Tag: black christmas

I’ve Never Seen Die Hard: OTC’s Favorite “Christmas” Movies

I think we are all aware of the meme of Die Hard as a Christmas film. The arbiters of coolness decided there was something a bit cringe about the people who claimed it as their favorite holiday film. Like, “Hey, forget It’s a Wonderful Life normies, I’m the freaky sort of dude who thinks Die Hard is the best Christmas film.” As the title of this blog entry indicates, I haven’t seen Die Hard so I am not in a place to dissect the meme but I have sympathy for people who dare deviate from the more staid Christmas canon. Half the films I consider my favorite Christmas films can charitably be considered garbage. Who am I to question anyone’s else’s tastes in or motives behind liking specific holiday films?

And here is where I completely contradict myself because I sort of wish I could launch a Christmas movie reverse class action lawsuit. Instead of a bunch of plaintiffs, it would just be me suing everyone who ever told me, “Oh my god, you have to see Love, Actually. It’s the best Christmas movie ever!” I did watch it and I was flabbergasted at how horrible it was. Snape destroys his marriage to Professor Trelawney buying jewelry for a side piece he hadn’t nailed yet. Rick Grimes dances in cringe to Dido as he pines for Elizabeth Swann. Mr. Darcy decides the capacity to speak to one’s soul mate should be optional. The movie insists that the (American) size ten woman Hugh Grant, at his most gormless, falls in love with, is fat. Liam Neeson takes romantic advice from a child, as you do. Let us not discuss the low-IQ scumbag whose entire life goal is to… have sex with every woman ever, I guess. The Laura Linney and Bill Nighy sections were the best but they cannot redeem this bizarre vehicle of second-hand embarrassment. Seriously, this movie was so shamelessly cringe that I worried my colon might prolapse before it ended.

With the above rant in mind, here’s my list of my favorite Christmas-themed films. Also, you should know that if I attempt something like this again in the future, the list will likely be different. Stability of opinion is for losers!

1. The Ref

On the surface, it looks like a dark comedy that ends with family redemption. A husband and wife leaving marital therapy are taken hostage by a thief after a failed heist. He forces them to take him to their home where they have to navigate an already tense Christmas family gathering while they pretend he is their therapist lest he kill them. The couple actually ends up repairing their fractured marriage and the genuinely bad people get what is coming to them, hurrah. Sounds like bog standard Hallmark channel stuff, right? The hook to this film is the cast. I dare you to find a Christmas movie with more distasteful leads.

The wife is played by Judy Davis, roundly considered by many in the film industry to be absolutely venomous to work with. Her condescending nastiness to River Phoenix on the aborted film, Dark Blood, made his life such a living hell that some believe it accelerated the drug abuse that led to his overdose. I cannot do justice to her awfulness in what I hope will not be a terribly long article so look it up.

The husband is played by Kevin Spacey, and I don’t even know what is happening anymore with him. Was it a witch hunt? Was he an indiscriminate horn dog and didn’t realize what a menace he was? Is he an abuser whose reputation is tarnished but evaded punishment? I don’t know, but the whole mess around him is unavoidable when mentioning he is in a film.

The robber is played by Denis Leary. People of my age and time and specific social milieu hold Denis Leary in some contempt. His outright theft of the late Bill Hicks’ comedic persona and jokes will always leave a bad taste in my mouth. When he was coming up and establishing himself, he was one of the most called-out thieves of intellectual property.

So you get to watch a harridan, a possible pervert and Denis Leary battle it out, with appearances by Christine Baranski, Vincent Pastore, and J.K. Simmons. Also prepare yourself for lots of mentions of cat piss. Good times.

2. Black Christmas

The original is the best – the remakes all make me itch because I sort of wanted everyone in the 2006 version to get killed. The more recent release was so bad I could not make it through it. The original is just amazing in a 1970s sort of way. Sorority girls don’t know the call is coming from inside the house, abortion is a plot point, Margot Kidder stole the movie (I sense she was “behaving” more than “acting” but who cares because she was hilarious), an entire police force as well as the emergency medical services accidentally leave a comatose woman alone in a house after she survived a murderous rampage, and Andrea Martin is stealth-hot, especially when she is wearing that crocheted shawl tied around her shoulders. Add in John Saxon and a police officer who has very limited exposure to blow jobs and you really can’t miss with this film.

