December 18, 2018

A plucky copyeditor at BuzzFake has Big Dreams™ of being a struggling journalist and snags an assignment covering the coronation of the elusive heir to the Aldovian throne. (It’s in British-occupied Continental Europe, bordering Belgravia, Genovia, and Activia.) She cons her way into the palace by Yes And-ing the royal butler and is assumed to be the new tutor of Emily, a mischievous and lonely mashup of Mary and Colin from The Secret Garden. After Teach for Aldovia earns the affection of this snooty disabled waif by calling her “brave” (UGHGHGHHGHG), Prince-To-Be notices her and acknowledges her existence by shaving the matted bear rug off his face and acting like a responsible adult. She tries to dig up some Hot Goss for her story and in a matter of 10 seconds, rides a horse for the first time, is bucked off and ditched by said horse, becomes stranded in the snowy woods, is menaced by a GODDAMN WOLF, and sits her ass down to accept her absurd fate. Thankfully Prince Charm-ish is always packing a WWI pistol to shoo away predators and scoops her up onto his horse just in time. Swoon?

While they decompress in his Royal Secluded Cabin, they Bond Over Whiskey until he leaves the room for Pretend Reasons, which gives her time to rummage through his desk and find a hidden lever which pops open a hidden drawer in which is a hidden folder with POTENTIALLY MONARCHY-DESTABILIZING DOCUMENTS revealing that the Prince was adopted. She conceals this shocking scoop and agonizes over whether to ruin this country by cementing her career with TMZfeed. But she doesn’t need to, because Triflin-Ass Cousin In Law is making a play for the crown himself by dropping this bombshell on Coronationmas, during the “speak now or forever hold your peace” part of the ceremony, which I do not remember from “The Crown” but maybe it was a deleted scene. After what feels like five document-revelation scenes, our heroine uses her Investigative Reporting skills to riddle out a weird poem and find a constitutional amendment tucked away in a hugely tacky Christmas ornament. Good thing they didn’t ever change up the Royal Ornaments year to year. If Melania was in charge of decorating this story wouldn’t have had a happy ending. He gets to be king and a year later he tracks down The Girl Who Kicked the Acorn’s Nest working in her dad’s diner and proposes to her. Reminder: in past 370 days they’ve spent a combined 12 hours together. I was fast asleep by this point but I assume she said yes because “A Christmas Prince 2: The Royal Wedding” started up on autoplay right after.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️ 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️ 5/5 elf ears. (Heavy whims expected in the next 90 minutes across Fantasy Europe.)
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨✨✨✨5/5 twinkly lights. (Shot on location in an actual castle with minimal CGI? Hell yeah!)
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🙃🙃🙃 4/5 faceplants. (Our Mary Sue does a very silly curtsy, wears Chucks to the coronation, and shatters a priceless Ming vase within her first 120 seconds of being inside a goddamn castle.)
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅🎅4/5 Santa hats. (It’s a Euro-Christmas so it’s full of jellied meats and Christmas trees, although Father St. Nicholas Claus is conspicuously absent.)
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?: 🔔🔔 2/5 silver bells. (Carried mostly by the Netflix bumper music.)
REASON FOR SEASON: The fragility of constitutional monarchies using acorn-based legislative scavenger hunts! 🌰

December 17, 2018

I bumped this to the top of our list after reading a friend’s incredulous post about it (thank you Caroline Keough Fulford!). One thing we love here at the Stocks, Nealon, & Chicken Think Tank is every film representation of The South/Appalachia, because we learn so much about the places we grew up! For example, this story is set in that part of eastern Tennessee where a single layer of flannel (untouched by farm dirt) is plenty warm enough for December weather. A headstrong young woman manages her family’s…pie farm? Maybe “manage” is a generous term because she is genuinely gobsmacked to learn their family is $67,000 underwater on their property and business, with 30 days to pay what must be decades worth of funds lost to mismanagement and keeping that mid-80s F-150 in tip-top shape. Somehow, the old man’s not worried, because he’s just been throwing out the collection letters as soon as they come. This logic, coupled with his faith, keeps him from bearing the emotional burden of impending foreclosure that the women in the house certainly carry. After all, he’s pretty sure “a child was born in that manger” (gesturing to the small nativity next to model train). Huh?

