100 Worst Christmas Movies
Home Alone: The Holiday Heist (2012)
The Unhappy Christmas: Yes, really, there are now 5 Home Alone movies. This one revolves around 10 year old Finn - no relation to Kevin McAllister, and he doesn't even live in Chicago.
Ask For The Receipt When: Despite the opportunity to do something different, the filmmakers resort to having Finn defend his home from burglary with a load of booby traps.
How To Make It Delightful: Take the title's advice, and leave the poor kid alone.
Christmas Mail (2010)
The Unhappy Christmas: A postal worker is hired to spy on Kristi, a "Santa writer" whose job is to respond to letters addressed to the North Pole.
Ask For The Receipt When: It turns out that Kristi actually lives at the North Pole and is none other than Santa's daughter.
How To Make It Delightful: Kristi purchases the newly privatised Royal Mail and runs it as a not-for-profit organisation.
Christmas Evil (1980)
The Unhappy Christmas: Disturbed loner Harry takes to dressing like Santa and goes on a killing spree. This won't be the last time that happens on this list.
Ask For The Receipt When: During the prologue, the child Harry cuts off his hand with glass from a snowglobe after catching dad (dressed as Santa) groping mom.
How To Make It Delightful: Couldn't he just issue a stern word to the people on his naughty list?
Christmas In Love (2004)
The Unhappy Christmas: Two divorcees are forced to spend Christmas together and realise they still love each other.
Ask For The Receipt When: It is revealed that the couple's new spouses are already having an affair and organised the Christmas break to force the reconciliation in order to get them off the hook.
How To Make It Delightful: True love will surely prevail without that level of cynical manipulation.
Dear Santa (1998)
The Unhappy Christmas: A bad husband and father is given a shot at redemption when an elf transforms him into a 'secret Santa' who must help Father Christmas deliver the presents.
Ask For The Receipt When: The secret Santa goes 'full Yuletide' by wearing a bow tie that lights up.
How To Make It Delightful: How about the man turns into the real Santa? Oh, no, wait - that's already been done in The Santa Clause .
Christmas Present (1985)
The Unhappy Christmas: Yet another modern-day update of A Christmas Carol - but not the last on this list, oh no - this one stars future director Peter Chelsom as a yuppie forced to spend the night on a council estate.
Ask For The Receipt When: Fantasy bleeds into reality as Mary and Joseph turn up riding a donkey, looking for somewhere to sleep on Christmas Eve.
How To Make It Delightful: Avoid the ham-fisted attempts to bring Dickensian poverty into the Thatcherite 1980s.
Six Weeks (1982)
The Unhappy Christmas: Dudley Moore helps a 12-year-old ballerina with leukaemia to fulfil her life's dream of performing the Nutcracker with the New York Ballet.
Ask For The Receipt When: You realise Dudley Moore - Dudley Moore! - is meant to be playing a U.S. Congressman. You'd be better off casting Peter Cook.
How To Make It Delightful: Well, it'd be nicer if (spoiler) the girl didn't die.
Stalking Santa (2007)
The Unhappy Christmas: Mockumentary about a Santologist's attempts to track down Father Christmas.
Ask For The Receipt When: The hero discovers that the Government has been suppressing evidence that Santa exists because it would derail the economy if people discovered they didn't have to buy Christmas presents.
How To Make It Delightful: Let William Shatner - the film's narrator - play Santa.
A Golden Christmas (2009)
The Unhappy Christmas: A man and a woman fight over the house they both want to buy, little realising they were once childhood sweethearts.
Ask For The Receipt When: A magical golden retriever turns out to be responsible for bringing the couple back together.
How To Make It Delightful: If you're going to make a Christmas dog movie, just be honest about it and make a film about a Christmas dog.
Battle Royale 2: Requiem (2003)
The Unhappy Christmas: A year after Battle Royale 's survivor Shuya devastated Tokyo during a Christmas Day terrorist attack, a class of schoolchildren is sent to destroy him.
Ask For The Receipt When: Our sympathies are meant to switch from the hapless teenagers to Shuya, now an Al Qaeda-emulating psycho.