3. Metropolitan

I saw this film when I was deep in my The Secret History/Mitford Sisters/Mary McCarthy’s The Group/Salinger-esque-fueled adulation of old money and the veneer of class. In this Whit Stillman vehicle from 1990, a group of monied college kids in Manhattan home for the holidays permit a less privileged and intellectually pompous peer, Tom, into their group. One of the kinder, intelligent young women, Audrey, has a crush on Tom, while her old friend Charlie pines for her and tries to repel Tom. Tom has eyes for another girl in this wealthy cadre, and the group attend debutante balls, have long after-parties, and engage in very aristocratic and very tame debauchery. Audrey and Tom navigate what they really want from life, I got to watch lots of preppy decor porn, and all in all it was an amusing, strangely sweet film. I would have picked Charlie, though, had I been Audrey. His self-deprecating earnestness and neuroticism were very appealing to me then and now. Repeat after me: Urban Haute Bourgeoisie.

4. Scrooged

You cannot convince me that the scenes where the Ghost of Christmas Present, played by Carol Kane, runs Bill Murray through the wringer are not some of the funniest scenes in cinema. This is just an hilarious retelling of The Christmas Carol, with David Johansen, Karen Allen, and Bobcat Goldthwait. Aside from being a film that has both Robert Mitchum and the Solid Gold Dancers in it, the movie brings little new to the Christmas table, but it’s funny, sentimental and I have a strong and enduring crush on Bobcat, so this one may only appeal to me. Still, give it a look.

5. In Bruges

Not sure if this is a dark comedy or a thriller with some funny moments, but this film is a Christmas gem. Colin Farrell plays a bumbling gangster who made such a huge mistake that his boss, Ralph Fiennes, wants him killed but also wants him to have a nice time before he is executed. So he sends him to Bruges, Belgium with Brendan Gleeson, who is told to show the doomed young man a good time before he kills him. Half the reason to watch this film is to take in how beautiful Bruges is during the holidays and to hear Ralph Fiennes shout, “You’re an inanimate fucking object!”

6. Bad Santa

Mr OTC loves this film and I quite like it, too. Billy Bob Thornton plays a dissolute Santa who, along with a dwarf who plays an elf, robs malls.  Serving as a mall Santa permits him to case department stores for huge Christmas Eve heists. With police sniffing out his motel room, Thornton inveigles his way into the home of a bullied kid who lives with his senile grandmother while his father is in prison. The film cast includes the late John Ritter, Cloris Leachman, and Bernie Mac, as well as the still-living mom from The Gilmore Girls. Bernie Mac was the scene-stealer in this film.

7. Inside

Part of the French New Wave of horror, this is a tense, upsetting film that is pretty tight and well-executed, and included an ending that I both hated but concede was the best way for the movie to end. Sarah, a pregnant widow, is home alone on Christmas Eve, preparing for her induction on Christmas day. However, a woman breaks into her home in an attempt to kill her and take the baby she is carrying, and Sarah does all she can to save herself and her unborn child. It’s a grim, gripping, bloody film and one of the few “Christmas” films I watch year-round. I know there has been an American remake but I find artsy European horror translates poorly when under the control of Americans. I use Funny Games and The Vanishing as examples. Just stick to the original with this one.

8. ATM

Boy who screwed over investors meets girl at office Christmas party. Girl accepts ride home. Boy’s jackass friend demands a ride too, plus a stop at an ATM so he can get money for some post-party snacks. Little do they know the ATM kiosk they visit is the hub of a murderous madman’s midnight antics and they have to find a way to get help or escape. It’s a pretty nice, claustrophobic little horror film but it also makes no sense in a “how on earth could anyone pull that off and why would they bother in the first place” sort of way, so don’t overthink it.

9. P2

An executive who works in a New York high rise is stalked by one of the building’s security guards and taken hostage on Christmas Eve. It brings little new to the table yet manages to be a very tense film. Wes Bentley, who is in real life a bit of a lunatic, plays the demented, lovelorn guard to perfection. I enjoyed his performance so much I began to root for him in a weird kind of way, even as I felt the tension as the heroine engaged in absolute mayhem to save herself.*

 

10. Christmas Evil

John Waters considers this his favorite Christmas movie. It’s the story of a kid who accidentally sees his dad, dressed as Santa, engage in what Joe Bob Briggs would call “aardvarking” with his mom, and it ruins him. He grows up to become obsessed with Christmas and human goodness, manages a toy factory, and keeps his own list of naughty and nice children. I’ll let John Waters explain the rest:

He breaks into people’s houses on Christmas Eve and wedges his fat ass down the chimney to deliver presents. The parents freak out and try to kill him but the kids save him and at the end he takes off on his sleigh.

