Johnson Family Christmas Dinner

(NOTE: None of the people in this picture are in the movie.)

Eurika Pratts, 2008
IMDb score: 2.4/10

Here is another obscure and mysterious Christmas film that will leave you deeply confused. You'll notice that it has a very low score on IMDb, yet it blows yesterday's feature, Rapsittie Street Kids, out of the water, and rightly so.

This movie was made by BlackChristianMovies.com and seems to be a sequel to their other film, Johnson Family Dinner—or possibly vice-versa. I haven't watched Johnson Family Dinner, but I'm guessing that it came first. I found it on YouTube and watched the first 30 seconds, but life is just too short.

The real excitement of watching Johnson Family Christmas Dinner is trying to figure out how all of these characters are related to each other. The movie makes no effort to explain any of the relationships, maybe because it's a sequel and assumes familiarity with the first film. The Johnson paterfamilias is Stephen, who appears to be in his early 40s but who has children who are the same age as him. Stephen has several children, including Theresa and Sam, who arrive in a car together, along with a small child named Chrissy, at the start of the movie.

This made Theresa and Sam appear to be married, and that impression is reinforced when Theresa addresses an older woman—who I took to be Stephen's wife—as "Mother Johnson," which sounds like something you'd call your mother-in-law. But don't be distracted: Theresa is Sam's sister, not his wife. Stephen tells us this moments later when he asks Theresa, in obvious reference to Sam, "How was your brother's driving?"

So why did Theresa call the older lady "Mother Johnson"? I have no idea. To the best I can figure, Mother Johnson (whose name may or may not be Bonnie) is Stephen's sister. The movie will try to confuse you about this—for example, a character will later refer to Stephen and Mother Johnson as "your grandparents" when speaking to Stephen's granddaughter—but don't let yourself be fooled. Stephen will soon make an offhand comment to Sam that Sam's mother is dead and that he (Stephen) lives alone. So Mother Johnson has to be his visiting sister. Now, why would Theresa call her aunt "Mother Johnson", you ask? I don't have all the answers.

Theresa seems to have three children: young Chrissy, who we've already met, teenager James, and college student Cindy. James, we're told, is catching a ride from his friend Reggie and will arrive soon. But earlier we learned that Theresa read a book and Cindy took a nap while Sam was driving to the house, so I was under the impression that they had driven at least a couple of hours. Yet Reggie will never appear in the movie, which means he dropped James off and left. So did Reggie drive hours to drop his friend off at this place?

Cindy shows up a few minutes later with her boyfriend, who calls himself the Eagle. The Eagle is a weirdo who eats nothing but raw tomatoes, claims to sleep standing up (like a horse), and aspires to make ridiculous-sounding movies. Stephen, that rock-ribbed family man, finds the Eagle off-putting and discourages Cindy from her plan to move in with him during grad school.

Another family member is Michelle, who is definitely Stephen's daughter, Theresa and Sam's sister, and the children's aunt. (They helpfully address her as "Aunt Michelle", which is not intended as a blind. She is really their aunt. I'm certain of it.) Michelle's only problem in life is that she can't manage to settle down with any of the men she's been dating, even though some of them have Blu-Ray players.

That detail about the Blu-Ray player might sound like a joke, but it's not. Little Chrissy is obsessed with getting a Blu-Ray player for Christmas—remember this is 2008—and has been grilling every family member about it. It is in that context that Aunt Michelle relates her experience with Blu-Ray-player-owning suitors.

Stick with me. This is all crucial plot information.

Meanwhile, we occasionally cut to a side plot about another family member named Moneymaker Mike.

No, sorry. That's not him. I regret the error.

His name is really Money Mike, and he has a girlfriend who appears in the credits as "Shane mm's GF". Money Mike and Shane are on their way to Stephen's house for Christmas dinner, but they never actually make it there. They eventually have a breakdown or possibly run out of gas. No one else in the family ever seems to notice they're missing. Mike blames the car trouble on an "Arab dude who made his own oil" and sold it to them. I have no comment.

At some point, a young man named Robert appears at the Johnson house. Robert is clearly Mother Johnson's (Bonnie's?) son. Because I was still making the incorrect assumption that Mother Johnson and Stephen were married, I deduced from this fact that Robert is the brother of Sam and Theresa, but he's not. He's their cousin, I think, but that's based on my current belief that Mother Johnson is Stephen's sister, and I still have some residual doubts about that.

Robert is estranged from his wife, Hillary, who appeared in the first 30 seconds of Johnson Family Dinner and seemed to be a main character. And he has a drinking problem, by which I mean that he has trouble drinking: in one scene, he lifts a wine glass to his mouth but doesn't manage to get anything out of it.