How To Make It Delightful: We're not bothered about a Battle Royale movie being delightful, but we'd prefer it not to take down Christmas with it.
Toys (1992)
The Unhappy Christmas: A war-crazed general inherits a toy factory and begins manufacturing drones. Only his nephew - Robin Williams - can stop him.
Ask For The Receipt When: Joan Cusack, as Williams' sister, gets her head blown off, only for the hero to discover she was a cyborg all along.
How To Make It Delightful: Lose the subplot where kids control the drones by playing (what they think are) video games. Don't give the Government any ideas!
It Happened One Christmas (1977)
The Unhappy Christmas: It's A Wonderful Life remade but with a woman - Mary Bailey Hatch - in the central role of the suicidal hero saved by an angel.
Ask For The Receipt When: It becomes obvious that, aside from recasting, they've basically kept the original script.
How To Make It Delightful: Watch the original.
ATM (2012)
The Unhappy Christmas: A trio of co-workers get trapped in an ATM booth by a hooded killer after leaving a Christmas party.
Ask For The Receipt When: The killer can't get into the booth without an ATM, but hasn't the gumption to simply smash the glass.
How To Make It Delightful: Pay off the killer and then use the rest of the cash to buy presents for orphans.
The Boy Who Saved Christmas (1998)
The Unhappy Christmas: A boy travels to the North Pole on a quest to have Santa help bring his parents back together.
Ask For The Receipt When: Santa's evil twin, Atnas, conspires to reverse Christmas so that he gets all of the presents.
How To Make It Delightful: Evil twin? Just... no.
Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas In July (1979)
The Unhappy Christmas: An evil wizard plans to create an army of evil snowmen using Frosty's hat, which the latter is blackmailed into giving up.
Ask For The Receipt When: Rudolph is accused of theft and his nose stops glowing.
How To Make It Delightful: Lighten the mood, maybe?
Christmas In Paris (2008)
The Unhappy Christmas: Belgian melodrama about a washed-up entertainer who helps a teenage orphan find out what happened to his parents.
Ask For The Receipt When: Yet another scene ends in one or both men breaking down in tears.
How To Make It Delightful: You're in Paris, guys. Go and watch some can-can dancers and have fun.
A Christmas Story 2 (2012)
The Unhappy Christmas: Belated sequel to the much-loved 1983 classic, whose hero Ralphie is now a teenager dreaming of getting a car for Christmas. So he's learnt nothing since the first film, then.
Ask For The Receipt When: Ralphie turns into a slapstick bumbler duelling with candy canes in a department store.
How To Make It Delightful: The original WAS delightful. Watch that instead.
Nativity 2: Danger In The Manger (2012)
The Unhappy Christmas: David Tennant assumes Martin Freeman's mantle of primary school teacher pushed into winning a national Christmas singing competition.
Ask For The Receipt When: The villain of the piece is revealed to be Tennant's identical twin brother, an arrogant composer.
How To Make It Delightful: Hire Matt Smith and John Hurt as Tennant's co-stars and let them travel through time and space… It's been done? Oh.
Autumn In New York (2000)
The Unhappy Christmas: Richard Gere falls in love with Winona Ryder, only to learn she's dying of a rare illness.
Ask For The Receipt When: Winona finally cops it on Christmas Day.
How To Make It Delightful: Let her live until New Year's Eve, at least.
The Perfect Holiday (2007)
The Unhappy Christmas: A department store Santa falls in love with a single mom while trying to make her daughter's wish come true.
Ask For The Receipt When: Queen Latifah and Terrence Howard turn up as angels Mrs Christmas and Bah Humbug.
How To Make It Delightful: A swift rewrite might prevent Santa coming across as a bit of a stalker.
A Christmas Proposal (2008)
The Unhappy Christmas: A lawyer is determined to turn a quaint village into a ski resort… until he gets stuck there and realises it's a nice place to live.
Ask For The Receipt When: It turns out the lady lawyer fighting for the village's survival is his childhood sweetheart.
How To Make It Delightful: At least try to pretend it's Christmas-time, instead of having the actors in short sleeves and the plants in full bloom.
