CultureMap Classic

Top 10 Christmas movies that aren't It's A Wonderful Life

With all due respect to Frank Capra and his 1946 ode to the lessons learned from near-suicide, It’s A Wonderful Life will not appear on this list. Instead, it's composed of some obvious choices with a few unexpected picks thrown in. Let the debate begin.

10. Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas (1977) The Jim Henson company’s adaptation of Russell Hoban’s 1971 children’s book was produced for HBO in 1977 and rebroadcast on ABC three years later. Most people under the age of 30 will remember Emmet Otter from the countless re-airings on Nickelodeon during the early 1990’s. The movie is so wonderfully saccharine, you might wind up with diabetes.

9. Gremlins (1984) Worst. Christmas present. Ever. Never buy a talking rat from a creepy old Chinese opium addict. And if you do, for the love of God, don’t get that sonofabitch wet. This Christmastime movie has Muppets too, they’re just not the cuddly kind. Allegedly, the original script called for the gremlins to decapitate Billy’s mother, then roll her head down a flight of stairs. You see, once upon a time – before Kingdom of the Crystal Skull punched my childhood in the groin – Steven Speilberg made awesome, awesome movies. They were smart, funny, and unapologetically violent. Gremlins is no exception.

8. Home Alone (1990) See? Child abandonment can be fun. Before Macaulay Culkin was [allegedly] diddled by the late King of Pop, he was assaulting dimwitted home invaders played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern with near lethal force in this Chris Columbus-directed holiday film. There’s an important lesson here, parents. If you have a large, Irish Catholic family (an acceptable stereotype in Hollywood, apparently), and you’re late for a trans-Atlantic flight, use the buddy system.

7. Batman Returns (1992) A festive holiday motif provided the perfect juxtaposition to Tim Burton’s signature macabre visual style. Let their be no doubt, this movie is effin’ W-E-I-R-D. A pretty good argument can be made that it isn’t really a Batman film at all, but rather a typically bizarre Burton Christmas movie that used Bob Kane’s vigilante battling a gang of deranged circus freaks led by Danny DeVito’s black goo-drooling Penguin to make it commercially viable – which it was.

6. Scrooged (1988) No list of Christmas movies would be complete without some variation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Richard Donner’s 80’s update starring Bill Murray stands alone among interpretations thanks to an all-star cast, perfect blending of sarcasm and sentiment, and clever setting in Reganomics-era New York. Whoever cast Buster Poindexter (real name David Johansen – lead vocalist of the New York Dolls) as the Ghost of Christmas Past deserves a medal. Fun fact: Poindexter was famous for that irritating and still ubiquitous 1987 cover of Arrow’s “Hot, Hot, Hot,” which he now describes as the “bane of his existence.”

5. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) Like his long time collaborator, Tim Burton, composer Danny Elfman makes his second appearance on this list (he also scored Scrooged). Just before Pixar ruined non-CG animated films for nearly two decades, Burton & Company gave us a stop-motion masterpiece that has become one of the truly great, stylized and enduring cult classics. The Nightmare Before Christmas is Elfman’s sonic tour de force (he also provides Jack Skellington’s singing voice), and is a visual feast from the twisted mind of producer Burton. Eyes up here, Disney. Mothball those sexy Silicon Graphics workstations once in a while and give us some more stop-motion goodness.

4. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) Ah, to see the world through the eyes of Clark W. Griswald – America’s second greatest pop culture dad (Bill Cosby’s Cliff Huxtable gets the nod, thanks to his impressive collection of hideous dad sweaters). Nobody combined sardonic wit with childish naïveté quite like Chevy Chase. Throw in a pre-Seinfeld Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and Nicholas Guest as the loathsome, obnoxious yuppie neighbors and a big ‘ole helping of Randy Quaid’s endearingly vulgar Cousin Eddie and you have a top vacation movie.

3. Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966) Arguably the greatest director of animated shorts ever, Chuck Jones delivers a visually stunning representation of Theodore Geisel’s, aka Dr. Seuss, perennial holiday favorite. Narrated by Boris Karloff (the titular Frankenstein’s Monster in 1931’s Frankenstein) with Thurl Ravenscroft (who was the voice of Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger for five decades) lending his trademark baritone to “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” Jones’ trippy classic stands head-and-shoulders above any of today’s animated fare.

