How bad does a Christmas film have to be for it to disappear forever? Very, very bad indeed. Maybe no such entertainment can be sufficiently appalling to prevent disinterment as the shortest day beckons.
These thoughts sprang up while watching the current remake of Silent Night, Deadly Night, Charles E Sellier jnr’s slasher flick from 1984. No offence is intended to the bracingly offensive original. Nor am I dissing the endurable 2025 incarnation.
What got me thinking was the remake’s repeated inclusion of scenes from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, the notorious 1964 stinker. That film is playing on telly as our anti-Santa chops up the naughty and spares the nice. Sounds plausible. You will not need to search too hard to find the awful Martians thing on Irish telly over the long break.
Cultishly inclined cineastes will be aware of legendarily bad films such as Plan 9 from Outer Space, Robot Monster and Bedtime for Bonzo. They will not, however, expect to find such atrocities playing on respectable channels before 2am. You need to dig around in the mankier basements of the streaming services to locate The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies.
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Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is, to be fair, most often relegated to prelunch slots on Movies Wow! 7. Averagely terrible Christmas films, starring people you’ve heard of, play on respectable, top-of-the-menu channels at civilised hours of the afternoon. I’m talking about mid-grade effluent such as Christmas with the Kranks, The Nutcracker: The Untold Story, Surviving Christmas, and Jingle All the Way.
That last one is useful for our argument. Jingle All the Way is a very poor Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy. That’s to say it rates low among the most debased of postwar cultural entities. Nobody would tolerate Junior – the one where Arnie gets pregnant – on Christmas Eve, but people with working frontal lobes will allow Jingle all the Way to flap on as they wrap the presents.
Why? Because Christmas films exist in a perfumed dimension all of their own. Mere membership of the genre is enough to protect them from execution by remote control.
This tolerance does have its upsides. Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, a genuine masterpiece, was, famously, a flop on initial release, in 1946. People so ancient as your current correspondent do not remember it appearing on television throughout Advent when they were tiny. There were certainly no reissues or restorations in cinemas.
It was rescued by the American networks’ desperate need for (as they then didn’t say) Christmas content in the late 1970s. “It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” Capra said in 1984. “The film has a life of its own now, and I can look at it like I had nothing to do with it.”
Sadly, the material around It’s a Wonderful Life on the Christmas movie channels is, for the most part, washed-out pabulum of the palest hue. It’s a mistake to compare this stuff to other films. It is, indeed, a mistake to compare it to any other artistic enterprise.
What we’re dealing with is closer to tinsel or snow in a can. Christmas movies are mere decoration. They provide ambient sound and images while revellers go about their seasonal duties. It is merely required that, should you turn an eye in their direction, you will see Vince Vaughn on a sleigh (Fred Claus) or Martin Short as Jack Frost (The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause).
The geniuses who, in the modern age, exploited this most effectively are, of course, our friends at Netflix. This year they offer us new content such as Jingle Bell Heist, A Merry Little Ex-Mas, and My Secret Santa. Type a few seasonal words into your search box and the screen will soon be bursting with yuletide guff. Nothing among ’Twas the Text Before Christmas, Haul out the Holly or Christmas on Windmill Way was invented by me.
The most durable – and maybe tolerable – of the streamers’ Christmas titles are those that send American stars of the 1990s or 2000s to find love in picturesque corners of the Old World. I wouldn’t say A Castle for Christmas, all of which I seem to have watched, is a good film, but one can imagine worse accompaniments to the last Quality Street than Brooke Shields cuddling up to Cary Elwes in the Scottish lowlands. It’s easy on the eye. It’s good natured. It wraps a warm glow ...
Oh, Jesus, now I’m doing it. I’m lowering my own standards to base levels. The critical deadening at this time of year gets to us all. Anyway, the conclusion is that, as suspected, no Christmas film is bad enough to wither into nothingness. The yearning for ambient dross is far, far too great.
