Santa Watch: Violent Night (2022)

Watched:  12/06/2025

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  First

Director:  Tommy Wirkola

LOL.  Oh my.

Really enjoyed this more than I should have, but I also really liked Deadly Games/3615 code Père Noël.  And after so many Hallmark movies, it's honestly kind of nice to spice things up a bit.

I guess the plot summary is:  An insanely rich family with government ties is taken hostage by a group of well-armed thieves.  Santa Claus happens to be in the house at the moment and gets involved, remembering how he was once a viking berserker with a war hammer named "Skullcrusher".  Things get intensely violent.

It's a knowing mish-mash of holiday favorites, from Die Hard to Home Alone, of having to fight back on the quietest night of the year.  

David Harbour plays ol' Kris Kringle as a miserable drunk, who bemoans - as one does in modern movies - the lack of meaning in Christmas and lack of belief in Santa.  John Leguizamo plays "Scrooge", the Hans Gruber of this bunch of international thieves.  Beverly D'Angelo - who looks great, btw - plays the cut-throat matriarch of the family.  Edi Patterson plays her alcoholic daughter with an obnoxious influencer son and a himbo actor boyfriend.  

The focal family with the young girl with belief in Santa is played by people I've never seen before, Alexis Louder and Alex Hassell, plus Leah Brady as Trudy.  

I guess I just loved how they manhandled some aspects of how holiday movies work - like the power of belief, of Christmas magic solving problems, how Home Alone works, and Santa's usual bag of tricks.

Anyway, it was a lot of Rated-R fun, and I was cackling.  A really good palate cleanser if things got a little too sweet for you in your holiday movie watching.  

Chabert Watch: Hometown Legend (2002)

Watched:  12/05/2025

Format:  DVD

Viewing:  First

Director:  James Anderson (I fully believe this is an Alan Smithee name for someone)

Editor's note:  we've decided to Thelma and Louise our way through the remaining Chabert filmography.  I've been looking to see if I can find the Chabert films I haven't seen yet via very cheap used copies or online one way or another.  This one set me back about $6.10.

First, this DVD, purchased as "used" from a Goodwill had never been opened.  Not since the movie was released in, like, 2003 on DVD.  It was wrapped in some sort of transport wrap from the seller, then the original shrink wrap, and THEN still had the vertical AND horizontal security stickers across the packaging intact.

This movie was produced by a Christian production company and some involved are still in movies.  As I bought this on a 2000's-era DVD, it has bonus features including a full Director's commentary I really want to listen to.  But, more importantly, there's all kinds of bonus content about Jerry B. Jenkins - which the DVD itself says is the most famous writer you never heard of.  Apparently he's the mastermind behind this movie?  And (deep sigh) the guy who wrote the Left Behind books.  And a bunch of other stuff.  This seems to be the Jenkins family parlaying their book money into movies.

But, yeah, he essentially uses the bonus features to promote himself.  Amazing choice.

Sellers Watch: Return of the Pink Panther (1975)

Watched:  12/03/2025

Format:  Simon's DVD

Viewing:  First

Director:  Blake Edwards

I never got onboard the Pink Panther movies back when it made sense to do so.  As a kid, they had some pacing I wasn't onboard with, and when I was really little, I was mad there was no cartoon Pink Panther in the movies.  Instead, it was that detective guy.

At the time, I wasn't aware of who Peter Sellers was, and I didn't ever tune in long enough to give the movies a real chance.  Simon has long found this baffling, so last night he brought over Return of the Pink Panther (1975), and -yeah, it's really funny.  

While it's a sequel, it gives you all the information you need.  Christopher Plummer plays a retired jewel thief who is framed for the robbery of the Pink Panther Diamond - the world's largest diamond.  Inspector Clouseau is called in to once again solve the crime of who stole the diamond.  

Obviously Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers didn't invent physical comedy, but there's certainly something hyper-specific about Sellers' Clouseau - the badly put in disguises, the walking Dunning-Krueger Effect of his real persona, and absolutely the slap stick...  You can certainly see where the ZAZ guys were getting some of their inspiration.

