Day 1 - Lucky Christmas

Lucky Christmas – Hallmark Channel (2011)

It’s been almost as year since I’ve seen my last Christmas movie, and in that short time I’ve kind of forgotten how terrible they are.  Kind of romanticized them in a way.  But ‘Lucky Christmas’ is leading off this exercise of 25 movies in 25 days to set things right!

Meet Holly (Elizabeth Berkeley), an attractive, abnormally tall, single, unemployed Michigan mother with a gambling problem.  That’s not explicitly stated, but she does have a crapload of failed lotto tickets in her glove compartment.  And she’s cries broke all the time.  Which means she probably doesn’t have the disposable income to waste on lotto tickets.

One night while having a drink with a friend, probably can’t afford that either, Holly drops her keys in the parking lot.  Normally this isn’t a problem, but then you haven’t met Joe (Mike Bell) who is the best friend of our hero Mike (Jason Gray-Stanford).  You see Mike and Joe were leaving the bar as Mike was feeling ill, just as Holly was entering, and since Joe’s truck just got booted he saw no issue with finding Holly’s keys on the ground and stealing her car so they could get home.  Joe is the linchpin of a dizzying array of terrible concepts in this movie that were outlandish even by ridiculous movie standards.

Guess what?  Holly’s lotto ticket hits!  Yay!  That’s a cool mil coming Hollys way, which means she can move out of the attic of the old people home she’s living in and start a restaurant, since she’s a chef and stuff.  Problem being that her lotto ticket was in her car that just got stolen.  No problem because Mike is a good guy, and despite his toxic best friends efforts to steal this ticket, he’s going to return it to her, along with her car Joe stole.

Not going to get all into it, but stuff happens which prevents this simple exchange from occurring, now Mike needs a plan, and Joe is the one that dreamt it up.  Befriend Holly, her young son Max, Romance Holly because Mike is a player like that, then sneak the ticket back in to her possession someway.  It’s an awful plan.  Just stick it in the mail slot.  Of course Holly, Mike and Max all fall in love, until Holly learns she’s been betrayed and love is lost, until Holly learns, via a wise (senile) old lady that money ain’t nothing without love to back it up.  We’re calling B.S. on that.

As far as being vomit worthy Hallmark Christmas movie, ‘Lucky Christmas’ gets a couple of things right.  It has a painfully predictable tale to tell, we have a semi-cute kid and a wise old person to deal with… but really that’s about it.  The movie was very light on the Christmassy things we count on, like incessant background Christmas music, an overflow of background decorations, and despite the fact it allegedly takes place in Michigan, it didn’t look very cold.  And while the story itself was woefully predictable, we gotta say it also wasn’t very Christmassy either in that blowing all your spare loot on lotto tickets isn’t exactly a launching point for bringing the Christmas Spirit.  Unless of course you’re scratching one of these bad boys:

All of these omissions keep the vomit level kind of low, and remember, the more vomits the more Christmassy your movie is.  And the movie itself was kind of terrible to boot. 

And one last thing, in their rush to get to the Lotto office before midnight on Christmas Eve to redeem the ticket, they run out the skating rink to find Joe’s truck had booted again.  What kind of petty meter maid boots a truck at midnight on Christmas Eve? 

Anyway, erstwhile TV Christmas movie watcher, you are going to have a lot of choices in this… and future… holiday seasons to choose from.  I’m not sure this two-vomit hiccup will be worth your valuable time.