30 Days of Horrible Christmas Movies... Day Seventeen - A Carol Christmas

A Carol Christmas (2003) - The Hallmark Channel

Two days in a row, two straight Christmas Carol knockoffs.  Watching these movies is way more difficult than I could've ever dreamed.  But this movie, 'A Carol Christmas' has William Shatner and the late Gary Coleman in it.  You read that correctly... Willis and Kirk!  Other than that it was terrible.

Carol (Tori Spelling) is the host of some kind of Sally Jesse Rafael styled TV show and a terrible person.  Duh.  Carol's Marley is her dead aunt Maria (Dinah Manoff) who was basically a stage mom, but just not her mom.  Where is Carol's real mom?  Somewhere not taking of her daughter.  

So we get to see how terrible Carol is to all of her people, including her Cratchit Roberta (Nina Siemaszko), only to get a midday visit from her aunt about the three spirits.  Christmas Past (Coleman) shows her how wonderful her childhood was until Aunt Maria got a hold of her, Christmas Present (Shatner) shows her how happy everybody is despite how mean she is, except Roberta who truly has a crap life, and Christmas Past (The legendary James Cromwell) shows her that she will die alone.  Bla, bla bla...  Somebody's gonna live the spirit of Christmas like forever.

As we said with the last Scrooge knockoff, the structure is there already, all that changes is the inner workings, and the inner workings here are Coleman, Shatner and Cromwell.  That's pretty darned good... though our filmmakers didn't do much with it, mainly because this is Tori Spellings movie.  Now we have no ill will towards Miss Spelling, but let's say you throw her out this movie, make Coleman, Shatner and Cromwell the Three Wise Men and then follow them around as they do stuff... now we have a crap Christmas movie I think we can work with.  Why am I making up movies that don't exist instead of talking about this one?  Because I've kind of forgotten it already.

Still, I remember enough to know that it was a solid, vomit worthy movie.  Super tired Christmas plot, a cute kid, a wise old dude played with supreme buffoonery by Mr. Shatner, lots of Christmas music including the constant playing of an off tuned version of Carol of the Bells which was disturbing.  Oh... I just got it.  Her name is Carol, Carol of the Bells, out of tune... It took a while, but I get it, and  this film had more groan worthy dialog you can shake a stick at.  But you could tell that Hallmark hadn't refined it's craft back in 2003 with this one, still working out the Crap Christmas Movie Kinks.

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