(He also has a drinking problem in the more conventional sense.)

Speaking of intoxicating substances, it turns out that James has brought along a couple of joints and plans to blaze up in grandpa's guest bathroom. But he has to call his school chum Reggie for advice on how to smoke them, implying that he's never used grass before. So he decided to try marijuana for the first time while visiting his conservative, straightlaced grandfather on Christmas Eve, surrounded by family members? Well, at least he had the sense to light up next to a window. It would have been smarter to open the window first, but he's new at this.

All right, so you can see that the family members all have their own problems. And those problems boil over at the dinner table, right after the family finish eating a hearty meal of yogurt and a box of spring mix from the Kroger. Everyone starts yelling until Stephen declares that dinner is over and everyone should just go to bed.

We then see all the actors pretending to sleep in what appears to be broad daylight. (It's not even the bad day-for-night look you sometimes see in low-budget movies. It's just day. Maybe it's morning already. I don't know.) Oh, and true to his word, the Eagle sleeps standing up, with his arms folded over his chest like Boris Karloff in The Mummy.

In the morning, everyone instantly reconciles with each other, and everything is fine. End of movie.

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I really don't think I'm selling this movie well enough. It is a joy to watch. The challenge of making sense of the character relationships is the most engaging movie-watching experience I've had in a long time. I'm convinced that there are some places where the dialogue outright contradicts itself about who is related to whom and how. It's like solving a jigsaw puzzle with an unknown number of pieces from a different puzzle thrown in.

I was curious about the negative IMDb reviews this thing got, but I was disappointed to find only one written review in addition to many one-star ratings by users who didn't include written comments. Everything the one reviewer says is true, but I have the feeling that "zardoz12" had the wrong attitude going in. But, while I was looking for reviews, I found the IMDb plot summary, which differs quite a bit from what I thought the plot was:

This comedy drama focuses on the trials and tribulations that a family goes through, always reconnecting over Sunday, possibly Christmas, dinner. As a mother and father observe the unfortunate events of their grown children's lives, they have to pick when and where to become involved. From Alex, who opened a failed restaurant with her husband Sam, to Robert Downy Jr. who's just welcomed a new baby into the world, to Rebecca, who suffers from a seasonal irritable bowel syndrome, the dinner table sees its share of laughter and tears, but over time each family member learns that they depend on each other to get through it - even when they're in each other's throats.

I remember the family being "in each other's throats", but I don't recall anyone named Rebecca or any character having irritable bowel syndrome—at least not that was mentioned. And what is this skepticism about whether it was Christmas dinner? That seemed pretty clear.

And how did I miss Robert Downey Jr.'s appearance? I guess this was during that slump in his career between Chaplin and Iron Man.

Well, I've said quite enough about Johnson Family Christmas Dinner. I can't recommend it enough. It's on YouTube. Watch it before the holiday season is over.

Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa

Colin Slater, 2002
IMDb rating: 1.3/10

This bizarre "movie" was made in 2002 and apparently aired on a large number of local WB stations—though not on the national network, contrary to rumor—only to be forgotten for many years before being uploaded to YouTube. It has become somewhat notorious for it's appallingly bad animation and incomprehensible plot. But the really shocking thing is that the cast includes some first-rate voice actors like Nancy Cartwright from The Simpsons and even Mark Hamill (who, in addition to playing an elderly hobo in a recent series of flop space comedies, is a highly respected voice actor).

Bad animated Christmas movies are a dime a dozen, but this one sets its own standard. The computer animation in The Christmas Brigade was clunky and primitive, but this movie is grotesque. The characters have a hideous, uncanny appearance, and the backgrounds look like they were animated by a small child on a home computer running Windows 2000. It's abhorrent. It's disturbing to look at—especially the character Smithy, who has a scarf wrapped around most of his face all the time, so all you can see are his enormous, lifeless eyes.

The main character, whose name I believe was Ricky, looks only slightly better. His scalp is often visible between chunks of hair, giving the impression of a bad wig, or maybe the early stages of radiation poisoning. In the opening scene he walks, like a clumsy windup toy, through a field of snow without leaving footprints and without ever seeming to be physically in the same place as the rest of the scene. But the most important character by far is Ricky's great-grandmother:

The comments on that YouTube video contain various speculations about why great-grandma talks like that. One commenter claims that the voice data was corrupted, and they didn't bother to fix it. Another says that it's really the actress speaking, which is definitely not true. Well, you're not going to find the solution here. I certainly can't explain it. I'm pretty confident it was the result of incompetence rather than a deliberate choice, but who knows.