A Nanny For Christmas (2010)
The Unhappy Christmas: A high-flying advertising exec who doesn't have time for her kids hires a nanny for the occasion. Imagine Mary Poppins shorn of anything that made Mary Poppins good.
Ask For The Receipt When: Dean Cain (he was Superman once, you know) turns up for no good reason than that the story needs a love interest.
How To Make It Delightful: Cast Julie Andrews as the nanny.
Winter Of Frozen Dreams (2009)
The Unhappy Christmas: The true story of Barbara Hoffman, a prostitute-turned-killer who was convicted in the first ever murder trial to be televised.
Ask For The Receipt When: You realise how far Thora Birch's career has collapsed since the heady days of American Beauty .
How To Make It Delightful: Set it during Summer? It might be factually inaccurate but it'd be less depressing around Christmas time.
Christmas Miracle (2012)
The Unhappy Christmas: Eight strangers find sanctuary in a church when a storm hits and help each other to overcome their woes.
Ask For The Receipt When: The film turns into one long religious hug-a-thon.
How To Make It Delightful: Make them work for their spiritual reawakening by having the church under siege from hungry wolves.
The Christmas Path (1998)
The Unhappy Christmas: A fallen angel tries to make amends to his boss - Santa - by helping out a family in trouble.
Ask For The Receipt When: You realise that the young son the angel is trying to help is none other than a pre-fame Shia LaBeouf.
How To Make It Delightful: Either this is a religious movie about an angel, or a secular one about Santa. Don't confuse the two.
Santa Claws (1996)
The Unhappy Christmas: Raven, an actress, is stalked by a crazed fan dressed in a Santa Claus outfit.
Ask For The Receipt When: The lunatic starts to bump off Raven's co-stars. His weapon of choice, thus justifying the pun in the title, is a claw.
How To Make It Delightful: Allowing the female cast to keep their clothes on would be a start.
Natale a Rio (2008)
The Unhappy Christmas: Two divorced men book a luxury holiday in Rio, but accidentally swap accommodation with their backpacking sons, who are also headed for Brazil.
Ask For The Receipt When: This turns out to be exactly the same as every other Italian Christmas comedy, except set in a different country.
How To Make It Delightful: Take a year off from taking your flat-footed slapstick on tour.
12 Dogs Of Christmas: Great Puppy Rescue (2012)
The Unhappy Christmas: A girl has to put on a Christmas show to save a puppy orphanage.
Ask For The Receipt When: The characters do a rap, despite this being set in the 1930s.
How To Make It Delightful: If you insist on having a 12 days of Christmas theme, the star should be a partridge, not a dog.
An American Carol (2008)
The Unhappy Christmas: A Michael Moore-style filmmaker is corrected of his left-leaning ways by three conservative angels, including Kelsey Grammar as General Patton.
Ask For The Receipt When: The filmmaker is taken to a future Los Angeles controlled by Islamic radicals.
How To Make It Delightful: This much right-wing bile is impossible to sweeten, but it might help to actually set a Dickens-inspired tale at Christmas, instead of the 4th of July.
Christmas In Compton (2012)
The Unhappy Christmas: Cuba Gooding Jr's brother Omar plays an aspiring music producer at loggerheads with crooked record exec Eric Roberts.
Ask For The Receipt When: The film's attempts at making a warm, upbeat African-American Christmas movie come at the expense of a stereotypical Korean character.
How To Make It Delightful: Raise the project's ambitions by casting Cuba Gooding Jr and Julia Roberts instead of their siblings.
Santa Baby 2: Christmas Baby (2009)
The Unhappy Christmas: Jenny McCarthy returns as Mary Claus, Santa's daughter, and has to stop an embittered elf taking over the North Pole.
Ask For The Receipt When: You realise that, in 1990, director Ron Underwood and actor Paul Sorvino (playing Santa) were working on, respectively, Tremors and Goodfellas . How the mighty fall.
How To Make It Delightful: Lose the gimmick whereby Mary is a high-flying suit from the City, and yet is still meant to be a loveable figure. In Christmas movies, the suits are the enemy.
Duplex (2003)
The Unhappy Christmas: Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore's dream apartment turns into a nightmare when they meet their elderly tenant.
