarian to die in this 1977 tarantula flick...no reason, except, say, the fact that he gets bitten by about twenty DDT enhanced arachnids who had previously proved that one nibble was enough to take down a horse. Was there some sort of antidote in Kirk’s far too prominent belt buckle? Did the tightness of his jeans prevent the venom from spreading through his doughy body? Even if his (and quite possibly the rest of the world’s) fate is left tangled up in webs, Shatner’s survival is a cheat.

3. Snakes On a Plane

If you build your marketing campaign around earning an R rating, you have a responsibility to your ticket buying public to provide inventive kills and little mercy. Snakes On a Plane never got that memo, as observed by the surviving characters that include the bland leading man, an obnoxious Beverly Hills brat actually named Mercedes, and worst of all, two bratty little kids who should have been marked for death in the first reel. Even a dud like 1976's Rattlers  had the nerve to knock off a few obnoxious child actors in the pre-credit sequence. Snakes On a Plane, on the other hand, teased us with bad assery and delivered a de-fanged bite.

2. Silent NIght, Deadly Night

As my Catholic school-educated mother has often said, nuns are evil. Mother Superior (Jean Miller), the primary villain in this notorious 1986 Santa Clause slasher, is arguably the least likable character in a film exclusively populated by extremely unlikable characters. You'd think the filmmakers--who so clearly hate everything in this world--would revel in the chance take a few shots at a God-fearing and child-hating Dominican. You'd think wrong. Somehow the woman partially responsible for harnessing little Billy’s psychotic tendencies and mind-boggling confusion over what Santa Clause actually does gets to celebrate another Christmas (probably by slapping the wrists of orphans with a candy cane). The only redeeming factor is that the world’s meanest nun loses her habited head in the gloriously bad sequel.

1. Scream 3

By all accounts, David Arquette’s bumbling Sheriff Dwight Riley should never have survived Wes Craven’s first installment of this meta-slasher. I’ll accept the fact that Dewy was just too gosh darn lovable for test screen audiences to mourn. I’ll even give him a free pass for Part 2 since Randy was sacrificed. But by the third installment, his number was up. Remember the ads that boasted how no one was safe? Apparently they were referring to Jenny McCarthy, the other guy from Felicity, and the token black dude. We loyal fans, who survived Courteney Cox’s bangs and Nev Campbell’s squints, get to end with the lamest double date in horror history. 

So dear bloodthirsty readers, please share your cravings: which last men, women, and children standing would you like to see get a much more exciting alternate ending?

Pop Question

What's the best title of any film ever made ever?

My vote? Gourmet Zombie Chef From Hell.

Mind you this, to my memory, is a far better sentence than the film that follows it. I personally haven't seen it in years, but another fine blogger the world knows as Zedword will be covering it this week in a cleverly themed Zombie Cuisine Week. He even did a promo video!

Which is way more than I'll ever do for my readers. The most you kids get from me is a random youtube search for the finale from The Pirate Movie:

Amazing, yes, but it ain't an undead Rachel Ray. So if you're feeling the need for some ghoulish munching (not to beconfused with goulash munching; Zed may have promised to lay off the puns but I never signed up for that), head to his blog (http://zedwordblog.blogspot.com/ ) and enjoy.

Is it wrong that now I'm kind of hungry?

Someone Left the Satanists In the Devil's Rain

Having just started reading Brian Keene’s The Conqueror Worms, I enthusiastically queued up this month’s Final Girl Film Club pick, The Devil’s Rain, fresh in the mood for some truly terrifying precipitation.


Okay, who am I kidding? With Ernest Borgnine headlining the movie poster wearing a satanic priest’s robe and ram horns, plus the promise of a doughily shirtless, sideburn styling, prominent belt buckle wearing William Shatner, I knew exactly what I was in for. This 1974 Robert Fuest helmed horror emits a powerfully pungent odor of deliciously aged cheese from the opening credits to the gooey end. Know your limit for lactose tolerance before indulgence.


Quick Plot (if that’s what you can call it): A promisingly haunting credit sequence features creepy medievalish hell paintings, guttural moans, a set of disembodied ears holding a butcher knife, and one of the oddest listings I’ve ever seen: Technical Advisor: Anton Szandor Lavey, High Priest of the Church of Satan. I don’t know what technicalities Lavey advised on, but you Satanists should not be proud. No offense to Satanists; it’s just a really bad film.

Next, we jump into a dark and stormy night where Shatner awaits the return of his soon-to-be-melted father bearing a message to return the book to Corbus. If that makes no sense to you who haven’t seen the film, it makes about 3% more to me, and I watched the whole thing. Then again, I also missed John Travolta’s two second film debut as a waxy faced Satanist, so maybe I’m just not nearly as intelligent as Fuest’s intended audience.