The plot of the film is that Ricky wants to give his classmate Nicole, who he fancies, a teddy bear that he received years earlier as a gift from his now-deceased mother. That's pretty weird, but let's not dwell on it. Nicole is a rich (?) snob who only likes gifts that were purchased at the mall, so she rejects the teddy bear. Ricky and Smithy then have to look through some garbage dumpsters to find it.

I know I'm not getting this exactly right, but I had some trouble understanding the plot, and I refuse to watch it again. It's very bad.

I think there were some songs.

I really don't know what else to say about this. It's on YouTube if you want to see it for yourself. If you watch to the end, you'll see that they tease an Easter-themed sequel, and it's almost heartbreaking that they thought that was going to happen. I don't know how you could watch this movie and think it might be worth making another one. Then again, it bears repeating that someone deemed this acceptable to show on television, so who's to say it didn't deserve a sequel.

Garfield's Thanksgiving

Phil Roman, 1989
IMDb rating: 7.9/10

I got a couple of things wrong about this in my offhand less-than-one-sentence reference to it at the end of my review of Dutch. I said it featured "old Garfield and Doc Boy", but Jon Arbuckle's brother Doc Boy does not appear in it. I must have been thinking of the Garfield Christmas episode. I also implied that it was made in 1991, but it was 1989.

In my defense, I can't ever remember seeing this before, even though I was an avid fan of the Garfield and Friends cartoon, which I recommend. Garfield's Thanksgiving is not really a movie. It's what people commonly call a "TV special", but usually that means a feature-length (or close to feature-length) production. In this case it's just a half-hour episode of Garfield and Friends, but it's devoted to a single story rather than being broken up into smaller segments.

I'm describing this at length because there's not a lot to say about Garfield's Thanksgiving adventure. The plot is that Garfield has to go to the vet's office the day before Thanksgiving, and she puts him on a diet. Meanwhile, Jon is engaged in shockingly desperate and self-destructive behavior to get the veterinarian, Dr. Liz Wilson, to go on a date with him. He gets her to come over for Thanksgiving dinner by holding his breath until she agrees—which is what a three-year-old would do. I know Jon Arbuckle is not noted as a ladies' man, but this is profoundly pathological behavior.

Are we supposed to believe that Liz Wilson had no plans for Thanksgiving? Or did she have to call her family and explain why she couldn't visit them this year because a pathetic manchild who talks to his cat held himself hostage until she promised to eat dinner with him?

Garfield's diet occupies about three minutes of plot time. Liz insists that Garfield cut down on carbohydrates and fat, so Jon feeds him half a lettuce leaf for lunch. That seems pretty inadequate, especially since cats are carnivorous. Anyway, as soon as Liz shows up at the house, she decides to cut Garfield some slack on the diet, and that's the resolution of that.

Meanwhile, Jon reveals that he somehow has no idea how to prepare a meal, even though he's a bachelor and presumably manages to feed himself on a regular basis. Well, I guess it doesn't take Wolfgang Puck to whip up the gigantic, plate-sized, completely raw steaks he usually eats:

So he botches the job by leaving the turkey frozen solid until Thanksgiving morning, and then he puts a bunch of raw, uncut vegetables into a pot and pours water on them and thinks that will be edible. Finally Garfield convinces him to call his grandmother in to save the day. I appreciate that they actually thought through the question of how anyone could possibly salvage a frozen turkey, which grandma does by slicing it into slabs with a chainsaw and then deep-frying. (Wouldn't there be pieces of bones in all the slices? Oh, who cares.)

While this is going on, Jon is distracting Liz by telling a series of boring stories about the history of Thanksgiving and how it compares to similar harvest-time festivals in other countries. I got the impression that Jon was just buying time so Liz wouldn't realize that he had called his elderly grandmother to make dinner for him and his date even though he's a grown man with a house and a job. But, if this is just a distraction, why does Jon just happen to know all of these pointless facts? Is it possible that there's a hole in this plot? Maybe I should watch it again.

Whatever the case, the dinner turns out great, and Liz never finds out that Jon's grandma made it. She just walks into the dining room and sees that the table has been miraculously set and doesn't ask how it happened. Maybe she figures Odie did it. She's so pleased with the food that she promises to come back next Thanksgiving and kisses Jon on her way out the door.

He is so in there. Maybe this holding your breath until you pass out trick isn't so bad after all. I'll go practice.

Dutch

Peter Faiman, 1991
Rotten Tomatoes score: 14%

In 1987, John Hughes made one of the best movies in the world. Planes, Trains and Automobiles is not just a solid comedic film, though it is that. It's one of those few movies that really stays with you and makes you feel good about life.

