By Geno McGahee
Every year I do a holiday movie review spree and I do it because I am so full of the Christmas spirit. I have all this joy. Sadly, this joy was nearly extinguished as I sat through the Hallmark movie “HAUL OUT THE HOLLY”.
Emily (Lacey Chabert) was shafted as a kid during Christmas. Her parents gave her a camera to take pictures of some big Holiday even that the neighborhood holds every year. I don’t blame her. She wanted some toys or something fun. She didn’t want to follow around a bunch of assholes in bad Christmas sweaters with a Kodak.
Time passes and she is now living in the city as an adult. After breaking up with her boyfriend, she decides to go back and see her parents. When she gets there, her parents reveal that they are going to Florida and that she can stay in the house during the holiday. That sounded like a great deal to me. Get a huge beautiful house and lose two annoying assholes at the same time? Sign me up.
Jared (Wes Brown) the Home Owners Association President comes along and this film really goes into the toilet. I’m not saying that Brown is a bad actor because he was given nothing to work with and they were trying to play him off as a funny awkward character. I hated this character. I don’t think Brown brought anything to this role. His heart wasn’t in it. If his heart was in it, he sucks, but I think he was just going through the motions. At one point, he’s singing The Twelve Days of Christmas and I wanted to kick him in the nuts.
Emily begins getting citations for not having enough decorations up from Jared. I love Christmas but this asshole is obsessed with it and he is shoving it up everyone’s ass that lives on that Evergreen Circle. Remarkably, Emily begins to like him. What?! Poor Lacey Chabert. She is always likable and she is here but they gave her complete shit to work with here and she tried to make it work, but it did not work.
Another idiotic character is Ned (Stephen Tobolowsky). He is obsessed with the holiday too and thinks having snowball fights with adults is the most fun a man can have. Tobolowsky is tremendous and I love him in almost every film, but not even he could save this. It’s a shame that they had Tobolowsky involved and this film still sucked donkey balls.
Every character in this, outside of Emily, is annoying and this film is so empty. I know that Hallmark isn’t known for deep and memorable holiday films, but this has no thought or real story. I guess they went to their writer and said: “We need to make five million holiday films this year. Get writing. They don’t need to be good. Just write.”
I hated this film. I hate it more as I think about it as I’m writing this review. It’s not fair that this could ruin my holiday. Hallmark needs to write me an apology letter and spray it with perfume.
The most obnoxious asshole in the film, Jared, gets the girl and also dresses like Santa Claus, which makes him more excited than I was when the ending credits rolled. This is one of those films that you just put on for background noise and when you look at the screen, it looks like a Christmas film and that’s good enough, I suppose.
Can you guess if I’m going to give this one a good rating?
HAUL OUT THE HOLIDAY is shit. You don’t expect greatness from the Hallmark holiday films, but this one had no soul. It was nearly unwatchable but I watched it because I need to review shit for my holiday review spree I do. I should have picked another movie to start it.
Watch this if you want to puke.