Ask For The Receipt When: They hire a hitman to bump off the old dear on Christmas Eve.
How To Make It Delightful: No home is worth that much hassle. Just move, guys.
Christmas Cupid (2010)
The Unhappy Christmas: Christina Milian's Hollywood publicist must visit her boyfriends of Christmas Past, Present and Future in order to find true love. Even by the low standards of Dickens adaptations, this one scrapes the barrel.
Ask For The Receipt When: You see the credit, "Songs by Mariah Carey."
How To Make It Delightful: Instead of making a film, spend the budget on a dating agent for Hollywood players. They obviously need a cuddle.
Le Martien de Noel (1971)
The Unhappy Christmas: A Martian gets trapped in a small town in Quebec and needs the help of local children to repair his ship.
Ask For The Receipt When: You see the alien, who looks like a sex pest even before he tries to lure kids aboard his spaceship with Smarties.
How To Make It Delightful: Wait 11 years, get Steven Spielberg to make it and call it E.T.
Christmas With A Capital C (2010)
The Unhappy Christmas: An atheist lawyer returns to his home time and demands that Christmas is renamed 'Happy Holidays,' in this propaganda piece from evangelical Christians.
Ask For The Receipt When: It turns out that all the lawyer needed to discover his Christmas spirit was hugs and prayers.
How To Make It Delightful: The lawyer is trying to change Christmas into a 'Festivus, for the rest of us.'
Don't Open Till Christmas (1984)
The Unhappy Christmas: A maniac gets revenge on his dad (who cheated on - and then accidentally killed - his wife while wearing a Santa outfit) by killing anybody else dressed as Father Christmas.
Ask For The Receipt When: A Santa is murdered by the killer smashing his face into the fire he was merrily roasting chestnuts on.
How To Make It Delightful: How about some 'joy to the world' for once?
The Town That Cancelled Christmas (2006)
The Unhappy Christmas: When a feud between two neighbours gets out of hand, the authorities crack down and cancel all Christmas celebrations.
Ask For The Receipt When: You realise from the amateurish hand-held camerawork that the budget didn't extend to a tripod.
How To Make It Delightful: Cancel it.
A Carol Christmas (2003)
The Unhappy Christmas: Tori Spelling is a bilious talk show host who is visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve. Oh, right, it's yet another adaptation of Dickens, only here the ghosts include William Shatner and Gary Coleman.
Ask For The Receipt When: Shatner arrives as the Ghost of Christmas Past, using a Star Trek transporter to take Carol on her journey.
How To Make It Delightful: It's going to take more than a gender swap to bring anything new to this story.
The Dog Who Saved Christmas Vacation (2010)
The Unhappy Christmas: Paris Hilton voices Bella, a poodle who helps hero dog Zeus fend off two crooks.
Ask For The Receipt When: The plot degenerates into yet another remake of Home Alone , only this time with dogs in the Macauley Culkin role.
How To Make It Delightful: Vary the routine a bit, and have an animal that isn't a dog be the hero for once.
Der Weihnachtsmann heit Willi (1969)
The Unhappy Christmas: German comedy about two boys who win a washing machine and have no way of getting it home… until Santa offers to take it for them.
Ask For The Receipt When: "Santa" is revealed to be a thief.
How To Make It Delightful: For starters, what kind of name is "Willi" for somebody purporting to be Santa? Change it, now!
The Nutcracker In 3D (2010)
The Unhappy Christmas: Elle Fanning befriends a magical talking nutcracker. Score by Tchaikovsky, although there's no ballet on offer.
Ask For The Receipt When: John Turturro shows up as the villainous Rat King in full-on Nazi-style uniform.
How To Make It Delightful: It might help - if you're making a film based on a famous ballet - to include some actual dancing.
Chasing Christmas (2006)
The Unhappy Christmas: Tom Arnold plays a Scrooge-like dentist visited by three blah Christmas blah ghosts. However, this time there's a twist.
Ask For The Receipt When: The Ghost Of Christmas Past, desperate to become human, does a runner and Arnold has to chase him through time.