2. A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) The somber-yet-somehow-comforting “Christmastime is Here” from the Vince Guaraldi Trio could only have been improved if Nat King Cole had lived long enough to provide the vocals. The song is pure holiday perfection, as is the charming, sophisticated animated Christmas film from the brilliant mind of Charles Schultz. Although ostensibly about eternal sad sack Charlie Brown’s selecting a pitiful little tree to be the centerpiece of his school Christmas pageant, the half hour special is most notable for Linus’ soliloquy on the true meaning of Christmas – the birth Jesus. JESUS?! Somebody call the ACLU. That can’t be right. Oh wait, it was still okay to talk about Jesus in 1965.

1. A Christmas Story (1983) Why does Jean Shepherd’s nostalgic pre-World War II story of a bespectacled little boy and his Red Rider carbine action air rifle top our list? Because it’s a family-friendly Christmas movie with no moral. Go ahead; watch it again. What does Ralphie Parker actually learn by the end of the movie? Absolutely nothing. He lies about shooting his eye out and gets away with it! It’s endlessly quotable, cynical, and incredibly funny, especially when viewed as an adult. The leg lamp, the pink bunny suit, Flick’s tongue stuck to the pole, “I triple dog dare you,” I could go on. It all combines to create not only the best Christmas movie of all time, but one of the great period films ever produced.

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Movie Review

Camp Miasma puts a comedic twist on the classic slasher movie

Photo courtesy of MUBI

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

The horror genre really ramped up in the 1970s and ‘80s, bringing the slasher subgenre that gave audiences new visuals of gore, but also a reliance on sexism and homophobia that would come to define the era. The new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma wrestles with that legacy in ways that are funny, thought-provoking, and downright strange.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a queer filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the moldy IP that is the Camp Miasma franchise, one that was fresh in the 1970s but which numerous shlocky sequels have rendered irrelevant. In an attempt to get to know the property better, Kris has scored a meeting with the reclusive Billy (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original film who has shunned the public eye for decades.

Turns out that Billy lives deep in the woods at Camp Rivoli, which served as the location for the first film. As Kris tries to get to know Billy and convince her to be a part of the new film, she starts to fall under Billy’s spell and the lore of the franchise as a whole. That includes believing that the movie’s villain, Little Death — a transgender person who has an air conditioning vent as a head/mask — may not just be a character created for the movies.

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), the film at first feels like it’s going to go the straight-up comedy route, with comic explosions of blood, a strange fascination with candy brands, and a production design that does nothing to hide that the two main actors are on a movie set with painted backdrops. This is backed up by Kris’ phone conversations with her girlfriend, Mari (Jasmine Savoy Brown) and her agent (Sarah Sherman), as well as numerous other details.

But the film starts to go down the surreal route the longer Kris stays at the camp with Billy, especially when they sit down to watch the original Camp Miasma. An extended sequence shows a good amount of that film-within-the-film, demonstrating why Kris and Billy have a love/hate relationship with the property. For Kris, though, the lines between the film and the real world start to blur, and Schoenbrun uses a variety of out-there elements to drive the point home.

The final act of the film can barely be described as Kris goes deeper down the rabbit hole, with Schoenbrun using her film to comment on the horror genre as a whole, its treatment of women and LGBT people, the movie industry, and more. All the while the “camp” of Camp Miasma maintains a presence, with candy wrappers showing up everywhere and the tongue-in-cheek references to Little Death (the French term La petite mort, which means “the little death,” is a euphemism for orgasm).

Einbinder, an Emmy winner for Hacks, is the perfect person to inhabit her role. Her established real-life and fictional personas color everything she does in the film, with her enthusiasm and curiosity shining through. Anderson leans heavily into another reference — Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard — to create a character that is as mysterious as she is alluring. Supporting actors like Brown, Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Dylan Baker, and Eva Victor keep the movie at the right pitch all the way through.

While other films have made fun of horror movie tropes before, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma finds a wholly unique way of doing so. It’s a funny and daring trip into the psyches of two women who may be victims of their own obsessions, and of the movies that made them that way.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in select theaters

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