Time has been very kind to 2003’s Will Ferrell Christmas comedy, Elf. It hasn’t quite reached the iconic status of a film like It’s A Wonderful Life, but its traction as an underdog favorite in the world of holiday movies has still reached disturbing proportions.
When I first saw Elf at the age of thirteen, my opinion was fairly neutral, or perhaps only a little negative. It was a forgettable affair, so I assumed it would die the same slow death that befalls most sub-par holiday films. Unfortunately, its home release would ensure that never happened. Throughout my life, I’ve been forced into watching this boring, lifeless, pretentious, cameo-obsessed, unfunny, derivative, obnoxious, sorry-excuse-for-the-media-it’s-printed-on piece of garbage far too many times. For whatever reason, it’s a real crowd-pleaser with most people, so when someone selects this barrage of stupid as the chosen holiday film of the evening, I’m either forced into wasting another 97 minutes of my life, or I’m going to be an asshole and passive-aggressively ask that you select some entertainment less likely to negatively impact the collective IQ in the room.
I really hate Elf.
I know – it’s a harmless family comedy, but my blood boils at its very mention. I also realize that it’s a Will Ferrell comedy, and I am not the target audience, so I can’t really judge anyone for loving it – at least, I can’t vocalize the fact that I’m harshly judging you right now for having any positive emotions for the film whatsoever, if that is indeed the case.
My strong reaction is probably related to my overall love of holiday films. I’m particularly fond of Rankin/Bass animated specials, and stories with very loose ties to the season. There are a plethora of fantastic holiday films out there, so go find a penny and scratch the underside of your old DVD or Blu-Ray of Elf like it’s a goddamn lottery ticket, and watch any of these festive classics instead.
Black Christmas (1974)
We’re going to pretend this has nothing to do with the 2006 and 2019 films of the same name.
I’ve spoken about this one before, and for the past several years this has replaced It’s A Wonderful Life as my essential Christmas viewing. There’s nothing overtly flashy about Black Christmas, but Bob Clark’s fairly simple proto-slasher film is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable horror movies I’ve encountered. Set in a sorority over the holiday season, the plot unfolds just a little differently than the less-refined slashers of the 80s. There are some notably memorable performances here, the kills are creative, and it’s shockingly funny.
Even this horror film about a stalker murdering students on a college campus is funnier than Elf. Clark would eventually revisit the holiday season with A Christmas Story (1983), which may one day end up on a list of my least favorite Christmas films.
Metropolitan (1990)
Known for his dry, witty screenplays about aimless 20-somethings with large vocabularies, Whit Stillman is a director who released a trilogy of quality films in the 90s, and then proceeded to drive his career into the ground by essentially remaking the same film over and over again, badly. Thankfully, his early films remain, and Metropolitan is his finest work. I could see many taking issue with Stillman’s writing style – every character is clearly just a slightly modified version of another Stillman character, and they all speak in the same vernacular – but the film is charming enough that I can easily overlook that.
There isn’t much of a plot to speak of – only a setup. Nick, a lower middle-class youth in New York City, shares a cab with a few strangers who mistake him for one of the many wealthy young adults in town for “Deb season,” during which the children of the failed aristocracy hold semi-luxurious Christmas parties and galas. Nick is forcefully invited to one of these parties, and simply plays along. As he becomes more involved with the group, his views on the upper class are challenged in silly and unexpected ways. It’s a film that elicits delayed laughter quite often, and sometimes fully understanding each joke requires prior knowledge of obscure history or philosophy. This is one of the few comedies that I find funnier on subsequent viewings…unlike Elf, which only becomes more painful and gruesome to sit through.
(Not Die Hard)
Die Hard is not on this list. Die Hard is still better than Elf. It is definitely a film that takes place during the holidays, and if you want to get militant about whether or not it’s a proper Christmas film, take that conversation elsewhere. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Better Watch Out (2016)
A more recent Christmas horror film on its way to iconic holiday status, Better Watch Out is a genre-bending home invasion thriller with a twist. It begins as a classic “stalking the babysitter” story, and eventually evolves into a rather twisted and bloody dark comedy. This was one of the more surprising holiday films I’ve seen in the last few years, mostly because, on the surface, it looks rather dreadful and boring.
The casting may make or break this for some people. To be more specific, your ability to become drawn into the story initially may be inversely proportional to how badly you wanted to smack the kid in M. Night Shymalan’s The Visit every single time he began “spitting sick rhymes” – and yes, his rhymes are cringe-y enough to induce illness in some audiences. In spite of this, I found both lead child actors to be surprisingly tolerable.
If you’ve grown tired of all the sugary-sweet Christmas specials of yore that audiences seem to gobble up like Will Ferrell when presented with a buffet of candy, give this cynical gem a try.
The Lodge (2019)
Now we’re getting into some real Christmas trauma. This is for everyone who believes their own family’s holiday antics couldn’t get any worse.
The Lodge is incredibly difficult to talk about without ruining several key surprises. After [spoiler event] happens, a man takes his fiancé and two children to a remote lodge for the holidays. For [spoiler reasons], the children aren’t very fond of their proto-stepmother. When their father is called away to work right before a major snowstorm, the rest of the group slowly succumbs to the terrors of isolation and the horrors of step-family.
