Scentsational Christmas
Let's begin our discussion of this movie by talking about one it's supporting characters. Sugith Varughese is a Canadian actor of Indian descent who has been featured in some of my favorite shows, such as Transplant and The Expanse, but he seems to have found a new groove for his career, Hallmarky Romantic Holiday Movie Dad. I'm sure his agent met with Mr. Sugith and let him know he had a couple of scripts for him to consider, and then set about describing the roles. Sir, you are going to play the dad of a serious minded, ambitious woman, who left the family business for the big city to start her own life, leaving you and your wife to run this business, but then your wife dies leaving you to run the business alone, which you do very poorly, forcing your daughter to come home and save your ass. I'm sure Mr. Sugith was like 'Cool... what about the second script?'. To which his agent had to let him know that was both of them. The roles are identical. There is literally no difference between the father in A Gingerbread Christmas and a Scentsational Christmas. They could've green screened his performance and cut and pasted them into both movies, but my man is a professional so he decided to mix them up by giving his business destroying dad in this one an Eastern Indian accent. Now on to the show!
Ellie (Nanzeen Contractor) is a chemist working for the conglomerate supermodel Nastia (Samantha Helt) and her current project is designing the next great perfume. If she nails it, she gets that much desired promotion and a relocation to France, but Nastia is no hurry to make a decision so Ellie is off to spend the holidays back home in Snowy Town to check on her dad.
Upon making it home and walking into the little log cabin that the family uses to make their candles, Ellie runs into Logan (Mykee Selkin), the dashing travel reporter that her dad has rented out a room in their home as a BnB, unbeknownst to Ellie. When dad eventually stumbles in she gets all the information she needs. Dad (Varughese) is running the business into the ground because he can't really make candles, renting to Logan is helping keep some income flowing, and Logan is in town to do a story on small town Christmas's. Ellie is pleased with none of this, despite Logan amping up his charm superpower to 11.
But Logan is relentlessly charming and helpful. I mean this cat never stops. Anything that's going wrong in Ellie's life right now, Logan is their to fix it. From her dad's crap ordering and billing system... fixed. The mystery of the family candle holders... solved. Ellie's inability to do a Christmas bar toast... resolved. They mystery of the missing ingredient of the family's famed Christmas Candles... Logan accidently solved that one too. However the big mystery in this film is the Christmas locket Eliie's late mother was obsessed with finding and learning it's history. Logan is eventually going to solve that too, by the way.
So these two kids are getting really close, with Ellie even showing Logan how to make candles, and let me tell you, I had no idea making candles could be such an erotic experience. Who knew? This erotic candle experience resulted in our near miss kiss, which would've happened if dad didn't stumble in and ruin everything, despite the fact he's been trying really hard to hook these two up. So what breaks up this fledgling love affair? It's overly complicated but it has something to do with Nastia being allergic to Ellie's original fragrance submission, Ellie making a new fragrance from the missing Christmas candle ingredient, Logan blogging about it, Nastia reading the blog and accusing Ellie of betraying her trust, and Ellie getting pissed at Logan which leads to him running away.
But he didn't run away my friends, he just had to solve the locket mystery for his woman. Ellie now realizes she loves this man she's known about a week and lights candles in the snowstorm so he can find his way back to her. It's a thing in this movie. We're not going to get into it. Regardless, he finds her and they make start making out in the snow. At Christmas.
Just so you know, everything worked out for Ellie. Nastia came to her senses and decided to launch a candle line, partnering with the family biz and places Ellie in charge, so now the family business will thrive and Ellie can stay in Snowy Town as she has learned that this is home. And she got her man. Or did she? Sure they were making out, but Logan let us know early and often that he like to travel and wasn't all that interested in staying in one place... unless the situation was right. He never said this was the right situation. Just saying. He might not be there when she wakes up in the morning.
Anyway, I guess this movie was okay. I mean it was kind of talky and a little on the busy side, where it would've worked perfectly as one of those Hallmark Murders and Mysteries presentations, but this is Lifetime and they don't need a special division for murder because that happens all the time on that channel. Our leads were good though I will say that Mykee Selkin seemed way more into Nanzeen Contractor than she in to him. This could just be a Nanzeen thing because I've seen her in a few of these movies, and beautiful as she is, she does seem to have some trouble generating electricity with her male co-stars.
The vomit worthiness was rock solid as we had lots of snow, hot cocoa sipping, near miss kissing, Christmas caroling, Christmas tree shopping and trimming, and a dead mom, but we were missing out on cookie baking, though maybe erotic candle making is suitable substitute? Who am I to say?
So if you're looking for a little mystery to go with your Holiday Romance Predictability, topped with a touch of erotic candle making, this is only the show in town.
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