How To Make It Delightful: Stop doing Dickens wrong!
Elf-Man (2012)
The Unhappy Christmas: Jason Acuña - aka Wee-Man from Jackass - stars as an abandoned Christmas elf who discovers he is a superhero.
Ask For The Receipt When: The plot descends into a remake of Home Alone with a masked dwarf in the Macauley Culkin role.
How To Make It Delightful: Why not get back together with the old gang and make a Jackass Christmas special, Wee Man?
The Magic Christmas Tree (1964)
The Unhappy Christmas: Ultra-low-budget film about a boy who uses a magic ring to bring a Christmas tree to life, which then grants the boy three wishes.
Ask For The Receipt When: The boy wishes to have Santa to himself; Mr Claus is duly imprisoned in his living room.
How To Make It Delightful: The tree gets the three wishes instead.
Jaws: The Revenge (1987)
The Unhappy Christmas: A Great White kills Martin Brody's son on Christmas Eve. Could it be... REVENGE?
Ask For The Receipt When: The action shifts to the sunny Bahamas. What kind of Christmas film is this, anyway?
How To Make It Delightful: With the strategic addition of CGI headgear, this could easily be renamed Shark In A Santa Hat .
Elf Bowling the Movie: The Great North Pole Elf Strike (2007)
The Unhappy Christmas: Movie based on the Nintendo game in which Santa punishes striking elves by lining them up as bowling pins.
Ask For The Receipt When: The titular game is suggested as a means of resolving a dispute between Santa and evil brother Dingle Kringle.
How To Make It Delightful: Turn it into a movie about an elf flashmob.
Hercules Saves Christmas (2012)
The Unhappy Christmas: Hercules being a pit bull who takes a boy to the North Pole to convince Santa to put him on the nice list.
Ask For The Receipt When: Hercules speaks.
How To Make It Delightful: Hey, kid, why not try being nice the rest of the year and save yourself having to beg?
Jack Frost (1997)
The Unhappy Christmas: NOT to be confused with the Michael Keaton family film, this version is about a homicidal snowman.
Ask For The Receipt When: Jack rapes a pre-fame Shannon Elizabeth in the shower.
How To Make It Delightful: A pile of snow, a carrot for a nose, coal for eyes. It's not THAT difficult, is it?
A Halfway House Christmas (2005)
The Unhappy Christmas: Five recovering addicts share a house for the holidays… while being filmed for a reality TV show.
Ask For The Receipt When: Evil Jared Hasselhoff, of Bloodhound Gang fame, turns up as Santa.
How To Make It Delightful: Skip to Twelfth Night and, while you're there, you may as well skip to the twelfth step, too.
Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny (1972)
The Unhappy Christmas: When Santa's sleigh gets stuck in the sand on a Florida beach, he tells them the story of Thumbelina before the Ice Cream Bunny offers to chauffeur him around in a fire truck.
Ask For The Receipt When: An hour of the running time is devoted to the story-within-a-story because the producers have craftily filmed the Santa stuff as a framing device for a different film.
How To Make It Delightful: Ditch Santa and just make a film about the bunny instead.
Love Actually (2003)
The Unhappy Christmas: Every actor in Britain falls in love. Actually, there's a couple of Americans, too.
Ask For The Receipt When: It all gets too much and you start to feel sick from too much sugar.
How To Make It Delightful: Chop out half the plots and concentrate on the ones that don't provoke a gag reflex.
Serendipity (2001)
The Unhappy Christmas: Jonathan (John Cusack) and Sara (Kate Beckinsale) decide to let fate decide if they should be together after meeting while Christmas shopping.
Ask For The Receipt When: Years later, they're both still moping around - but neither has bothered Googling the other.
How To Make It Delightful: Who needs to put their trust in Serendipity , when Cusack already has The Sure Thing on his C.V.?
Christmas Caper (2007)
The Unhappy Christmas: Thief Kate Dove (Shannen Doherty) goes into hiding after a Christmas con goes wrong.
Ask For The Receipt When: She is forced to babysit for her niece and nephew, who gradually thaw her frozen heart
How To Make It Delightful: Drop the 'r' from the title and make Christmas Cape , about a superhero dressed as a snowman.