The movie co-stars Catherine Schell as Plummer's wife, and - showing me he's hilarious and I had no idea - Herbert Lom as Clouseau's boss.

Anyway, there are some very dated jokes (read: kinda racist) so proceed with the knowledge that the movie is 50 years old.  

Explaining jokes is lame, so I'm going to just offer this one up as a pretty dang funny movie.

Hallmark Christmas Miscellanea Watch: A Grand Ole Opry Christmas (2025) and Christmas at the Catnip Cafe (2025)

Watched:  11/30 and 12/1/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First for both

Director:  AGOOC - Clare Niederpruem / CatCC - Lucie Guest

Sunday we decided to lean into the Hallmark Season with their big dollar movie, A Grand Ole Opry Christmas (2025).  Monday I was doing other things and we let play Christmas at the Catnip Cafe (2025).  And it was a study in where Hallmark is going in 2025 with a more ambitious, less-boilerplate film versus classic Hallmark formula.

A Grand Ole Opry Christmas was a sincere time-travel movie about a woman (Nikki Deloach) whose father was a 90's country star in a Brooks and Dunn model, but he threw in the towel and quit making music.  A few years later he died, and she doesn't know why he quit making music.  She, and her best friend (Kristoffer Polaha), are transported to the mid-90's via Christmas/ Grand Ole Opry magic to learn what happened.  

Mean, Christmas at the Catnip Cafe is about a big city marketing exec (Erin Cahill) who inherits half of a cat cafe in small town upstate New York.  The other half is owned by an overworked veterinarian (Paul Campbell).  She wants to sell to buy a condo in LA.  He wants to keep his cafe open.  But they mutually wish to get to business time.

RomCom Watch: Happiness for Beginners (2023)

Watched:  11/30/2205

Format:  Netflix

Viewing:  First

Director:  Vicky Wight

We watched Happiness for Beginners (2023) because Jamie had read the book and wanted to check out how it was turned it into a film.  And because Jamie watches so much nonsense of my choosing, I wished to be flexible and watch a movie about Eat, Pray, Loving one's way through a long hike.  Plus, Ellie Kemper is fun.

And, yeah, I am very glad Ellie Kemper got a movie as a lead and was able to show some star quality other than making mad bank as Kohl's Mom.  I've mostly seen her play "wacky" and this wasn't really that.  Here, she's a woman in her 30's who just wrapped up a divorce and decides to go on the aforementioned days-long hike on the Appalachian Trail.  

Helen (Kemper) is accidentally joined by her younger brother's best friend, Jake (Luke Grimes) who accidentally also signed up for the same hike, and along the way she learns, laughs and loves, and the two hook up at the film's end.  Shocker.  (You will know this in the first five minutes of the movie.  This is a spoiler only if you have amnesia that makes you forget how every movie, ever, worked.)

Neo-Noirvember Chabert Watch: The Pleasure Drivers (2006)

Watched:  11/29/2025

Format:  DVD

Viewing:  First

Director:  Andrzej Sekula

Editor's note:  we've decided to Thelma and Louise our way through the remaining Chabert filmography.  I've been looking to see if I can find the Chabert films I haven't seen yet via very cheap used copies or online one way or another.  This one set me back about $5.

Truly a product of a particular decade, somehow The Pleasure Drivers (2006) arrived about seven years after that decade.  It's another LA-based low-budget crime movie, with this one peppering itself with vague philosophical aspirations, but what they are saying lacks any insight and is dumb.  And, the movie is entirely populated by characters who take their cues from how human beings behave from other movies, leaving us with weird third-generation xeroxes of motivation instead of anything identifiable as human.  

Everything about the film feels late-90's, part of the post Pulp Fiction indie boom.  It's three stories that loosely intertwine, and, of course, collide at the end.  But none of the three stories is very interesting and none of the characters terribly watchable.