Oh yeah, we almost forgot the “love” “story”. An erstwhile woulda-been country phenom, Scruffy McDenim, returns to his hometown for redemption after his budding Nashville career tanks when he makes a complete ass of himself in a TV dance show. Our heroine, holding an ironclad grudge against him for standing her up at junior prom two decades ago, tells him he can enjoy their country hospitality (a barn cot) for $5000/mo –a good deal in San Francisco! He clearly attended the same Tennessee public school as her because he’s also awful at math and says yes to this arrangement, coughing up tens of thousands of dollars to her in the hopes of some hayloft whoopie. The money ain’t enough, and Boss Hog Developer pressures the banks to demand immediate collection to force her out in time for him to build a new Dollywood-style attraction. But Garth Bland decides to have a Christmas concert and charge every blue-collar resident in town $20 a ticket to attend. EVEN STILL, it takes a buyer from the local Piggly Wiggly or something to actually bring them up on cash enough to pay off their debts just hours before their Christmas deadline. Maybe if they just focused more on, ya know, doing farm, they could have had this same outcome months ago. But all’s well that ends well right? Thank ya Baby Jesus!

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️ 0/5 elf ears. (I reckon they ain’t got none of that, what with the pie crop blight this year. Also my dog went to jail and my tractor left me.)
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨1/5 twinkly lights. (Nary a snowflake in these thar hills. I guess Town puts up some lights somewhere? And there were a couple incidental horses. But not like, Christmas horses.)
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🙃 2/5 faceplants. (Skinny Chesney’s dance moves are more awkward than Brad Paisley’s “Accidental Racist”!)
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅3/5 Santa hats. (Finally, someone’s putting the manger back in Christmas.)
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?: 🔔 1/5 silver bells. (It was nice to hear contemporary Christian praise music arrangements of Christmas carols. Just kidding, give me that old-time religion.)
REASON FOR SEASON: QuickBooks! 💹💸

December 16, 2018

It’s Liar Liar: Special Christmas Unit! A political power couple in NYC is preparing for a Christmas at his parent’s place where they’ll announce his candidacy for Mayor. But in her rush to get the latest it-toy, a sentient soccer ball powered by Alexa™, she tells some big lies to a kid in front of Santa. Santa, not appreciating this Kellyanne Conway-level deception, curses our plucky heroine to only tell the truth. Now she must Meet the Parents and manage her man’s nascent campaign appointments without being able to pretend they are good people with nice taste and hobbies. But! In a feminist twist, this Huma Abedin discovers how liberating it is to be able to tell people exactly how she feels, especially when it comes to her appetite (the last pancake is finally hers!) and telling shady politicians that they’re straight trash. Even after the curse is lifted by Gucci Santa, Bland Paul still loves her enough to throw a tacky Christmas proposal at her, which – whoa, holy crap – she REJECTS?! Wait that can’t be right. No it is! She does not say yes! She now makes choices based on what’s best for her – which includes running for City Council herself! Hot damn it’s a Christmas miracle! This is 100% the least bad one we’ve watched! Hell, I’d watch it again!

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️ 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️ 3/5 elf ears. (It’s not weird to her that Santa is real and laid a hex on her. Fun!)
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨✨3/5 twinkly lights. (The very nice upstate manor has well-decked halls, and the wardrobe is legit wealth.)
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🙃 2/5 faceplants. (The movie starts to break bad with Our Girl doing an impromptu standup act…I’m sure the writers though it was funny but these jokes don’t land. They don’t even take off.)
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅5/5 Santa hats. (All yr fave characters are there: Santa, snow, trees, saucy Grandma, hot brother…)
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?: 🔔🚫 0/5 silver bells. (Godawful. Plug ears. Sounds like an IHeartRadio original soundtrack.)
REASON FOR SEASON: Honesty! 🙊

