Rotten Tomtatoes score: N/A
Once again Rotten Tomatoes has not managed to find any reviews of this TV movie. However, the Viewer Rating feature on that site reveals that site visitors have rated it a 60%. Now that is some Christmas charity.
This movie stars the Olsen Twins, and it was made around the beginning of their rise to popularity. If you're as much of a loser as me, you may have realized that Jeff Franklin, who directed this effort, was also the executive producer of Full House. And I'm sure anyone who watched it remembers that Bob Saget and Lori Loughlin show up in a cameo at the end, so it reeks of a Full House side-project.
Now I love Full House. I grew up with it, and like many people of my generation, I still enjoy heckling old episodes of it when they come on Teen Nick. But somehow this dreck has just not retained the same nostalgia for me. It's bad. The Olsen Twins are very annoying (which is not really their fault, since they're just kids and clearly not old or precocious enough to be carrying a movie on their own), and without Uncle Jesse and Joey to liven the mood by acting like idiots, it's hard to sit through.
It tells the holiday tale of a single mom named Rhonda (Cynthia Geary) and her twin girls (their names are Sarah and Julie, but let's dispense with that charade and just call them the Olsen Twins). Rhonda works long hours at a mini-mart to support her children, and she is constantly "romanced" by an ineffectual suitor, Eddie (J. Eddie Peck). Eddie is a compulsive lotto player, a driver for FPD, a pastiche of FedEx and UPS, and also the world's last surviving Roy Rogers fan. We see a news report early on discussing the unsolved case of the "FPD Bandit," who has been holding up delivery trucks. Gee, I wonder if that's going to come into play later in the movie!
Rhonda hasn't had the heart to tell her obnoxious children that she is working Christmas this year. One day, before Rhonda goes to work, the girls overhear her telling her friend (their babysitter for the day) that they are "a handful" and are making her life stressful. Yeah, no kidding. I've been watching for fifteen minutes and I've had about all I can take of them.
So the Olsen Twins decide they'll hightail it to Grandma's house. They sneak aboard a city bus, where a kindly old lady (who shows no concern about two five-year-old kids on a bus by themselves) tells them they've got about three hours' travel to go. Luckily for them, Eddie (whom they remember from when he made a delivery to their house) has parked his truck nearby, and they stow away as he drives off. He eventually discovers them and uses their birth date to choose his lotto numbers.
Rhonda, suitably distraught that her children are unaccounted for, has called the police. A bumbling detective played by Stuart Margolin (whom I remember as Angel Martin from The Rockford Files) assures her that he will "absolutely" find the children. That's a lot of confidence. Anyway, the search is called off when Eddie calls in to let Rhonda know that the children are safe. For some reason, Eddie is in such an all-fired hurry to finish his route that he schleps the kids along on his remaining deliveries, instead of returning them home immediately.
Once Eddie arrives at Rhonda's house with the Olsen Twins, he is bludgeoned by Rhea Perlman (no kidding, the one from Cheers) and her oafish husband Jerry Van Dyke (no kidding, Dick Van Dyke's brother, the guy from Coach), who steal his truck. They are at first upset that the girls are in the truck, but Rhea Perlman decides they should ransom the children. Somehow that involves driving the kids out to Grandma's house in a motor home, which is convenient for the title of the movie.
Eddie comes to on the sidewalk and reports the incident to Rhonda and the same cop from before. He also discovers that his lotto ticket, which an Olsen Twin is still carrying, has won the jackpot. Wow, what a mess this plot is turning into.
So they get a ransom call asking for $10,000, and what do they do? They steal $10,000 worth of merchandise from FPD and hock it. Rhonda insists on writing down all the things they stole so that they can buy everything back and forward it to its intended recipients. Meanwhile, in the kidnappers' motor home, Jerry Van Dyke seems to have no interest in committing any crimes, and prefers to bond with the children. I guess it's Stockholm Syndrome or something.
Rhonda and Eddie meet up with the kidnappers at some Christmas fair. As they're handing off the cash to Rhea Perlman, Jerry Van Dyke is busy losing track of the kids. This is the third time they've been lost track of! Are these Houdini's children, or is every adult in this movie as negligent as the McCallisters? (Sorry, sorry, we'll get to that one.)
The girls have somehow stolen a horse-drawn buggy from the fair, and it's up to cowboy wannabe Eddie to ride to the rescue. The scene drags on for a very long time, but he manages to stop the girls' runaway carriage just before it goes over a conveniently-located cliff. And guess where they somehow end up: Grandma's house. Why? How? Who cares?
But it's still not over! Now the cop comes back, tells Rhonda and Eddie that he knows they stole $10,000 worth of stuff from FPD, and arrests them on suspicion of that and all the other recent FPD-related crimes. But Jerry Van Dyke confesses to the previous FPD Bandit crimes, and he and Rhea Perlman get arrested instead. (Rhonda and Eddie are still guilty of a felony--why does the cop let them go? Again, who cares?) So the cop helps them race back into town in time to claim their lottery winnings.
The lotto hosts are, as I alluded to above, Bob Saget and Lori Loughlin. Bob Saget is clearly mailing this performance in, and it's actually pretty hilarious. Definitely the highlight of the movie. So they take their winnings, buy back the stolen merchandise and deliver it to its rightful owners, and live happily ever after.
I know I've sprung to the defense of some lousy movies before, but this time I just can't. It's watchable, yes, especially if you're watching it with friends so you can talk over it and heckle the movie. And since Rotten Tomatoes didn't give this a score, it's hard to say what people think of it. Sixty percent for a viewer rating really just means that enough people liked it to stuff the ballot box. But you know, even that's too much. It's
Sorry.
And the True Meaning of Christmas, according to this movie:
1. It's important for adults to be at least vaguely aware of the location of children in their care.
That's setting the bar pretty low, but that's the lesson I got.
2. Comically inept criminals aren't so bad deep down.
Especially when they're played by popular sitcom alumni.
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