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.