As we head into this holiday season, a plethora of movies have started appearing across every streaming and television platform. While it’s always fun to watch the classics like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Charlie Brown movies, it’s even better to watch the blatantly bad movies (subjectively, I suppose). Everyone knows the Hallmark movie trope, but my recommendations aren’t limited to just that network. Here are my top five favorite bad Christmas movies across the board.
- Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer
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Rotten Tomatoes: N/A (Not even good enough to be rated)
Where to Watch: Your local VHS tape or Amazon Prime Video
Playing throughout the 2000s, this became a prime Christmas movie of my childhood. Although, this being one of my personal favorites to this day doesn’t exempt it from being awful. While based on the amazing classic holiday song “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” by Elmo & Patsy, it didn’t translate very well to the screen (likely why it was a direct-to-video movie). The animation is definitely not stellar and still takes me out of the movie quite a bit but onto the plot. If you’ve ever heard the song, you basically know how this goes. It all starts with the siblings Jake and Daphne arguing over the existence of Santa on Christmas; meanwhile, their very weird cousin Mel plans to sabotage Grandma’s fruitcake recipe so she’d have to sell their store. Later, Grandma attempts to go home, and from the window, Jake witnesses the vehicular assault of his grandmother by Santa. As he clearly sounds insane, no one believes him when he goes to tell them what he saw, even though she’s missing. After a year of Grandma remaining missing (because everyone in this family apparently just gives up on finding her), Mel tries again to sell the store, but Jake is given an extra week to try to prove Grandma is alive so the store can remain with them. Of course, Jake takes the most sensible course of action and emails Santa. I still wonder how he just got through so easily, but this begins his Grandma rescue mission. This movie is honestly a classic that anyone can enjoy while also making fun of how terrible it really is.
- Falling for Christmas
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Rotten Tomatoes: 62%
Where to Watch: Netflix
Another very random pairing, Falling for Christmas stars Lindsay Lohan and Chord Overstreet from Glee, and falls right along with Christmas Inheritance on the corny plot scale. This one begins with Lohan’s character, heiress Sierra Belmont, who is offered to be “Vice President of Atmosphere” by her father for his company. This seems like a prime opportunity for her boyfriend, Tad, to take her on a dangerous ski path to propose in a prime location for views, seemingly meant to be satire but falling flat in execution. While there, she ends up falling and getting amnesia – forgetting everything, of course. Her rescuer is none other than father and inn owner Jake (Overstreet). He, seeing no other choice, lets her stay at their inn with him and his daughter. While there, it becomes pretty obvious Jake is hanging onto the inn by a thread, as he can barely keep it running. So, after obviously forming a relationship with Jake’s daughter and growing on the family, she has to help save the inn and try to get her memory back. I honestly thought that, while every single trope was there, this was a prime example of how to make it kind of work.
- Christmas Made To Order
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Rotten Tomatoes: 27%
Where to Watch: Hallmark
With the strangest crossover of this century with Jonathan Bennett (or Aaron Samuels from Mean Girls) and Alexa PenaVega (Carmen Cortez from Spy Kids), this movie is quite the ride from beginning to end. As architect Steven (Bennett) finds out he is hosting the family Christmas gathering, he decides to get some help from a “holiday coordinator” named Gretchen (PenaVega). While I went into this thinking it was an original plot for Hallmark, I was somehow so very wrong. Steven is an all-business guy, who certainly clashes a bit with Gretchen’s holiday-lover vibe. Surprising as ever, they find mutual connections and somehow end up liking each other, though you really wouldn’t know it. Though Christmas Made To Order definitely had some issues, I found them making the movie better and nearly comical.
- Noelle
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Rotten Tomatoes: 55%
Where to Watch: Disney+
While this Disney movie certainly beats the classic Hallmark romance plot, it still somehow ends up pretty tacky. What ends up being a gender-bent Fred Claus, Noelle has certainly been done before, but this time is actually entertaining (not that it doesn’t still have some pitfalls). When Santa retires and his son, Nick Kringle (Bill Hader), is meant to take over the operation, things take a turn for the worse as he just decides to up and leave them hanging. Oh, but not to worry, Noelle Kringe (Anna Kendrick) decides to take the journey to “rescue” her brother. “Where is he?,” you might ask… Phoenix, Arizona, of all places. The most interesting destination to recently gain a Santa prospect. While on her journey to get Nick back as the new Santa, Noelle meets a private investigator who she hopes will help her find her brother. Instead, he helps her realize possible Santa powers because that’s a genetic thing I guess. This was certainly a better and more elaborate example of the Disney holiday movie attempts, and it went interestingly, to say the least.
- Christmas Inheritance
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Rotten Tomatoes: 43%
Where to Watch: Netflix
One of the earlier examples of Netflix’s questionable attempts at Christmas movies, Christmas Inheritance certainly is reminiscent of the famous Hallmark-style movies, leading to an interesting plot. This movie starts by sending a rich heiress and potential future CEO Ellen Langford (Eliza Taylor) on a wild goose chase to find her father’s business partner and deliver Christmas cards to him, as per her father’s request to keep up his long-standing tradition. To do this, she has to leave her luxurious lifestyle and fiancé and go back to the small town of Snow Falls (because apparently, everyone at Netflix gave up on naming towns). However, there’s a catch: she must remain incognito and avoid letting on her status, only having $100 to complete the errand. She runs into trouble, and potential romance, with local townie Jake Collins (Jake Lacy), as typical with every cheesy enemies-to-lovers Christmas plot. All of this to deliver cards and potentially become the CEO of her family’s company, while, of course, learning some pretty blatantly obvious life lessons along the way.