A Christmas Regret Watch: A Little Piece of Heaven (1991)

everything on this DVD cover is a lie

Watched:  12/23/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Second (and last)

Director:  Mimi Leder

While watching A Little Piece of Heaven (1991) for ChabertQuest2025, I knew instantly that this would be a movie to share with Dug and K.  

As longtime readers will know, sharing terrible Christmas movies with Jamie's brother, Dug and his wife K, is a yearly tradition here at The Signal Watch.  And, for reasons I cannot guess, Christmas seems to really bring out some absolute nonsense, from failed comedy concepts like Santa with Muscles to the utterly sincere failures, like this one.

There are many flavors of "this movie is a bad idea" out there, and we've covered a lot of them.  But this TV movie commits the sin of, as Dug put it, insisting that the ends justifies the means.  Even if the ends are highly, highly questionable.  And the means are absolutely mortifying.  

This movie contains:

• a very 90's take on an actor playing someone "special"
• drugging a child
• kidnapping a drugged child
• light casual racism
• 90's screenplay ingrained racism
• child slave labor
• child emotional labor
• gaslighting within gaslighting, like an inception where we're passing through layers of bullshit that's knee-deep
• nonsense rationalization
• child abuse-ploitation
• more kidnapping
• transporting minors
• abandoning pigs
• basically casting all those horror stories you see about people kidnapping people off the street and keeping them in their basement, or imprisoning children, and turning the abductor into a hero
• the greatest bullshit ending to a movie ever committed to screen
• Kirk Cameron

But, fun fact, a very young Lacey Chabert received an Emmy Nomination for her role as "Princess".  

Anyway, somehow this movie was written, produced, filmed, edited and given a plum primetime slot on network TV.  And everyone thought this was fine.  Even the scene where it's clear someone is tossing chickens out of a window.  And all of young Jussie Smollet's dialog.