Annie Claus Is Coming To Town (2011/Gaiam Vivendi DVD)/Bloody Christmas (2012/MVD DVD)/The Christmas Pageant (2011/Gaiam Vivendi DVD)
Picture: C+/C-/C Sound: C+/C/C+ Extras: D Main Programs: C/D/D
To show
how exploited Christmas is long before it arrives, here are three titles that
would seem different, but are more the same than not.
First we
have the one viable and still-boring entry Annie
Claus Is Coming To Town (2011) which has Maria Thayer in the title role
getting involved with a man. Too bad it
was not with a better script. Vicki
Lawrence and Vivica A. Fox turn up thinking this could work out to be some
‘cute’ holiday favorite of some sort, but it never pans out. Instead, we get a long 87 minutes of mostly
clichés and too often backwards thinking.
It’s attitude towards women is mixed and I was mostly bored, though it
could have picked up, but the lack of energy and honesty sabotages that as
well. There are no extras.
Michael
Shershenovich’s Bloody Christmas
(2012) is a Horror exploitation bit about a public access Santa on a killing
spree (the cover as featured above expresses our attitude at the site about
this glut of XMas-ploitation from Horror to The Hallmark Channel) that is just
a sloppy mess and an excuse for blood to be splattered all over the place, yet
it echoes the splattering of phoniness and pseudo-morality in the dramas it
would send up if it were smarter. This
is awful, but so is the opposite alternative, which is the reason to include it
to make said point.
Extras
include Cast Interviews, a Trailer of some sort and lame Deleted Scenes.
That
brings us to The Christmas Pageant
(2011) with Melissa Gilbert (yes, that’s her despite all the plastic surgery,
really!) as a big Broadway star who is fired from her latest job (who does she
think she is?!?) and forced to do a smaller production, but there, she meets a
man (yawn) who could change her life (put her back in the kitchen?) and it gets
worse form there making it about as mean and pointless as a Santa on a killing spree.
Edward
Herrmann even shows up, but this is a disposable bore, is borderline misogynist
and even outright insulting in its smugness and condescending sense of
self. There are no extras, but it is
awful.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on all three DVDs are poor, but Annie is the only one that is
watchable, as Pageant is softer and
has more noise than expected and Bloody
is just a mess. The lossy Dolby Digital
5.1 on Annie and Pageant just spread out simple stereo
at best, while the lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo on Bloody has awful location audio, bad sound editing, bad sound
mixing and can be harsh in its playback along with some distortion and
compression.
- Nicholas Sheffo
