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What
are my 10 Alternate Christmas Movies? Glad you asked! With no further
ado, and in no particular order of rank –
1: Die
Hard – YES Die Hard. Big Bruce Willis way back when he had hair and the franchise
didn't suck the bottom of a fish tank. This is perhaps my all-time
favorite Christmas movie. There's drama, there's action, there's
suspense and terror – this movie has it all! Also it is perhaps one
of the best written screenplays ever, I kid you not. Just watch it,
every bit of dialog or action in the beginning of the movie comes back full
circle – the taking off the shoes – he has to run over floor of
broken glass. I could go on and on about the awesomeness that is Die
Hard but I think I'd lose you so I better get back to it.
2:
Batman Returns – No, not the Dark Knight Rises
– as much as that movie tried to be as awesome as this one – it
just wasn't. No this one has the REAL Batman - Michael Keaton
sporting a new Bat-Suit, a car that looks the same but can do a whole
lot more, at Bat-Boat along with Danny DeVito as the Penguin,
Christopher Walken being Christopher Walken with big spiky white
hair, and best of all Michelle Pfeiffer as the best Catwoman to grace
the big screen – although Lee Meriweather is still pretty damn
amazing 47 years later. You get all these elements and you also have
a Christmas movie on top of it! I remember it being intense for kids
but then again these days you see parents bringing five year old kids
to Man of Steel who
seemed to love every minute of the intense mass destruction. So, if
your kid is cool seeing an entire city wiped out, your little one can
handle this.
3: Black Christmas (1974) – This one should be
fairly obvious given that it has “Christmas” in the
name, however the tragedy of
this title is that most people either A: don't know it exists, or B:
they dismiss it entirely or C: they accidentally pick up the shitty
remake from 2006 and think
they saw the real deal. Either A, B, or C – those are huge
mistakes. This little gem from 1974 is a true holiday horror movie
classic. Before Halloween, before Friday the 13th,
this was the movie that made the idea of an innocuous, innocent,
family-fun holiday terrifying. It features an outstanding cast in
Olivia Hussy, Keir Dullea, A pre-Superman Margot Kidder, and the
always bad ass awesome John Saxon at the whim of a serial killer that
is slowly picking off coeds on a college campus during the titular
holiday. Why is this one so scary to me? You never actually “see”
the killer! Only his menacing voice over the telephone. Plus it's
directed by Bob Clark – yes, that Bob Clark, the director of A
Christmas Story!
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6:
Prometheus – Yes, that Prometheus!
The pseudo-prequel to Alien
is in fact a Christmas movie. While this movie has taken its
beatings for its various plot holes and the depiction of its
supposedly brilliant scientist characters who make grand leaps of
logic and simply look left to find the thing they traveled light
years to find – however, I dig it. While not the best sci-fi film
ever made, it is one that is made up of big ideas that are too abstract to give a definitive answer to. Personally, I'd rather have
a movie that has a lot of big ideas that raises a lot of interesting
questions and makes no attempt to answer them than to have a movie
that looks pretty but does nothing and is ultimately forgettable.
Plus this one also brings director Ridley Scott back to the genre he
helped define in Alien
and Blade Runner. It's
creepy, it's well directed, the effects are awesome, and the use of
3D is incredible! The “Med-Pod” scene alone makes owning a 3D TV
set worth the sticker price.
7: The Searchers – While as of
this writing I don't recall it actually taking place over Christmas –
it covers pretty much every holiday during it's 2 hour run time as it
features John Wayne tracking down his kidnapped niece and the
renegade Indian Chief Scar who took her. The movie spans several
years as Wayne's character Ethan and his 1/8 Indian nephew Martin
literally hunt for their missing relative. The passage of time is
marked by Ethan and Martin returning home empty handed only to see
the people they've left behind grow older and progress without them.
This John Ford classic western examines so many themes from the
rampant racism of the era to the role of women in the family, to the
role of men in the family with a deft touch that you rarely notice
the lessons being learned by the characters. And that is perhaps why
this movie makes the list. Like such classics as It's A
Wonderful Life, this is a movie
that features a whole cast of characters who start the movie one way
and end it changed for the better. It counts as a Christmas movie in
my book – if for no other reason than it gives me another excuse to
put this in my blu-ray player.
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That is it ladies, gents, and germs! Sorry I've been away from you all for so long – I got really busy with the new job editing movies and writing press releases, but I'm hoping to get back to a regular thing with this. Probably not daily, but weekly should be possible! Go slow out there, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays!