Terrible Christmas Film #1: November Christmas

And so, it begins. And, as so often, it begins with a sick yet deeply irritating child, and an act of collective delusion.

I was worried, temporarily, that November Christmas might be a bad Terrible Christmas Film to start with - not because it would be too bad, but because it might be too good. One rarely sees actors one can name in a TCF, November Christmas has two: Karen Allen (most famous as Marion Ravenwood in the Indiana Jones films) and Sam Elliott, the Stranger from The Big Lebowski. It was entirely possible that we might find ourselves beginning our odyssey through the world of godawful festive entertainment on the kind of high note that would make everything to follow feel unbearably bad.

Honestly, this dude? My hopes were high...

Fortunately, this is not the case. Perhaps the only way in which November Christmas is like The Big Lebowski is that it takes a very relaxed approach to storytelling. I mean, it takes a looooong time to find out what the film's about: we begin with a framing sequence in which a pretty blonde reads to an entire classroom of those staples of the Terrible Christmas Film, specifically Irritating Children. Please God, I said to myself during this part, do not let the first film I review for this project feature an entire school of these bastards,although in all fairness at least some of them look as bored by the film as I am so far. But no! This is, fortunately, a framing sequence.

We move from the library into the place pretty much all these films are set: Smalltown USA. Smalltown, in these films, exists as a counterpoint to that enemy of Christmas Spirit, the Big City. Will this story involve some city folk being redeemed by the locals' smalltown ways? Most probably. And this will come through...

...a reading scheme ran by Karen Allen? Well, I mean literacy is an issue, I suppose, and a Christmas film is a better place to consider it than most...but no. This is just a subplot which the film dwells on for entirely too long in order to introduce Allen and her husband, who is played by Sam Elliott and is called Jess but is, to all intents and purposes, the Stranger from the Lebowski film during his downtime. He exists to Be Wise and Do Good. In a lot of other Terrible Christmas Films Elliott's character would be the stranger who is blatantly secretly Santa with a magical! secret, but it turns out there is some tragedy in the Stranger's past and the story is as much about redeeming him as it is everybody else.

Still however, the main plot of the film only starts to become apparent well over twenty minutes in, in which we meet a family visiting their child in hospital where she wears a hat indoors. It's pretty obvious to the viewer that the sprog has cancer from these subtle clues alone, but the people who made this film are damn well going to make sure you're certain by having a Big Reveal in which the kid takes off the hat and - ohmigod! She's bald!! Cancer!

If there's one thing Terrible Christmas Films are not, it's terribly subtle.

Anyway, essentially the plot of this film from here on in is that this particular Irritating Kid (she is, she is irritating: all kids in Terrible Christmas Films are irritating, they're cast for it; if you're going to start feeling bad about this one  just because she happens to be ill this is going to be a rough month for you) is going to die and her Big City Family can't do nothin' about it, not for all their high-falutin' chemotherapies. But y'know what might work? If the entire town colludes to fool the kid into thinking it's Christmas...

Yes, in our first Terrible Christmas Film we have encountered that Terrible Christmas Trope, the Healing Power of Christmas. For good measure this is augmented with the more traditional healing power of faith, as we see the Stranger ask the local priest to intercede on the child's behalf, but this nod to the Bible Belt is balanced by an early scene in which the Irritating Sick Kid's father buys his son (Backup Irritating, Though Not Sick Kid) a toy dinosaur, so this film won't go over all that well with the Creationist crowd. But the main healing effect, we're left in no doubt, is the result of the Yule season's magical powers. Powers which have not only enabled her to survive, but also to find success as an author, having written a children's picture book about her seasonal experience. Because if there's one thing kids like to hear about, it's Christmas-cured cancer. 

Of course that isn't what kids want to hear about, but it is the kind of thing the adults who consume Terrible Christmas Films lap up. I think I can see why those kids in the framing sequence looked so bored.

Brace yourselves...Terrible Christmas Movies are coming

Christmas...the season of peace on Earth, goodwill to all men people regardless of gender, and, of course, terrible, terrible heartwarming family films. You know the kind of thing: a sick child, a town scarred by tragedy, a workaholic CEO who fails to understand The True Meaning of Christmas (tm)...Every year the lower reaches of the satellite or Freeview channels are taken over by hour after hour of this sentimental mush: a fact I'm reminded of whenever I visit my parents, because my mother loves this stuff. And, in case you haven't worked it out yet, I don't. 

Well, I've decided that it's time to try and change that. Since coming out to my parents, I feel like I owe it to them to try and understand more about their lives in the same way they've had to understand new things about mine. And so, this December, I've set myself a challenge: every day, right up until Christmas Day itself, I will watch a Terrible Christmas Movie and review it on this blog. I'm not talking about the undisputed classics of the seasonal genre, your It's a Wonderful Lifes, your Scroogeds, most (but not all) versions of A Christmas Carol...I'm talking the truly awful Christmas films, the ones you find on True Entertainment or the Hallmark Channel, the ones where the biggest star is some guy you vaguely remember playing the baddie in an episode of AirWolf back in the eighties or someone who was in the back row of the WCW Nitro dancers...these are the Christmas films I shall be seeking out and reviewing in this blog.

So join me, if you will, for a journey through a strange parallel world of irritating children, jaded adults and mysterious strangers who are clearly secretly Santa with a magical secret. Will our cynical hearts be warmed? Will we uncover The True Meaning of Christmas (tm)? Or will we simply reach Christmas Day more convinced of our Scroogelike position than ever? I don't know. But what I do know is that, over the next twenty-five days, we're going to have to deal with a Hell of a lot of schmaltz. So brace yourselves, because Terrible Christmas Films are coming...and they're going to start coming tonight, at 9pm, when I watch the first Terrible Christmas Film I've managed to find in the schedules, November Christmas, which is airing on True Entertainment (Freeview Channel 61, Sky Channel 184, Virgin 189). I will probably be livetweeting the whole film via my Twitter account at @AnathemaJane - feel free to join me.