I survived five Christmas movies in one day

Alright, it’s that time of year again. As soon as Thanksgiving was in the rearview mirror, it was time to decorate for Christmas…which also meant that I’d unfortunately be consuming an unhealthy amount of Hallmark-esque Christmas movies in the process. Luckily, I only was getting bits and pieces as we decorated and did other chores around the house on Saturday. So welcome to Nathaniel’s Guide to Not-So-Great Christmas Movies: 2024 Edition. Keep in mind that the summaries that follow are based completely on my vague recollections of not very memorable movies, so take that as you will.

Our Little Secret

Lindsay Lohan is back in this Netflix original about two exes who figure out their new respective partners are siblings at a Christmas party and then decide to lie about knowing each other for some weird reason. Ensue hilarious hijinks as they try not to let their secret slip while also falling back in love with each other. I guess.

Or at least, that’s the idea. While there are certainly scenarios in this movie that seemed designed to be funny, I mostly just raised an eyebrow and contemplated the eventual heat death of the universe. While I appreciate the effort that seemingly went into trying to come up with potentially funny situations (on paper, it’s a lot more than most of these movies do), unfortunately the writing and direction lacks the ability to actually conjure up a laugh at anything happening on screen. It was also competent enough to not have me laughing at how bad it was, which was honestly worse, because then I was just bored. This gets three French hens out of 10 lords a-leaping from me.

Hot Frosty

It’s just like the regular Frosty the Snowman, but instead of a snowman being brought to life by a magic hat, a magic scarf turns the snowman into a hot human guy and another actress from Mean Girls falls in love with him because it’s Christmas and what else is she going to do? Thanks Netflix!

I caught bits and pieces of this one, but I mostly only comprehended the ending where Darryl from The Office tries to kill Hot Frosty by melting him in a jail cell. That was kind of neat, but Hot Frosty lives via the magic of Christmas and is a real boy now. I’m pretty sure most of this is just fish out of water stuff with our snowman guy not knowing how humans work. It’s…fine, but I deduct a point purely for making me type out a phrase like “Hot Frosty” so many times. Two eyes made out of coal out of one overzealous police officer that looks like Doug Judy from Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

The Merry Gentlemen

Pretty sure this one is about a lady who blackmails her local handyman into doing Christmas Magic Mike performances in an attempt to save her parents’ business from going under. I’m going to be real here, I think I heard all of three lines of dialogue, partially because the Christmas movie fatigue was already setting in and partially because I couldn’t really hear it over the number of shirtless dudes on screen. Some dude from like five episodes of Gilmore Girls is the main guy though, so Mikaela had to watch it. The business they were trying to save was called the Rhythm Room and that’s all I really remember. I’ll give it one coerced handyman out of eight generic Channing Tatums.

Christmas in Notting Hill

Unfortunately, this was one that I pretty much saw the whole thing. On the plus side, this was an actual Hallmark movie, so it was so bad that I actually had fun making fun of the ridiculousness of it. An American lady goes to London, where she randomly bumps into super famous British soccer player Graham Cracker (that’s literally what she calls him) and he breaks her ornament she just bought. Luckily, he’s hot, so it’s fine, and she’s also an American (and as such, doesn’t know soccer) so she doesn’t know that Nabisco guy is famous. Golden Grahams is happy to have finally found someone who doesn’t know he’s famous and so he likes her. Ensue movie.

The main character in this movie gets mad at all the dumbest things over the course of its 90 minute run time, but on the plus side, they have a doctor who tells soccer guy that she “has a gut feeling” that his injury will keep him out awhile and does not elaborate further. Not only does Teddy Grahams not get a second opinion, but it turns out none of the injury subplot matters because he finds the will to not retire from soccer because of magic or something.

I had hopes for the soccer aspects, but nah, this was probably somehow the most generic of them all. I did laugh when they cut away from the actress kicking a soccer ball into a goal ten feet away because I guess she couldn’t actually do that in real life, so there’s that! Two s’mores without chocolate or marshmallows out of fifteen takes of the actress missing the goal before the crew just gave up and said they’d fix it in post.

Haul out the Holly

I think the moral of this story is that HOAs aren’t actually evil, so for that reason alone this movie is terrible. At the end, a grown man gets upset that he doesn’t get to dress up like Santa, so he throws a temper tantrum. Gretchen from Mean Girls realizes that he wants to be Santa and says he can, so then they live happily ever after. One snowman-clearly-made-outof- wood-not-snow out of 50 neighbors forcing you to join their Christmas cult.

A C ERTAIN POINT OF V IEW

BY

NATHANIEL U NDERWOOD REPORTER