Fitzwilly (1967)
The Unhappy Christmas: Crooked butler Fitzwilly (Dick Van Dyke) masterminds a Christmas Eve department store robbery.
Ask For The Receipt When: The heist itself simply looks like a typically fraught afternoon's shopping on Oxford Street.
How To Make It Delightful: Dick Van Dyke should only be employed alongside singing nannies or flying cars.
Just Friends (2005)
The Unhappy Christmas: Fat teenager-turned-handsome twentysomething Chris Brander (Ryan Reynolds) gets a second chance with his high school crush, Jamie (Amy Smart).
Ask For The Receipt When: Chris ruins a children's Christmas pageant. That's about as Christmassy as this one gets.
How To Make It Delightful: Chris puts his puppy fat back on so he can audition for The Xmas Factor as a wannabe Santa.
Christmas Carol: The Movie (2001)
The Unhappy Christmas: Ebenezer Scrooge (Simon Callow) is visited by ghosts, etc etc. C'mon, you must know how this one ends.
Ask For The Receipt When: You realise the most innovative thing they've done is to slap "The Movie" onto the end of the title.
How To Make It Delightful: A surefire solution to Dickens fatigue - add Muppets.
Rent (2005)
The Unhappy Christmas: A year in the life of New York bohos begins when they're asked to pay unanticipated rent on Christmas Eve 1989.
Ask For The Receipt When: Nobody blinks when there's a reference to Thelma And Louise , not released until well after the events of this film's story.
How To Make It Delightful: Watch it on stage where it was meant to be seen.
The Great Rupert (1950)
The Unhappy Christmas: Rupert, a squirrel, decides to help the family he shares a house with by passing their landlord's money to them.
Ask For The Receipt When: The kilt-wearing Rupert starts to dance.
How To Make It Delightful: Money problems this Christmas? Roasted squirrel makes a fine alternative to turkey.
The Family Man (2000)
The Unhappy Christmas: A mysterious tramp (Don Cheadle) sends banker Jack Campbell (Nicolas Cage) into the alternative life he might have had if he'd become a family man.
Ask For The Receipt When: You realise you're being asked to watch a cookie-cutter remake of It's A Wonderful Life .
How To Make It Delightful: Nicolas Cage is forced to live a life where he continues to make good films after, say, Face/Off .
Babes In Toyland (1997)
The Unhappy Christmas: Nursery rhyme power couple Jack and Jill are caught in a witch's plan to take over Santa's toy factory.
Ask For The Receipt When: The film lurches schizophrenically from cutesy fairytale into kid-scaring goblin horror.
How To Make It Delightful: For a counter-cultural Christmas, try a concert film from 1990s girl grunge rockers Babes in Toyland.
The Ice Harvest (2005)
The Unhappy Christmas: Crims John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton are thwarted in their efforts to escape with $2 million during a frozen Christmas Eve.
Ask For The Receipt When: It hits you that Harold Ramis is directing Cusack and Thornton, and yet this black comedy isn't very funny.
How To Make It Delightful: They're stuck in a cold town. C'mon, Ramis, give us Groundhog Day again.
Alvin And The Chipmunks (2007)
The Unhappy Christmas: Songwriter David Seville (Jason Lee) finds a trio of singing Chipmunks - Alvin, Simon and Theodore.
Ask For The Receipt When: The squeaky-voiced critters wail through "Christmas, Don't Be Late."
How To Make It Delightful: Mute the volume.
Trapped In Paradise (1994)
The Unhappy Christmas: Three criminal brothers (Nicolas Cage, Jon Lovitz, Dana Carvey) are stranded by snow in the town whose bank they've just robbed.
Ask For The Receipt When: Having exhausted conventional transportation, the brothers try to flee town on a horse-drawn carriage.
How To Make It Delightful: For once, can't the crooks be charmed by small-town values before they've intimated the locals with violence?
It Happened On 5th Avenue (1947)
The Unhappy Christmas: Hobo Aloysius T. McKeever (Victor Moore) squats in a deserted 5th Avenue mansion.
Ask For Th