Shat adjusts his cowboy hat and bravely heads into a ghost town in search of his vanished mother and to battle John Corbus (Ernest Borgnine...we’ll get to him) for the return of her soul (I think). Corbus has his sights set on a missing book once stolen by Shat’s ancestors. They have a showdown inside the “New England”-ish church (which, according to one character, does not belong in a western desert), which is actually a Satanic holy place (you can tell by the stained glass artwork straight off a metal band’s drumset). By showdown, I mean Shatner prays and shoots a few worshippers while Borgnine speaks Latin and smiles smugly.


Enter Tom Skerrit as Shat’s brother, a young doctor with a fabulous mustache and a conveniently semi-psychic wife who helps explain the history of our characters with a dreadfully lit flashback. Believe me, you haven’t seen American history until you etch into memory the image of Borgnine in full Pilgrim getup, shooting out lines like “Didst one of thee fall from the favor of Lucifer?” to what I imagine to be a group of escaped community theater actors in a dress rehearsal for The Crucible. It’s more wonderful than it sounds.


After being separated from his wife, Skerrit enlists the aid of his superhelpful mentor, Dr. Sam Richards, a parapsychologist who actually took ten minutes to read the sought after book and therefore has some semblance of what might be going on. Together they discover the world’s coolest faberge egg, complete with a television screen that displays all the lost souls trapped in hell. It also contains the titular devil’s rain, a force so powerful, it can melt any eyeless minion into a gooey pile, not unlike the result you get if you’ve ever tried to light one of those Spencer Gift Store’s novelty candles of glittery waxen wizards.

If it seems like I’m hopping through plot points like Leprechaun on a pogo stick, I do apologize, but The Devil’s Rain is simply not an easy film to summarize. It’s also not the easiest film to watch, as its grainy, dull lit action actually aggravates the eyes at times. There’s nothing frightening, clever, or particularly interesting about this satanic romp, but that’s certainly not to say The Devil’s Rain isn’t amusing.


High Points
Borgnine is kind of amazing as Corbus, and by that I mean he’s hammier than an out-of-work Miss Piggy at a French buffet


The melting effects are fairly impressive when watched on a small screen. This is vital as they take up a way too extended sequence that seems to run longer than the entire film

Low Points
Odd that the scant 86 minute run time contains such prolonged scenes as the Satanists’ desert march (which clocks in at 3 minutes) when a few quick bites of exposition could certainly have padded out the length while, you know, explaining stuff


While I didn’t exactly hunger for more Shatner (I may be a woman, but I am fairly immune to his muggy charm), the switch of protagonists at the halfway mark was a little jarring. It wasn’t that Tom Skerrit was awful or even that Shat was any good; as an audience, however, we have little to hold onto when we don’t know a thing about who we’re supposed to be rooting for

Lessons Learned
When he visits earth, Satan generally resembles any animal character played by a human on Shelly Duvall's Faery Tale Theatre

When you hear your mother screaming, it’s best to stare worriedly at the source of the sound before slowly jogging to see what the trouble is


Satanists bleed sour milk and have elegant penmanship


If when driving, an eyeless zombie creature pops up in your backseat, avoid removing both hands from the wheel to grab your hair as you scream. Sure, you may be frightened at the uninvited hitchhiker about to kill you, but that’s how accidents are caused


Winning Line
“Remember: no one knows what we’re about,” Corbus growls to his colonist clan, only to then open the door to an angry mob carrying torches and Salemnesque judgement

Rent/Bury/Buy
The Devil’s Rain is a pretty horrid film, but if conventionally horrid sounds like heaven to you, then by all means, rent it and crack open a bottle of some bitter water (because it’s so sweet). There seems to be two DVDs on the market, and unfortunately Netflix sends out the bare bones 2000 release, with mere a trailer, stills gallery, and a nice screen shot of John Travolta’s big closeup, complete with the signature chin cleft. If John Waters can record a commentary for Mommie Dearest, then surely someone with a touch of wit could put a nice audio spin on The Devil’s Rain. If nothing else, hire a grammar expert to pick apart everything from the tagling--Heaven Help Us All When The Devil’s Rain!--to Satan describing himself as “the highest, most exalted king” because a) is he not the only king? b) not the first king? and c) is there another king that was merely exalted?

Don’t forget to head over to Final Girl’s site for a roundup of other horror bloggists reviewing Borgnine’s satanic adventures. This is certainly a pick ripe for riffing, so be sure to read everyone’s reviews, then balance out your dairy intake with a hearty round exercise.


Or just by watching a better movie. Your choice.