Steve Martin and John Candy portray two flawed, believable, relatable strangers stuck together on a Thanksgiving weekend trip that goes wrong in every way a screenwriter can think of. Of course, there's nothing brilliant in that concept; it's been done a million times. It's the execution that made the movie such a classic, from Del Griffith's pantomime of the "Mess Around", to the at first funny but then increasingly heartbreaking confrontation in the motel room ("You want to hurt me?"), to Edie McClurg's two-word response to Steve Martin's over-the-top outburst (the scene that singlehandedly got the movie its R rating), to the weird but hauntingly evocative synthesizer score, to the very last shot of the movie, where John Candy says more with a facial expression that most movies manage to say in 120 minutes of dialogue. The film accomplishes such brilliance with such a humdrum concept that one can't resist the temptation to compare it to "a lesser film". A lesser film would have made this story stupid, or sappy, or irritating, or all three.

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"And just to prove it," said John Hughes in 1991, "by God, I'll make that lesser film!"

To be fair, John Hughes only wrote Dutch. Other people directed and produced it. But I can't let him off the hook that easily. Hughes had a massive influence on the pop culture of the 1980s and 90s, and his movies were scattered broadly across the comedy spectrum, both in terms of content and of quality. (Consider that The Breakfast Club and Flubber were written by the same man.) And I know it's not fair to put him up on a pedestal just because he made one of my favorite movies. But the similarity of this film to Planes, Trains is so blatant that it cries out to be judged by its predecessor's standard.

The effect is like watching Jaws 2 after you've seen Jaws. It's not bad exactly, and if the first Jaws had never existed, Jaws 2 would have been just another OK summer movie. But, because it was a sequel, it became an exercise in recreating every commercially successful aspect of the first film, only without the coherence and plot integrity that made the original work so well. It's a mediocre movie doing an impression of a really good movie.

So is Dutch.

Dutch Dooley (Ed O'Neill) is a working-class Joe whose girlfriend Natalie was the loser in a painful divorce from her rich snob husband Reed (perennial bad guy Christopher McDonald). Reed is a jerk. He has no other personality traits, except that he is a rich jerk. His richness is important because it distinguishes him from Dutch, who is also a jerk, and because it gives us an ostensible reason to consider Dutch an underdog and therefore worthy of our sympathy.

Natalie learns that Reed, who was supposed to spend Thanksgiving with their preteen son Doyle, has stood the boy up for a business trip. Doyle, whose spoiled mind has been poisoned by Reed, would rather spend Thanksgiving alone in his dorm room at boarding school than with his mother, but Dutch offers to prove his worthiness as a mate by bringing the little bastard home to Chicago for the weekend.

Dutch and Doyle's relationship strikes the worst possible note right off the bat. Doyle knows who Dutch is and why he has come, but he pretends to think he's an intruder and tries to beat him up using his karate skills. The scene is played too seriously to be slapstick, and it makes the kid seem deeply disturbed. Dutch then responds by hog-tying the boy to a hockey stick and carrying him bodily out to the car.

In the right kind of movie, this could have been funny. When Bad Santa beat the crap out of some teenage bullies, it worked, because you knew that was the kind of movie where it's OK to laugh at Billy Bob Thornton beating up children. This movie really wants you to care about its characters, though, so there isn't anything funny about it. It makes Dutch seem like an unlikable roughneck who shouldn't be allowed to supervise children. The movie tries to win you over to Dutch's side by making Doyle utterly hateful, but all that did was make me dislike both of them.

Every once in a while, you can see some potential in the characters. At one point, Doyle steals and deliberately wrecks Dutch's car and, and in the following minute or so, he acts exactly like a kid who suddenly realizes he's crossed the line. But that goes nowhere, and before long they're off on a mindless plot twist where Dutch's wallet gets stolen by two lovable call girls who offer to give them a ride—one of whom looks unsettlingly like a teenager, possibly just because they wanted Doyle to have a crush on her, but anyway it's creepy.

There are a lot more events in the plot, but none worth describing. It's just an obligatory series of mishaps until they finally get to Chicago. When they do, Dutch confronts and then punches Reed, which again makes Dutch a jerk and shows that he has not grown as a character in any way.

I should note in closing that Reed is played by Christopher McDonald, who plays pretty much the same character in every movie he's in, and who also ended up on the receiving end of a gratuitously violent comeuppance in Happy Gilmore and to a lesser extent Flubber.

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So, in conclusion, when you're searching for a 30-year-old Thanksgiving film to watch this holiday weekend, don't pick Dutch. And, since I can't think of any other Thanksgiving movies from 1991, you may just be out of luck. See what old Garfield and Doc Boy are up to, I guess. That's got to be on YouTube.