A flurry of options: Our guide to 2021’s most intriguing holiday movies
A movie set in a hacienda that stars part of the cast of the original Brady Bunch? A campy satire full of Drag Race queens?
TV Features Jonathan Silverman
Graphic: Natalie Peeples
As far as holiday movie seasons go, 2021 is shaping up to be a corker. With over 140 new holiday movies airing across cable networks and streamers—and we’re just talking “boy meets girl at their town’s struggling holiday carnival” type stuff, not Home Sweet Home Alone—viewers and fans will have a bevy of options to choose from.
To help you separate the peppermint wheat from the hot chocolate chaff, we’ve put together a list of what we think are the most intriguing, off-the-wall, and genre-bending holiday movies airing this year. We’re talking hacienda-set romps starring the cast of The Brady Bunch, a RuPaul produced satire that features dozens of Drag Race queens, and Lifetime’s first lesbian-centric holiday film. These are the movies that we’d take time out of our busy ho-ho-holiday schedules for, so crack open a new roll of wrapping paper and enjoy.
17 Comments
I mean, the Kelsey Grammar and Bruce Campbell movies look decent so far…Also:
I’ve compiled a series of slides depicting the highlights of your career.
I think a very tiny list of movies that are actually intriguing would suffice.
Sorry, but what happened to 8 Bit Christmas ? Saw it over Thanksgiving, and while its its doesn’t have A Christmas Story epicness, it’s pretty damn close.
I really tried with 8-bit, and just couldn’t get through the first 30 minutes, I will have to try again…
Bruce Campbell is the only reason to watch any of these movies! 140 new X-mas movies, good lord.
181 lol
Did people realize Ashley Williams and Kimberley Williams-Paisley were real-life sisters? I did not. They are co-starring in a pair of Christmas movies for Hallmark https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/sister-swap-ashley-williams-heavy-hand-every-aspect-new-hallmark-christmas-movies.html/
A Castle For Christmas sounds like a much-less-good version of I Know Where I’m Going, so I may just rewatch that instead.
I don’t know that one, I will have to check it out.
You can find I Know Where I’m Going on Youtube – it came out in 1945. I’d also recommend Whisky Galore! and The Maggie. Sometimes, the older films about Scotland are far superior to the shite Netflix and the like ejaculate onto your screen.
How much do I want to keep Bruce Campbell employed?
No to anything with John Schneider since his slide into Trumpism, can’t look past it.
I sat through Single All the Way and somehow didn’t come out the other end a complete idiot. Who read this and thought it would be a good idea? I guess Netflix – which clearly doesn’t care about its own integrity given its apparent collective 2% on RottenTomatoes – let it slide since it was apparently produced by TaskRabbit. You could play a drinking game with all the product placement in this movie if you wouldn’t be drunk within the first five minutes. I guess Jennifer Coolidge needed a new car, because nothing else explains why she’d stoop to this level. Some movies are so bad they’re good. This isn’t one of them. Barely watchable and immediately forgettable is the best way to describe it. Embarrassing for everyone in it is another. The only likable character is the MacGuffin, and the rest of these insufferable yuppies deserve each other.
It was deeply, deeply bad and everyone involved deserved better. I want no more movies where two best friends are just meant to be, or where two gay people are meant to be simply because they are both gay, ugh!
As your resident Bitchy Gay Scot, allow me to tell you this: A Castle for Christmas is the sort of hormonal, gash-frothing bullshit that middle-aged hausfraus in the USA just lap up (like a flock of Karens to a pool of warm chardonnay, bitches). It has been roundly, mercilessly and viciously mocked by Scottish Twitter and for good reason. It has all the nasty wee cliches you Yanks want in a film about Scotland: shite romantic plot, shite acting, shite costumes, shitey wee cutesy villagers (god fucking forbid you morbidly-obese sacks of sadness would ever dream of setting a film in a Scottish city! Crivvens!), a shitey wee subplot about a shitey wee authoress who decides to bastardise her totally and completely unrealistic Scottish “laird”’s family history to relaunch her shitey wee career as a scribbler of “historical romance” (aka – Shite Romance fiction – see Outlander for more details). BTW – if the diseased potheads at Netflix wanted to make Elwes character half-way realistic, they would have given him an English accent, as there are fuck-all lairds in Scotland who speak with a…what sort of accent was he trying for? Brigadoon via Take The High Road? Point is this: he was shite, the film was shite, Netflix are also shite. It was fucking shite.Now for something completely different.I actually enjoyed watching Single All The Way. Shock, I know. But it was nice watching an LGBT-oriented film where one of the leads doesn’t die a miserable death so as to appease the breeder, sorry, heterosexual expectations that all gays die alone or some crap like that. It was also scarily one of those very rare beasts: a rom-com where the kids aren’t irritating little pustules of infected pus that you don’t want to set on fire all the time they’re on-screen. Also, Jennifer Coolidge and Kathy Najimy? As for the Christmas House: kill it with fire!I’ll finish off with saying this: whoever did Peter Gallagher’s latest round of surgery should be locked in a darkened cellar. Jesus shitty Christ in the manger, but he looks puckered…
Single All the Way was complete trash and everyone involved deserved better. The “best friends secretly are in love but even they don’t know it” is so deeply cliched it makes me scream and on behalf of every gay person just because someone else is also gay doesn’t mean we want to date them, pushing that premise in the movie was so annoying as to be nearly offensive. SKIP. IT!