Except his sleigh is a van, he gives away tons of gifts to orphans, kills an evil capitalist, crashes a Christmas party at a bar that is strangely full of kids and absolutely wrecks his brother’s life forever. This is not a film that attempts to be funny, though some think it is a comedy because of Waters’ synopsis. It’s actually a film about the relentless corruption of innocence and the way that the sacred is made profane though the pursuit of profit. But there are moments so ridiculous that keep it from being a pathos-laden slog. It’s serious but over-the-top, the character with principles is the villain, and Christmas has never before been this grimy.

Tell me about your favorite Christmas films. Do you want to ruin my day and explain why Love, Actually is a masterpiece? Can you explain why Terrifier 3 was so awful? What movie do you watch every year at Christmas?Share away, my friends!

 

*Can currently be watched for free on Amazon Prime Movie.

Oddtober 2024: The Melancholy Nostalgia of Rotary Phones in Horror Movies

Rotary phones. This whole entry came about because of the black rotary phone on Laurie’s chest of drawers in John Carpenter’s Halloween.

Lately I’ve found myself focusing on phones in older horror movies. The black rotary phone in Black Christmas that delivers deranged phone calls from a psycho killer to the helpless sorority girls. The white princess phone on the bedside table of the protagonist in George Romero’s Season of the Witch. Forget the phone in Scream, that movie’s too young. It’s just the phones in horror films before 1982, approximately.

I wish I had something deeper to root to this feeling of pleasant sadness when I see rotary phones in films, especially horror films. This will not be an erudite discussion along the lines of analyzing the meaning of the James Ensor poster in Laurie’s room. It’s just me explaining, as insane as it sounds, how older horror films trigger memories of people in my life who are gone and the places where they lived. It wasn’t a simpler time because life is always complex no matter what. But it was a more visually consistent time, when memories of people and places were not so subject to change and media influence as they are in contemporary films. It was also a time when a person could have an unassailed inner life if they wanted one, and they didn’t have to go full Unabomber to accomplish it.

For decades, my grandparents had the same telephone, a black rotary phone that sat on a side table in their dining nook. They also had an old fashioned phone where the microphone was attached to the wall with a spool-shaped receiver you held up to your ear. It wasn’t used but it remained on the wall anyway. I’ve always wondered who got that phone when my grandfather died.

My own childhood home had a basic wall-installed phone with a traditional handset that stayed in that place, unchanged, for the ten years we lived there. The cord was stretched out from being pulled across the kitchen so we could talk while we washed dishes or tried to stretch it into a bedroom for privacy. I didn’t hate answering the phone back then.  Even though telephones brought bad news, when I was young a telephone ringing generally meant something good. A friend wanted to chat, a boy wanted to ask me to a dance, someone wanted me to go bike riding with them. As I got older, sometimes a ringing phone meant someone needed me to cover their after school shift at Michaels, but uniformly, a phone call was nothing more than an invitation to speak to an actual human being about something grounded to a shared reality.

I miss rotary phones. I especially miss phones where the buttons or dials are not housed within the handset, ensuring a life free of butt dials and accidentally handing up when you shift the phone as you speak. I miss them because they seem like a symbol of the last time in history when technology changed slowly enough that the phone you used in grade school was the same one you used in high school. I often feel like we as a world are descending into absolute social chaos because communication technology has and continues to out pace our capacity to adapt.

In Michelle Stacey’s book The Fasting Girl, which is about Mollie Fancher, a girl who was believed to have lived for decades without eating, she speaks about how the zeitgeist at the time was one of psychological chaos. Why? Because suddenly people could move from one side of the country to the other via the Transcontinental Railway in a matter of a few days. Suddenly letters could arrive to the recipients in other states within the same month they were sent. Then the telegraph enabled people to deliver urgent messages in a matter of hours. This rapid expansion of technology caused people to experience a paradigm shift that deeply affected their mental states.

How could one help being nervous in this mind-expanding universe, in which the emerging universe would threaten to change unrecognizably in the course of a generation? How could one avoid the ambient fear of all the noise and speed and light and steam? Humans had never been exposed to such phenomena; they had not learned yet to tolerate them.

