It takes eight minutes until we see a flashback to the first film.

A lot of this film is quite bad. Almost any time Robert Culp is on screen it feels like it’s spinning its wheels and filling time; Ricky (incredible headgear aside) is a shadow of his eyebrow-wiggling, garbage day-declaring self; a third thing to round out this list but I’ve already forgotten most of the side characters.

But I find a lot of the scenes with Laura strangely compelling. Maybe I am just distracted by her looking a bit like Jennifer Connelly while being the best-dressed blind woman in the world but I really like this abrasive, assertive blind girl pensively making her way through an awful horror sequel.

Fun but in a popcorny way for the most part, which I guess is appropriate for a Christmas episode. I had forgotten how messy this was. Feels very all over the place, bouncing from setpiece to setpiece with the Doctor saying “but that’s impossible!” half a dozen times to segue into the next story beat. Also, the Segways. The awkward staging of the Racnoss queen feels very, well, stagy and the hamminess of her acting with the bit with Lance and the axe feels like it tips over into pantomime. Which, again, appropriate I suppose.

More than happy to watch this one again and delighted to introduce my partner to it. Maybe it can become a new tradition.

💯🦭💋🌹🪦

Between the disjointed sketch comedy feeling of many of the scenes and the audio that is all over the place this reminds me of movies I made with friends in secondary school but on a grand scale. The gender politics are kind of fascinating and all over the place.

tuoys :)

It is a bit of a letdown after the first series, isn’t it? Not that Tennant is bad, he makes a great first impression here. But everything else feels a bit weak. Rose’s character development gets rolled back and she feels utterly helpless without the Doctor, having just saved him right before this.

I am never very fond of them trying to make the Doctor an action hero badass and the fact that the sword fight looks so rubbish doesn’t help. There are a few highlights. I enjoyed the Sycorax switching to English mid-speech as a sign that the Doctor was awake again (even if I also don’t like the translation circuit working through him makes him even more special and magical) and visually evoking East Enders with the overhead view of the alien invasion is a cute way for Davies to wear his soapy influences on his sleeve.

Watching in Japanese all the way through for the first time and this film is even better than I remembered, honestly. Even more details to pick out on a rewatch, things friends pointed out in passing as funny that I didn’t even notice and have such thought and significance to them when you know what’s coming after. I am not completely happy with the film’s attitude towards family and parents but I am more than happy to overlook it in service to rest of the movie.

The only reason to watch this is to do a double feature of it with the sequel as a prank on your friends.

This film is so much funnier than I remember. Half of it is just footage of the first film and then most of the rest is more flashbacks and it briefly turns into In the Mouth of Madness when Ricky goes on a date to the cinema where they are also playing footage of the first movie.

Nitpicking in the extreme: The reused footage has a strangely inconsistent quality and seems to often be much darker than the original film actually was, at least in the copies we watched, but they do at least colour-correct the slow motion shot from the end of the first film that had a jarringly different colour temperature to the rest of the shots surrounding it. I was also very glad that they removed the extremely harsh white flashing that accompanies flashbacks in the original movie that we are flashing back to here.

What elevates the reused footage is Eric Freeman’s narration. He is trying to be sinister throughout the movie but delivers every single line with the exact same menace and weight that would be comedic in and of itself but as it becomes a monotone across the entire picture just gets funnier and funnier as it goes on. Also, despite a huge portion of the film being reused from the first film Ricky’s narration manages to get some of the plot details wrong. When we finally leave the flashbacks his physical acting is iconic, constantly waggling his eyebrows like someone rigged his animation skeleton incorrectly and tied them directly to his lip movements.

There is someone named Samurai Retz in credits listed as playing himself and I have no idea who in the film that is meant to be and there does not seem to be any information about him online other than the fact that he is listed in the credits of this film.

Lovely mix of silliness, heartfulness and fun scifi plotting that one would expect from Moffat. I love the wee lesbian though I am surprised that she wasn’t more central to the episode and Anita obviously hits it out of the park with the surprise mini episode she got to be co-star of in the middle of this one.

The weak link, which I felt as a recurring issue with the last series, is a resolution that is fairly thinly justified and in this case also feels like reheated leftovers from Boom, which itself felt like it was relying on established tropes from previous Moffat stories to fill in the gaps. Like the ending is a photocopy of a photocopy of a person’s consciousness uploaded into a computer to exist in some sort of cyberspace afterlife.

The idea of running the Santa operation like a hyper-competent thriller spy agency is cute (if you don’t think about it too much). I was worried that the movie would have that as basically its only joke but it’s allowed to fade into the background without constant lampshade hanging or winking at the camera over it.

I was similarly worried that Arthur’s steadfast belief in the true spirit of Christmas would be a bit overbearing but his earnestness is cute without going totally overboard and the egos and cynicism of the other Santas have a groundedness that ties the silly antics into a plot that manages to feel real and touching despite my own inherit cynicism to stories about Christmas.

I believe that I watched this last year as part of a movie night thing and trashed it. I was feeling extremely cynical about it and just couldn’t get over the idea of someone who talks about getting rid of the “surplus population” being so easily convinced towards being the most generous man in the world (and even at the end of the movie he still indulges in playing with the power he holds over the Cratchits before being nice to them).

This year I watched it with my partner who is a bit more into sentimental Christmas movies than I am and let the politics melt aside to enjoy it and had a genuinely lovely time. I don’t think I need to sing the praises too much, that the puppetry is great and that Michael Caine’s Scrooge being a perfect foil for it is a given. The songs are fun and yes of course I cried at Tiny Tim dying.

But to put on my cynic hat one last time the framing device with Rizzo and Gonzo could really be cut it consistently fails to be funny.