December 16, 2018

Every wonder what Shannon Doherty has been up to ten years ago? Apparently she was training to be a world-class jewelry thief. After pulling off a Mission: Impossible-style heist of the world’s most plasticky diamond, the cops close in on Shannon and her mentor, Canadian Denzel Washington. She has to flee town because she doesn’t know how to put on a balaclava correctly, which is okay because just then, her sister calls and asks for her help in their home town of Cliché. Apparently kid sister and hubsand decided to go to the Bahamas for an ill-timed, peak-hurricane-season vacation without taking their kids (…rude) and now they’re trapped by a hurricane (WHY DO THEY ALWAYS TRAVEL JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS?!). Only Aunt Charmed can fill in to look after their two kids at Christmas, which makes for a good hideout also and a prime opportunity to score again (Amazon orderers be warned: 90210-Ninja is coming for your Sonicares!). In the end she discovers that her little town is a great place to be after all, especially after reconnecting with her old flame, the town sheriff who covers for her when the Feds finally corner her.

There’s a crucial pickpocket “twist” that the whole movie hinges on but it’s telegraphed so clumsily that there isn’t even a mild payoff. The jokes are weak, the production/hair/scenes are cheap, and the acting is so poor that Rob Schneider would pass on the script. Worst of all though, this movie was so dreadfully boring. Not gonna lie y’all, we put this movie on thinking it might be a corny “The Pacifier”-type picture but in the end we would have had more fun Black Friday shopping at Wal-Mart.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️ 🧝‍♂️ 2/5 elf ears. (The movie gets some points for sleight of hand tricks and playground-level spy moves.)
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨1/5 twinkly lights. (One sparkle, for the crappy fake diamond presumably sourced from JoAnn Fabrics. Its four C’s are probably “Cheap”, “Crappy”, “made in China”, and “Coupon for 40% off all beads and rhinestones”)
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🙃 2/5 faceplants. (There’s some precocious child acting and a bumbling Vinny the Fence-type.)
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅1/5 Santa hats. (On the movie poster Shannon Doherty’s Santa hat is clearly photoshopped on her head, which about sums it up.)
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?: 🔔🚫 0/5 silver bells. (The generic James Bond-themed music could’ve used some sleigh bells.)
REASON FOR SEASON: Jewels! 💎

*We fell into a coma after Santa’s Boot Camp and got behind on these very important reviews so we’ll double up until we’re back on schedule. YOU’RE WELCOME.

December 11, 2018

This straight-to-DVD/R iMovie project asks the age-old question: If you’re Santa and your elves go on strike, what do you do? All that merry doesn’t make itself! Time to kidnap some children and force them into slavery on your plantation! I wish this was a comedic exaggeration but it’s actually the actual plot of this movie. It’s a surprisingly accurate portrayal of grassroots union organizing and direct action by 7-year-old elves (one of whom, a Young Yzma type, is legit good enough to go Disney Channel Original!), though unfortunately it goes off the rails when said comrades bully the enslaved teenagers brought in as involuntary scabs.

Shot on location in a greater Atlanta church all-purpose room, the back lot of pastor Keith’s barn, and exteriors of the Garden Center, in what had to be a demanding one-day, one-take-only shoot, the literal slaves are brainwashed into thinking they’re on the Naughty list to accept their new reality. But then Emo Greaser and Snitchin’ Carlton hatch a plan to escape on Santa’s sleigh. It fails, and Santa rage-quits Christmas, leading the elves to ally themselves with the slaves and save Christmas their own damn selves. The takeaway here isn’t that Santa needed to learn a lesson about worker’s rights, but that Christmas must go on even if it means you have to steal children, endanger yourself, and work for free. In case the message isn’t clear to viewers, Santa busts through famous brother Eric Roberts’ Santa riffs (…why?) during the credits to drive home the logline of the movie: be good and don’t be a teenager with any visible feelings or else you’ll get 12 Years an Elf’d.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🚫 0/5 elf ears. (None here. Literal slavery! They say those words! And why is it called Santa Boot Camp??)
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨🚫 0/5 twinkly lights. (It was not a good time of year to shoot on location in Atlanta suburbs.)
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🚫 0/5 faceplants. (For a movie with this many kids, there’s a deep lack of humor here.)
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅3/5 Santa hats. (I guess there’s elves and Santa and stuff, but Santa is a straight up Big Daddy plantation owner. Also, there’s no references to Jesus but there is a whole conversation about Jews?)
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?: 🔔🚫 0/5 silver bells. (Was there music? It was basically Texas Chainsaw Massacre)
REASON FOR SEASON: Slavery! ⛓ (WAIT! Is this a deep allegory to the Fritz Lang film Metropolis?…Nah.)