Stationary phones with dials were wholly replaced with touch tone phones largely in the 1980s, though they persisted until modern life made it impossible to use them anymore. I have a better chance of explaining the origins of the universe than I do explaining or even understanding the technology that finally killed off rotary phones (beeps are involved, I think), but it stands to reason that if the possibilities of train travel and the promptness of the telegraph caused people to experience anxiety that manifested in psychological illness, what has happened to us all in the decades between rotary phones and these card-pack-sized devices that allow us to be reached at any moment via voice, text, social media, or email while they also give us the capacity to discover any fact from any place in history in a second. We can watch our lives fall apart into utter chaos when someone finds an old Tweet and decides we are fascist racists because we think lox is gross. We can listen to any piece of music, watch any movie, read any book, all the while avoiding direct human contact. And maybe that’s a good thing, because lord knows I don’t want to talk to anyone ever. But it’s undeniable that phones have now made it almost impossible to be alone, calm, and without the expectation that at any moment you may find yourself texting to several people at once as another scam call from the Fraternal Order of the Police gets sent to your voice mail.

Part of me knows I fixate on rotary phones because it’s a mental link to people like my grandparents. I also fixate on them because they’re stylish, because they make horror movie plots easier to create, because I despise speaker phones. But I also fixate on them because the horror they could convey was concentrated and specific. Nasty prank or obscene calls were of course a problem, but some asshole calling and hanging up or breathing heavily over the phone seems so much more… welcome than picking up a glass and metal device that fits into your hand and realizing that Twitter is coming for you, or that some weirdo has taken to using your phone number on credit card applications and skipped out on payments, or that a device that has access to all your data fell out of your pocket without you noticing and your best possible hope is that your thousand dollar ball and chain is in a toilet somewhere, utterly ruined, and not, say, in the hands of a teenager who can in seconds steal all your money. In Halloween, the worst thing that happened with a phone was when Lynda was strangled with a phone cord, and even then it was sort of okay because it meant we no longer had to listen to her annoying, continual giggling. And wouldn’t you rather go quickly via cord strangulation than the slow death of calling your credit card companies begging them to cancel your card after it is maxed out somewhere in Dubai?

If this sounds insane it probably is but I miss the homes and the things people used in their homes before the Internet came, and for some reason horror movies drive that home to me in a way other films do not. Sometimes it’s not just the phones. I remember the kitchens in Halloween as well, especially the kitchen at Lindsey’s home. Those kitchens were not showplaces influenced by the social media that drives so many of us to alter our homes into minimalist nightmares with kitchens with bare granite counters upon which many a smoothie is blended but meals seldom cooked. I know modern front loading washing machines are more water and energy efficient, but I hate them because clothes never get as clean as they do with top loaders with agitators, and the laundry room Annie used in Halloween when she got butter all over herself reminded me of the machines we used all throughout my life. Then seeing that cardboard box of Tide with maybe ten loads of washing powder… Did Costco exist back then? And if it did, would anyone in the seventies have bought a 108-pod value pack of detergent only later to rush their teen son to the ER because he ate several of them during a TikTok challenge? And would my grandparents have had a chance in hell of even understanding the preceding sentence?

I guess rotary phones in horror movies are a symbol of a calmer, less frenzied life. You go a hundred and fifty years back and those lives seem absolutely foreign to most Westerners. No cars, no electricity, indoor bathrooms were thin on the ground and no phones at all. But 1978, when Halloween was released, is not much different than today. Cars, air conditioning, easy means of communication – even the same damn snacks down to quickly prepared popcorn. But the grinding stress of the way phones now shape our lives is absent. Laurie didn’t need to worry about the crops coming in so her village wouldn’t starve, but she also didn’t have to worry about being accessible every moment to anyone who wanted to reach her. She only had to worry about one maniac who never spoke a word.

And it’s not like I’m looking back at the 1950s-1980s and proclaiming them “better days” or harking back to my childhood and insisting that everything is going to hell these days. As I said, life is a hassle no matter when you are born. I personally think Millennials and Gen-Z have it worse psychologically than I did as a kid. I guess I am just saying that all things considered I prefer the hassles common to the era of the black rotary phones than the hassles of Little House on the Prairie or those of the Internet age.

When I see black rotary phones, I feel an exquisite loneliness. The people and the time those phones represent are gone forever and I miss them. I miss the days when homes were not social media driven showplaces and people made Jiffy Pop over the stove, when phones rang and people answered them even though they had no idea who was calling, when no one except the killer had any reasonable expectation of getting you on the phone at two A.M.  And when you threw your phone at the man in the mask, it probably hurt a lot more than hurling an iPhone at him.