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.