Thanks to our friends for screening this disaster with us! You’ve joined our nightmare now.

December 10, 2018

To score a sweet necklace she likes, a woman agrees to walk her neighbor’s dog even though she’s not really a dog person, and even though she’s impossibly wealthy. At a perfectly adequate – shabby, even – dog park, she meets a MRA-type dog walker who’s also in vet school and naturally has a shit ton of down time to walk old people’s dogs for free. He relentlessly negs her and says she’s not a Real Dog Girl, and then accuses her of being a spy. A spy?! Yep, it turns out that the dog park is about to be replaced by a luxury spa, so the four people who frequent the park will have to find another place to carry their dogs around. And the developer responsible? The husband of the neighbor of the girl! Whose dog she’s been walking THIS WHOLE TIME! In order to prove herself to the Nice Guy, she helps him throw a complete failure of a Save the Park Christmas Party. It’s never explained how this will save the park if it succeeds, but that’s not important, because zero people attend this non-event. But in the end, capitalist businessman relents after the main character shows him a new way: sticking a high-end coffee joint smack in the middle of the dog park and conning the area dog lovers out of every last pumpkin-spiced cent. Overlooking the truly dreadful acting and non-plot, this is by far the most misogynistic Christmas movie we’ve watched yet. DVM-to-be Slack Efron insults every element of Main Girl’s personality until her self-esteem is so shot she agrees to go out with him. Did Jordan Peterson write this garbage pile of a script? This was horrible. I almost want to watch Snow again. Please, send death.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🚫 0/5 elf ears. (There’s dogs, but not a single trick or fun dog thing.)
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨🚫 0/5 twinkly lights. (It was not a good time of year to shoot on location in Texas suburbs.)
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🚫 0/5 faceplants. (Dogs can’t be adorkable. They’re dogs.)
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅1/5 Santa hats. (They got tangled up in a string of lights, like a couple of goddamn idiots.)
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?: 🔔 1/5 silver bells. (Highlights include: the brother air-guitaring “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”. That’s it.)
REASON FOR SEASON: Gentrification! 🏗 (Thought I was gonna say dogs, didncha.)

December 9, 2018

Just when (your favorite ’07 pop singer) Christina Milian is tired of her joyful, chaotic, multiethnic Brooklyn family, a deliveryman from Enchanted Parcel Service brings her a tacky snow globe. Surprise! This isn’t just a plain old musical snow globe, it’s one of those old-fashioned ones that magically transports you inside its snowy village. You know, that kind. Her parent have been worried that she’ll soon be a 25-year-old spinster, so of course she falls for a dunderheaded baby man with a vacant stare and no smize. Either she is an expert-level troll who is deeply committed to petty family spite games, or her type is the George of the Jungle-meets-Express for Men mannequins. Natch, her Gentleboy Caller escapes the globe just as she’s getting familiar with an Earth-based man, leading to some fun polyamory shaming from her mother, Dr. Jennifer Melfi. After some zany first-time-in-the-mall hijinks with a Paul Blart type (why is this a trope?), she accidentally gets trapped in Snow World herself where she suddenly realizes how imperfect this “perfect” world is after all (ie: it’s hella white). Fortunately she’s freed from the sunken place after approx. 5 min by a strangely self-aware NPC who conjures the deliveryman to send her back to Earth in a snow globe modeled after her own apartment, just in time for Christmas dinner. She chooses real-life boyfriend over her Second Life boyfriend and he goes back to shoveling snow endlessly in a glass eternity. This movie was surprisingly okay and had some funny moments! Maybe it wasn’t so baOH MY GOD THEY STUFFED THE CHRISTMAS GOOSE WITH LASAGNA.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️5/5 elf ears. (There was literal walking in a winter wonderland.)
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨✨3/5 twinkly lights. (The snow globe set was so small that it was almost a bottle episode. I have to feel bad for the extras forced to walk in circles for hours.)
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🙃🙃3/5 faceplants. (The Adorkability in this movie is carried solely by the snow globe boyfriend, that untroubled quasi-human equivalent of all-purpose flour.)
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅5/5 Santa hats. (You can’t get these magical snow globes on Flag Day, baby!)
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?: 🔔🔔🔔 3/5 silver bells. (Original Christmas music by Christina Milian will make you say “now THAT’S what I call background!”)
REASON FOR SEASON: Family👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 !

