By Geno McGahee
I love TERMINATOR and most of the other movies in the series and I’ve always been a fan of Linda Hamilton. I never saw that BEAUTY AND THE BEAST TV series though. It always looked weird to me. That guy’s Beast makeup looked fucked up. I wonder if they had sex scenes in that series. If they did, I’d give it a go.
Julie Bedford (Hamilton) has the ideal life, living with a rich husband, George (Garwin Sanford), but that all comes crashing down when she finds out that her hubby is cheating on her with a young dance instructor. George was so fucking lucky that he wasn’t married to Sarah Conner. She would have said “I got a surprise for your ass” and sent the Terminator to his front door and shot his dick off. So, since that didn’t happen, I assumed that HOME BY CHRISTMAS wasn’t a direct sequel to any of the TERMINATOR movies, but I didn’t yet rule it out.
Because Julie was bent over and done dry by her husband, she now had to move to a shitty part of town and her teenage daughter, Andie (Brittney Wilson), with her. Immediately, it doesn’t go over well. Andie hates leaving her nice house and school and now she has to go to a school on the wrong side of the tracks. When I saw the school, I swear it looked so much like the school in the Billy Blanks movie SHOWDOWN. Since so many other films happen in the same universe, maybe this and SHOWDOWN does too.
Even though Andie blows up and calls her father a “stupid idiot”, she moves back to live with him and that’s not the only bad thing that happens to Julie. She gets jumped by a thug and robbed and has all of her money stolen. The thug also empties out her bank account. This was the future Sarah Conner worried about.
After the unfortunate series of events, Julie is homeless. She is now living in a car and trying to piece her life together. She befriends another homeless woman, Selma (Brenda Crichlow), and she shows her the way to make it. Julie also befriends Max (Campbell Lane), an old guy that owns a coffee shop. He stands uncomfortably close to Julie a lot but she doesn’t seem to mind. I doubt that her husband was bringing his A game to the bedroom with her, considering his young piece on the side. She probably thought old dick is better than no dick.
Julie finds her way into a home by masquerading as a real estate agent, but she begins to dig it and goes for the exam to become one in reality. She also found a new man in Max’s son, Michael (Rob Stewart), a doctor, and they hit it off very well. So, her life is coming together, but I thought this was a Christmas movie! You see this a lot. These films that have Christmas in the title have very little to do with the holiday.
Julie remains homeless, but when she finds out that her daughter is coming back for the holiday, she has to come up with something. So, she decorates a house that’s for sale and pretends it’s hers and even meets up with Santa for good luck. Well, it wasn’t really Santa. It was a guy playing Santa and when Julie says that “I believe in you,” the Santa guy winks. You can tell that he thought he was going to get laid that night and probably spent the entire night walking the neighborhood saying “have you see that girl that looks like Linda Hamilton? I got a candy cane for her.”
While eating with her daughter, she says something very strange. “Our futures are our own to make,” which tells me that this is a TERMINATOR sequel. I’m not sure how it fits in, but there has to be a connection.
HOME BY CHRISTMAS is a take or leave sort of movie that really isn’t a Christmas flick. They call it that, but it doesn’t make it as a holiday film. It makes it as a mediocre drama, a less than mediocre Terminator entry and a film that has nothing to do with BEAUTY AND THE BEAST the TV series that I know of.
Rating: 5/10
