Film Critics United

Holiday in Handcuffs (2007) - ABC Family Remember that movie 'Misery'?  About a crazy person who kidnaps a poor guy and holds him hostage while torturing him in her snowy retreat?   Imagine that movie as a fun family movie, with a dash of 'The Shining', only this time James Caan and Kathy Bates fall in love with each other.  Welcome to 'Holiday in Handcuffs' people. Trudie (Melissa Joan Hart) is a holy mess of a person, but on this day she just has to keep it together long enough to make it to her parents snowy retreat with her boyfriend, for the annual family Christmas celebration.  Sadly her boyfriend bails on her, claiming he was just pretending like he was gonna go until she gave up the cookie... Hey, that's what he said in this family Christmas movie.  Now distraught and in the middle of a breakdown, Trudie sees the deep dimpled David (Mario Lopez) and at that moment Trudie decides to kidnap David at gunpoint and force him to her family outing to...

Snow (2004) - ABC Family It's a week before Christmas and Nick (Tom Cavanagh) is a little nervous because it's his first year as Santa, but gosh darn, Buddy his reindeer has run off and been captured by the big game hunter Buck (Patrick Fabian).  Now Christmas is in trouble because the sleigh won't fly with only seven reindeer, and the scurrilous Buck has sold this reindeer to a local zoo run by the cute as button zoo keeper Sandy (Ashley Williams). Now the extremely awkward Nick has to travel to this town to bring his wayward reindeer back to the North Pole, and also teach it to fly because this is Buddy's first Christmas as well.  While all kinds of shenanigans and mayhem and chaos are taking place, including Buck's plan to sell off Buddy to be slaughtered by another big game hunter, what Nick didn't plan on was falling in love and finding his Mrs. Claus.  Awww....  look at Nick show Sandy around his North Pole workshop... while Buddy is back wherever th...

Christmas Do-Over (2006) - ABC Family The initial plan of this futile exercise was to watch these Hallmark styled Christmas Movies, poke a little fun at them, then move on.  What we didn't want to do was actually critique one because we did that for years and now simply watch movies for whatever entertainment value they can offer.  But then this ditty came along.  Christmas Do-Over is... ghastly.  This movie here is socially, morally, emotionally and spiritually bankrupt.  Thirteen days in it's pretty clear that ABC Family is the absolute worst.  Thank goodness for the name change. We're dusting off Ground Hog Day, a popular trope for these types of movies, hanging out with Kevin (Jay Mohr).  Kevin is divorced from Jill (Daphne Zuniga), father to little Ben (Logan Grove) and one the worst people you will ever want to spend time with.    All Kevin wants to do this Christmas Day is drop off the hastily and poorly selected gift to h...

Christmas Bounty (2013) - ABC Family From WWE studios we have another Christmas movie that's really not a Christmas movie, just a movie that takes place around Christmastime, but whaddayagonnado? Tory (Francia Raisa) is a Manhattan schoolteacher engaged to blue blood investment banker James (Will Greenberg) when she gets a mysterious call from Manucci (professional movie thug Alexs Paunovic) that he's going to kill her and family.  Well that's not the spirit.  Why does this dude want to kill the lovely Tory?  Because Tory's bounty hunting family traced this cat ten years ago, mainly Tory who was like twelve at the time, and put him away.  Now he's escaped and wants bloody revenge.  HO HO HO!  Of course Tory's fiance doesn't know anything about Tory's bounty hunting past.  I've noticed another theme of these Christmas movies, and probably Lifetime movies in general, is these women lying to their men about their pasts, no matter how mundane these...