December 8, 2018

CW: childhood cancer, death

Christmas too jolly for you? Try this based-on-a-true-downer of Christian music originals and CANCER. A grown-up DJ Tanner and Bland Husband are so busy with their job/MBA program and children that it’s, like, majorly stressing everyone out. It’s Halloween, so Deej takes the kids trick-or-treating (at about 2 pm, by the look of it) where they encounter some folks putting up Christmas decorations on a house. They’re all “bwah?” until one of the nice ladies gives DJ a card and tells her to read the blog. Cut to: Candace Cameron at a laptop, sucked into this blog like it’s HP slashfic circa 2002 (RIP). And then we watch an entire movie about a mom, dad, and baby Dax, diagnosed with leukemia at age 3 and it’s all very sad and emotionally stirring as they move into a room at St. Jude’s and meet the other Cancer Mommies and offer each other shoulder pats and dank nugs of wisdom like “cherish every moment”. Dax’s cancer doesn’t respond to treatment and he isn’t gonna make it to the new year (original song: “One Last Christmas”, yikes), so they go home…only to find the neighbors have created a Christmasween miracle! Cut back to: DJ Tanner getting her laptop soggy with tears and vowing to her husband to change everything about their family. She’s spent the entire day not doing her job or parenting her children thanks to this gripping mommy blog. So she goes over to join the festive/funerary crowd and thanks the mom she hasn’t actually met for saving her family (original song: “The Heart of Christmas”). I’m still not sure why we needed the additional layer of blog-reader to tell this story fully.

Guys, real talk, I find this genre of Munchausen-by-proxy-by-proxy deeply distasteful and exploitative. It feels icky to watch a kid die. I’m sure there are folks out there who find comfort seeing struggles similar to their own in a movie, but is it actually reflective of anyone’s experience? This family doesn’t have to worry about going broke paying medical bills (thanks St. Jude’s), they’re financially stable enough to not work for 18 months, they have a big social support system both at the hospital in Memphis and back home in (a very Californic-looking) Illinois, neither of them have mental/physical health issues that make it difficult to live in a hospital with their sick kid for 18 months, and obviously, they’re white, so no problems being believed or attended to by the doctors. Seriously, ick.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🚫 0/5 elf ears. (So much child death in Foon.)
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨1/5 twinkly lights. (The neighbors do a very nice job decking the halls and rounding up candles for “Silent Night”, but nary a twinkle elsewhere.)
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🚫 0/5 faceplants. (You don’t see any of that here.)
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅1/5 Santa hats. (They have a nice impromptu Christmas Eve service outside at the end…but it’s not even real Christmas.)
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?: 🔔🔔🔔 3/5 silver bells. (I mentioned the Christian contemporary originals, right?)
REASON FOR SEASON: Cancer blogs.🧸

