The Christmas Light

Michael DeVitto, 1995
IMDb rating: 3.2/10

I don't really want to review the 1995 direct-to-video "movie" The Christmas Light; my mission will be accomplished if I draw a few people's attention to it.

This 22-minute picture straddles the line between low-budget short and amateur hobby project—they managed to recruit Dan Haggerty (of Grizzly Adams fame) to do the narration, which suggests at least some sort of actual commercial production that was intended to be viewed by real audiences, but the movie is so cheap, so lazy, and so bizarre that it may indeed have been someone's high-school project. I really don't know.

Since it's so short, I don't know if I should bother to describe the plot. You can just watch it for yourself:

But no, I can't help myself. I have to tell you what it's about.

In Santa's "compound"—that's the term used in the film, and a fitting one given its maximum-security appearance—his most trusted elf Isaac has devised a method of fabricating and painting ugly wooden trains in record time. Yes, that is strikingly similar to a plot point from Santa Claus: The Movie, and I doubt it's a coincidence, but let's let that go. The Christmas Light may have many flaws, but unoriginality is not one of them.

Isaac's chief competitor (and the only other elf we see in the film) is Burton, who Dan Haggerty assures us is disliked by all of his fellows. Burton has his own train-manufacturing system, but it has the downside that its products explode immediately after assembly. Santa expresses his disappointment about as gently as possible under the circumstances, but Burton doesn't take it well. He begins raving maniacally and in rhyme, and then he accidentally falls to his death off a walkway in his non-OSHA-compliant laboratory.

Seconds later, Burton rematerializes as a statue, disintegrates again, rematerializes again as a snowman, and flies away (he can fly, I guess) pledging horrible revenge.

At that moment, somewhere on planet earth, a snowstorm has kicked up—Dan Haggerty explicitly blames the snow on Burton, but on what evidence I have no idea—and a girl named Jennifer consoles her frightened younger brother with a dreadful song called "The Christmas Light".

Meanwhile, Santa and Isaac are braving the dangerous snowstorm in Isaac's new invention, a "sled" called Sled 2. (The script consistently refers to Santa's trademark conveyance as a "sled" instead of the usual "sleigh". Was it a mistake that no one caught? Probably.) Sled 2 is equipped with a robot called X that can penetrate the fog and perform surveillance, which enables it to find a single house illuminated by a seemingly supernatural light that Santa calls "the Christmas Light". It turns out to be none other than Jennifer's house, which is lucky, because the four characters I've mentioned so far are the film's entire cast.

Santa tells Jennifer about the Christmas Light (even though she just sang a song about it), and she joins their expedition to find Burton and thwart his sinister schemes. When they find Burton, his snowman body transforms into a flying buzz-saw that attempts to destroy Sled 2. Isaac defends the team by sending the robot X to blast Burton with a red laser beam, melting him. At the last minute, Jennifer prevails on Santa to abandon this use of deadly force, and Jennifer instead leaves the sled to confront Burton face-to-face in his icy lair.

Jennifer and Burton sing what seems to have been intended as a duet, but it's really just a reprise of Jennifer's "Christmas Light" song intercut with Burton intoning "Ain't no way" over and over again. It's quite a treat.

The power of the Christmas Light melts Burton into a puddle. Santa instantly writes him off as a casualty, but a miracle occurs (according to the narrator), and Burton once again reconstitutes himself in his old elfin form. He pledges to join Santa, Isaac, and Jennifer to work for good as "the Christmas Brigade". End of movie.

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When I was in the fourth grade, I wrote a short story for a school project in which Santa Claus's nephew, Quilcer, has to rescue his uncle from an army of fire-breathing anthropomorphic bats. I wrote a sequel in fifth grade, involving a machine that gave the evil bat leader superhuman intelligence.

I freely admit that these stories were nonsensical. And, for what it's worth, no, it wasn't Christmas time when I wrote them.

The point is that this movie was made in 1995; my first Quilcer adventure was written the same year. If they wanted to make a movie that seemed like something a ten-year-old would have written, all they had to do was ask.

Debbie Macomber's Dashing Through the Snow

K.T. Donaldson [not his real name—C.], 2015
Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 45%

It took me 20 minutes of searching to figure out what the name of this movie was so I could look it up on Rotten Tomatoes. The reason it took so long is that all I knew about it was that it came on the Hallmark Channel at some point in the last month and a half and that it was a Christmas movie. And, let me tell you, that doesn't narrow it down much.

I commented once before that at Christmastime, the Hallmark Channel "produces at least 600 movies a day". That was an exaggeration, but I find myself overwhelmed by the proliferation of these things. They are all dreadful, and everyone knows that, but people keep watching them—including me, apparently.

I'm not going to try to review this movie in earnest, because I've already admitted that I don't remember anything about it. I know it was about a woman called Ashley Harrison who, for some reason that escaped me, is suspected of being a drug smuggler or something. And it turns out the handsome dream-hunk she's sharing a rental car with on her trip up Interstate 5 is actually a government agent trying to bust her. Do they fall in love at the end? Does he discover that she's not really a criminal? Does she turn out to actually be a criminal? Your guess is as good as or better than mine.

One thing that did stand out to me was that the entire movie is set on the I-5 corridor, the largest and busiest freeway on the West Coast, with the characters traveling from San Francisco to Seattle. And yet, the road they're traveling on is clearly a tiny, two-lane highway through the middle of nowhere in what is obviously British Columbia. The dialogue goes to almost surreal lengths to draw attention to the fact that they're driving on the 5 (including a scene where the two main characters pointlessly discuss the history of the Interstate Highway System), almost as if they're proud of the job they've done at simulating the setting. At one point, they wander through a snowy mountain forest in Sacramento. Here is a photograph of the landscape along I-5 outside Sacramento:

And it doesn't snow there.

The only thing that makes a thing like this watchable is the seeming sincerity of the effort. I had the impression while watching this movie that they were trying to make something worth watching. They weren't trying very hard, but I think they were trying. That's what distinguishes it from such fare as Netflix has recently been churning out, which has a hipsterish ironic quality about it, like Sharknado but on a much lesser scale. I prefer honest incompetence. (Hence my somewhat halfhearted review of a recent Netflix release.)

Who Cares?

Michael Rohl, 2018
Rotten Tomatoes score: 88%

It sucked.