By Geno McGahee
I always going into Hallmark Christmas movies with no expectations. When they make a bad movie, they make a bad movie, like CHRISTMAS SAIL, a movie so bad that I didn’t review it. I didn’t have anything to say. I just cried.
In NEXT STOP, CHRISTMAS, Hallmark does some time travel and decided to take a couple of the BACK TO THE FUTURE talent with Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson and why not? It makes an immediate connection to time travel, but with all the snow falling, I wanted Lloyd to scream “I was frozen today!” Am I the only fan of SUBURBAN COMMANDO?
Angie (Lyndsy Fonseca) is a doctor and her first operation is on some poor guy that is ass up in the operation room. I’m not sure what is going on, but the dude is out cold and if there’s one perverted doctor, he’s gonna get tore up. Thankfully, they didn’t go in that direction. A movie about a poor dude getting plowed on Christmas while unconscious would not fill me with holiday joy. I don’t think it would.
Angie and her friend, Sabrina (Sorika Wolf), go out for drinks and start talking about the sportscaster and Sabrina makes it clear that she would hump the TV if nobody was looking. Angie lets on that she nearly married the dude and gave him the catchphrase “when you can’t get enough sports, I’ve got more.” I hope he’s not talking about a bat and balls in his pants.
The conductor (Christopher Lloyd) gives Angie a ticket and, all of a sudden, she’s on a different train and she’s in the year 2011 and is dating Tyler (Eric Freeman) and her dad, George, is still in the picture. Years ago, he left her mother, Evelyn (Lea Thompson), and went to Arizona. She also runs into an old friend, Ben (Chandler Massey), and it was easy to see how this one was going to turn out, but Hallmark specializes in predictable movies.
Kristen (Paige Herschell), Angie’s sister, and her husband, Peter (Nicholas Delany), have one child, a son, and want another, but there’s a problem. Peter is shooting blanks. Perhaps a time-traveling woman can shake up Peter’s sack with some Christmas magic and make the juice work again.
Ben is a threat to Tyler immediately. He sees Ben as a man that is sniffing his bike seat. Is that the right expression? I heard it only once and it may not be a real saying. Did anyone say to you that somebody was sniffing your bike seat? Ben plays Santa and that’s a Hallmark sign that he’s the guy that the main character will end up with. Ben makes it pretty obvious that he wants to play sniff the bike seat with Angie but she doesn’t see it just yet.
Trying to put Tyler at ease, Angie sets up Ben with Chloe (Allie Trimm), with the hopes that they’d get together and do the nasty. Chloe is obnoxious and fake. Ben doesn’t want anything to do with her. He is set on Angie and will be outside her window during her and Tyler’s honeymoon, watching, if need be. Maybe that’d get it out of his system.
Part of the agenda of the time travel is for Angie to get her parents back together again and it was easy. She just put her mother in an old dress and sent her to the Christmas party and George got wood and the two were back together again, but the dog looked disappointed and I wonder why. Maybe George did something to that poor dog, but if he did, they never mentioned it, thankfully. I’m just wondering why that dog was so upset with George kissed his wife. It was weird. Maybe I’m reading too much into it.
Angie realizes that she is in love with Ben and she is brought back to the future and has her future planned with Ben. The two are happy and they decide to get married and live happily ever after. Everyone is happy.
NEXT STOP, CHRISTMAS is decent. It’s worth a watch and it’s obvious that they only had Christopher Lloyd for one day for this film, but they make the most of him. He actually stands out despite his limited time on film. I wasn’t a fan of his 70’s porn mustache though.
I recommend this one, but not overwhelmingly. I’m not insisting you watch it. Do what you want to do.