December 7, 2018

A Valley Girl schemes to get out of Christmas with her boring family but when she meets a mall Santa in a midlife crisis, it kicks off enough makeover montages and Claus Magic to finally teach her the true meaning of Christmas. If you want to watch something deeply horrible, well, you should watch “Snow”*, because this one was Pretty OK! Self-awareness goes a long way in this genre, so the chuckleheaded dialogue and cornball B-plot about a tyrannical mall cop actually made me expel slightly more air out of my nose than usual instead of making me stab candy canes deep into my earballs. If you’ve been following this series so far you know just how strong an endorsement that is. The clear best part is George Hamilton as Santa. St Nick, the Gay Blade, looks like a real ass movie star next to all these peasants. If that’s not enough of a draw, this film also features:

– Santa’s New Look montage (Fashion show! Fashion show! Fashion show at lunch!)
– Santa’s New Hardbody exercise and troublingly rapid weight loss montage (to “I’m Coming Out”, no less)
– Santa getting to “Pretty Woman” a rude store employee
– A Paul Blart Type who gets not one, but TWO cheeseburgers to the back of the head and vows to ban the Valley Girl from the mall FOREVER
– Santa’s complex system of “Bewitched”-style facial magic gestures (could double as baseball hand signals)

He and Valley Girl teach each other valuable lessons about family, fashion, fitness, and flying around in a new model T-bird instead of a janky old ungulate-drawn sled. Everyone wins, except for the mall cop, who gets what he deserves – which, inexplicably, is a gang of Malibu’s Most Wanted pelting him with a quantity of cheeseburgers!

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️5/5 elf ears. (Santa tugs his ears with sound effects to teleport down the chimney!)
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨1/5 twinkly lights. (It’s SoCal so no snow and no charming lights, tree displays, or weird nativities.)
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🚫 0/5 faceplants. (Characters are pretty possessed of themselves.)
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅5/5 Santa hats. (Alternate title: Santa’s Got a Brand New Bag.)
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?: 🔔🔔 2/5 silver bells. (The opening song was the original abomination “Too Cool for Christmas” and the primary motif was identical to the “All Things Considered” theme.)
REASON FOR SEASON: 💄💪🏻🛍️ The glow-up!

*Note: Do not watch “Snow”.

December 6, 2018

Set in SoCal, “Snow” (which is NOWHERE TO BE FOUND ALL MOVIE LONG) follows the disparate yet overlapping tales of 1. a pleasant zookeeper, 2. a big game hunter, 3. a 7-yr-old Kevin Hart and other denizens of a fun boarding house, and 4. Ed, from the then soon-to-be-canceled show “Ed”, as an excruciatingly awkward, dead-eyed, newly-minted Santa. The big game hunter (Howard Hamlin from “Better Call Saul”, wow) takes a break from sexually harassing women to poach a reindeer up in the “North Pole-Adjacent” hinterlands, leading Santa to stage a zoobreak, disguised as a functioning human person. They don’t even go into the zoo’s extremely unethical accessioning policies, but don’t get me started.

This movie feels like when adults act out stories kids write, except that’s charming and this is relentlessly awful in so many ways. This movie needs to go on an apology tour. Somehow, the reindeer – who feature prominently in the stupid, stupid plot – are depicted through both bad CGI *and* bad puppetry. At a crucial scene where our…???protagonists?? need to pursue an escaped flying reindeer (you know, Santa’s favorite reindeer, Buddy), instead of driving themselves, they force the only black woman in the room to do it for them after throwing a bowl of popcorn into her face. Also, new Santa canon introduced in this movie: even though he still uses the sleigh and 8 reindeer (“7 reindeer can’t pull the sleigh by themselves!”), he also has Mirror Teleportation. It’s never explained why the reindeer and sleigh are still an integral part of the system. We could go on – but we are so ready to forget this transgression of a TV movie.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️5/5 elf ears. (They pull out all the stops! As in, stooooooop please god stop stop stop)
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨✨✨✨5/5 twinkly lights. (Pretty festively decked out, even without snow.)
ADORKABILITY: 🙃0/5 faceplants. (Adorkability is contingent on characters possessing human-like traits and these are reptile people for SURE)
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅5/5 Santa hats. (It’s Santa and his draft animals.)
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?: 🔔1/5 silver bells. (Practically no music. An old lady lip-syncs at some point.)
REASON FOR SEASON: 🦌Animals???