If you’re anything like me, the same five holiday movies that run every year just aren’t enough to quench that festive thirst so deeply embossed on your very soul. You need more than that. If you are like me, you deserve more than that. You are also not wearing any pants.
The general rule for holiday films is that they must at least take place around the season, right? And so, if we simply twist that logic to say that “takes place during the holidays = holiday movie”, then there’s a lot of fun to be had the next time mom and dad come caroling. Just go right ahead and pop in one of the following…
15. Eyes Wide Shut
This is probably the most festive film that involves orgies, right above Caligula. The very first event of the film is a Christmas party in which the host’s sex-guest ends up ODing all over the place.
Sex, confession, prostitution, secret societies, HIV, and Christmas shopping with the kids are roughly the order of some of the highlights of this movie. Because that’s what you get when you combine Stanley Kubrick with the holidays. It’s either this or Vincent D’Onofrio blowing his brains out in a bathroom.
14. The Ghost and the Darkness
Man, cats are the worst. Mine keeps pissing in my clean clothes whenever I leave her alone. Every time I use the toilet she crawls through the laundry chute and stares at me like a gargoyle until I’m done. It’s unnerving. I guess she’s not eating me though, so that’s a plus.
While this film takes place within nine months, we learn that the drawn out hunt is actually a holiday activity when Jesus impersonator Michael Douglas points out early in the last lap that it is December. Lion would make for an impressive holiday feast. Of course on the flip side of that, so would Val Kilmer. So really no matter what happens it’s win-win.
13. Jaws: The Revenge
The Bahamas are a jarring place to celebrate the holidays/get eaten by a great white shark. You don’t associate either of those things with the tropics, however the festive clashing of bright red against the vast blues resulting from both events would be a pretty festive sight.
I’m never going to understand the hate toward the Jaws sequels. There’s even that unconfirmed Michael Caine quote, “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However I have seen the house that it built and it is terrific.”
Sure, they are terrible, but there are worse things for a movie to be, for example: sharkless. If you ask me, what we need is a fifth. Let’s dive into the abyss with this one.
12. Batman Returns
The beauty behind a Tim Burton Gotham City is that even if you live in poverty, your apartment still looks awesome. Also – it is by far the easiest city for blue-collar crime; everyone who might care is too distracted by that week’s spectacle. Just imagine trying to get a cop’s attention for a case of shoplifting when there’s a bird-guy riding a giant rubber ducky around the city and stealing babies.
I always imagined that in the Batman universe, Gotham is literally the only city having these issues – which makes it an embarrassment, but also an attraction. Like, there’s some goth kid in Dupont Indiana who just can’t wait to turn 18 because of this place.
11. Die Hard
Die Hard is the obligatory “Christmas but not Christmas” movie on these lists, and because of that I am required by movie-nerd law to include it here. I am, by no means, knocking the tradition, mind you. Don’t get me wrong here – every December it’s customary in my house to drop at least one German off of our roof to bring in the festivities, but I’m just starting to wonder if Die Hard Christmas is becoming too mainstream and commercialized, you know?
Maybe I’m becoming disillusioned by it all. Just the other day I swung from a fire hose and it didn’t even manage to hold my weight! I’m even starting to wonder of John McClane ever existed in the first place! No… No he is real. I know that in my heart.