With the holiday season in full swing, it’s easy to get burned out — cable stations are running crappy movies like Jingle All the Way and The Santa Clause 24/7, saccharine holiday music is blasting out of every speaker, and you’ve still got like half your list to buy, and what the hell do I get these freaks?
Calm down. Have an eggnog. Put some rum in it. And enjoy some of our favorite anti-Christmas movies — not films that hate the holiday, per se (though a couple of them do), but ones that cut through all that warmth and good feeling and get at the darkness underneath. Our contrarian Christmas viewing list is after the jump.
It would be unthinkable to begin this discussion with any film other than Bad Santa, Terry Zwigoff’s gloriously mean-spirited, piss-and-vinegar-filled 2003 holiday comedy. Billy Bob Thornton plays Willie T. Stoke (a decidedly W.C. Fieldsian name for the kind of role Fields could have played, had he been born sixty years later), a horny, drunken, pissed-off safecracker who masquerades as a department store Santa every holiday season in order to pull off a Christmas Eve score that he’ll live off for the next year. John Requa and Glenn Ficara’s script almost seems designed to offend, with scenes of a hammered Santa beating the shit out of papier-mâché animals, urinating on himself in the Santa chair, and sodomizing a clerk in the Plus-Sized dressing room. Acid-tongued and wickedly funny, Bad Santa has rightfully become an anti-holiday classic.
Comments (14)
How could you leave out “A Christmas Tale”?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1yPhab421Q
I’m going to assume you haven’t seen Rare Exports; that if you had, you’d have put it on here, becasue how couldn’t you? And no Nightmare Before Christmas?
I humbly submit “Rare Exports” for inclusion in your esteemed list.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwT3wtUCv9Y&feature=fvst
The trailer does not even do justice to the creepiness factor of this film. Thanks for reminding me that I must buy this. :)
(Lenny’s post wasn’t there when I submitted mine, but +2 for Rare Exports in the first three comments, sweet!)
“Bad Santa” is on the list of my fave movies ever! I remember we went to the movie theater to see a different movie, which turned out rotten, so we walked out of that one. We stopped by the room where “Bad Santa” was being played – anticipating to mock it, because we thought that it was one of those “earnest, uplifting” ones – and just couldn’t leave, it turned out to be so fabulous!!!
…Um except that Nightmare Before Christmas is ultimately a very Christmas positive film, and this is an ANTI Christmas list…..
My ladyfriend was telling me the other day that Bad Santa is now a beloved (anti-)Christmas movie and I didn’t believe her. We saw that movie together in the theater, and, as both grinches and comedy nerds who like their humor dark, it seemed like it couldn’t fail. But fail it did, big time! I’m pretty sure I didn’t laugh once. Maybe 2 or 3 half-assed smiles. At most. We considered walking out–not because we were offended by the content, mind you, but because we were painfully, mind-numbingly bored–but I know I at least kept thinking, this has got to get better at some point, right? Wrong.
No Die Hard?
“Now I have a machine gun. HO HO HO!”
My anti-Christmas Christmas movie is Die Hard. Watch it just about every Christmas.
Pete & Brad– Oh, “Die Hard” has long crossed the line from anti-Christmas movie to actual, legitimate, right-up-there-with-”It’s-A-Wonderful-Life” holiday tradition, in our house at least: http://flavorwire.com/235287/open-thread-what-are-your-essential-holiday-movies
I think the weirdest, most un-Christmas-y Christmas movie I’ve ever come across is the Hong Kong comedy kung-fu classic It’s A Drink! It’s A Bomb!
I’m gonna have to second the RARE EXPORTS recommendation. It’s INCREDIBLE. I’ve already watched it twice this season, the second time showing it off to a bunch of friends who all loved it. It’s really well-made, beautifully shot and a really original take on the Santa tale.
And while you’re on the evil Santa route, please check out SANTA’S SLAY, starring Claire from LOST, and former professional wrestler Bill Goldberg as Santa (who’s really a demon!). It’s awful is all the right ways.
Ummm, how could Invasion U.S.A. starring Chuck Norris be left off? Come on, the Cubans invade one town in Florida and are bombing Santa at the mall and firing rocket launchers at Christmas decorated houses. What more do you need?!?
Brazil!
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