If you live in an area that rarely sees a white Christmas, The Lodge is sure to simulate a winter chill – the kind of chill caused by one’s perception of temperature, rather than that emotionally cold and distant feeling I get while watching Elf.
Bad Santa (2003)
One of the most misrepresented holiday comedies is one you may be surprised to see on my list unless you’ve seen it recently. The advertising for Bad Santa really, really pushed this as a laugh-a-second raunchy teen comedy, where the central joke is that Billy Bob Thornton is a mean-spirited alcoholic dressed as Santa Claus. It looked as if this could have been directed by a number of faux-auteurs known for creating classless comedies in the early 2000s, but it isn’t.
Depending on your familiarity, it should be both telling and perplexing that Terry Zwigoff, director of the Thora Birch/ScarJo downer-comedy Ghost World, is the man behind Bad Santa. Tonally, the film is much closer to Ghost World than the aimlessly irreverent Judd Apatow rip-offs of the era, and it still shocks me that the crowd who tend to prefer the latter mostly seemed to enjoy this movie.
Bad Santa exudes a dry, cynical atmosphere, and most of the comedy is born of sad, empty characters that often display some over-the-top irreverence and even cruelty as a way to cope with their sad existence. This sets the film apart from its happy-go-lucky contemporaries, but it also creates an opportunity for each character to learn and grow – in other words, there are real character arcs here. I’d even go so far as to say that Bad Santa is rather sweet beneath its rough exterior, and perhaps even touching in a melancholic way.
Beyond Tomorrow (1940)
One of Christmas’s greatest public domain secrets, Beyond Tomorrow is a shockingly competent holiday love story. The title is perplexing and in no way indicative of the film’s holiday leanings – it sounds more like a science fiction adventure than a Christmas RomCom. This is likely what pushed it into obscurity, but in the last five or ten years, it’s seen a resurgence.
To be completely honest, I had to do some digging to find the name of this movie. I’ve seen it four or five times, but its name is so nondescript that it continually escapes me. Just about yearly, I inevitably Google, “Christmas movie old men dead romance comedy,” and then kick myself for forgetting the title.
Three dysfunctional but endearing old men live together in a large mansion, and after their dinner plans are spontaneously cancelled, they decide to engage in a bit of mischief. To draw in new guests, each man throws his wallet with $10 and a business card into the street. Before long, a young cowboy and a school teacher arrive on their doorstep, and the trio begin to play matchmaker.
The young couple fall in love, but their relationship is tumultuous. While on a business trip, the three men die in a plane crash. After being denied admittance into heaven, they return to earth as ghosts to repair the couple’s damaged relationship so that they can finally move on in the afterlife.
I wish films could die in plane crashes…
Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas (2014)
Saving Christmas is objectively a worse film than Elf, and yet, in a gun-to-my-head scenario, I’d pick this movie any day.
It is really, really difficult to capture what makes Saving Christmas such a captivating piece of garbage, in part because I’m not entirely sure you’ll believe me if I describe it fully. You might think that talking shit about a Christian Christmas film is probably a waste of my time, and probably serves to fuel the very fires the movie intends to stoke in the first place. This would be valid…but Kirk Cameron’s ego keeps the hate fun, and the film’s rhetoric is so bad that it could unintentionally be used as a Christian deprogramming tactic.
If you’re unfamiliar, Kirk Cameron is one of the obnoxious brats from a sitcom called Growing Pains that aired for seven seasons too long. At some point, Cameron became a cog in the Evangelical film industry’s propaganda machine, starring in a trio of movies based on the Left Behind franchise. The tagline for this – Put Christ Back In Christmas – should tell you everything you need to know about its intentions, at least in broad strokes.
Saving Christmas is barely a movie at all – it’s a careless sermon that promotes the Christian persecution complex, a perplexing alternate timeline of the origins of Christmas, and a music video based around Cameron’s own family’s holiday celebration. It’s also a rabid and direct attack on atheism and atheists. I make the distinction between the two because unlike civil discourse about religion that ends in all parties agreeing to disagree, the film goes for a very “atheists are fucking evil” approach. Around half of the film is devoted to Cameron’s Christmas party though, which is presented in a rather goofy and look-at-how-perfect-my-family-is way. Methinks Kirk doth protest too much.
Upon Saving Christmas’s release, it received scathing reviews (the coveted 0% on Rotten Tomatoes) from everyone but Christian film critics, who seemed to very strongly dislike Cameron’s Jesus-as-consumerism message, but refused to completely trash the film based on their own perception of the merits of its message. I’m aware that this is a contradictory statement, but it’s a contradictory concept.
What truly rescues this from “don’t you dare promote this” status is Cameron’s reaction to the hate. He made several public statements about how the terrible reviews were just persecution at work, and there are many allegations regarding either Kirk or his PR team artificially inflating ratings on IMDb and similar websites, and encouraging audiences to do the same. His actions were transparently exploitative and immature, and when you talk shit about Saving Christmas, a piece of him dies. Let’s keep talking, and perhaps we can be rid of this sub-intellectual child star reject once and for all.
It’s still more fun to watch than Elf.