My Favorite Anti-Santa Christmas Movies

[Elizabeth Grunewald]

My Favorite Anti-Santa Christmas Movies

Sometimes, you have to sit down and watch a movie. A Christmas movie. With your family.

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[Monshroud]

One of my favorite Anti-Christmas movies is The Ref with Dennis Leary. Leary plays a burglar who steals from a fancy house and after an alarm goes off his ride disappears, he is stuck in the town. He takes a dysfunctional family hostage, with the couple played by Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis.

The movie has a ton of foul language and great lines, it's a movie I watch every year at Christmas time.

 

[mjc0961]

As soon as I read the intro paragraph, I immediately thought Die Hard. Nice to see it included, and excellent clip you picked to go with it. I love when he says "Ho. Ho. Ho."

 

[Casual Shinji]

How could you forget Babe?!

That's a regular for my family every Christmas.

 

[Tarlane]

You putting Kiss Kiss Bang Bang on here makes me very happy, and not just because I have had a man crush on Val Kilmer since Real Genius and Top Secret. It really is an excellent movie that I really hadn't been thinking of as being associated with christmas, LA doesn't get enough snow to make the time of year jump out at you.

My thoughts immediately jumped to Gremlins and Die Hard though so I'm glad both of those were noted.

As always an enjoyable article.

 

[drbarno]

I thought Die-hard as soon as I started reading. I'm planning on watching all of the Die hard movies on christmas day as well.

 

[New Troll]

No Reindeer Games?!? Oh my...

Every year at Christmas time I've watched Die Had for the last umpteen years. I also watch Bad Santa now too.

 

[The Imp]

No Reindeer Games?!? Oh my...

Every year at Christmas time I've watched Die Had for the last umpteen years. I also watch Bad Santa now too.

Yes! Bad(der) Santa and Reindeer Games are great christmas movies and ofcourse Die Hard 1 and 2.
The Long Kiss Goodnight is also very good starring a great Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson duo.

 

[Varewulf]

I am partial to Gremlins myself. Watch it nearly every year.

 

[TheMadDoctorsCat]

So everyone loves "Die Hard"? Yeah, me too.

Can't agree on "Batman Returns" though. I always felt something was "off" about it, but I've only recently realised just how much Michelle Pfeifer ruins that movie. I still like it, but it's telling that by far the scariest villain in it is Christopher Walken's Max Shreck - the one guy who doesn't dress up in a costume or have a bullwhip or an umbrella that shoots laser beams.

EDIT: I'm also the one guy who preferred "Gremlins 2" to "Gremlins". I always felt that the original "held back" in an effort to set the scene and the characters. (Although the death involving a stair-lift is one of the all-time great comedy movie deaths; and the character who dies REALLY deserves it, which of course makes it that much better.) "Gremlins 2" goes all-out from early on, without ever sacrificing character or story to do so.

 

[Mana Fiend]

LivingTV always seems to show Little Shop of Horrors at Christmas time. I may well have it on DVD, but I'm happy every time it shows up.

 

[DaxStrife]

Die Hard definitely wins this list; Die Hard 2, not so much.
And props for including Ghostbusters 2; it may not be as good as 1, but dang it, it's still Ghostbusters.
Didn't see Kiss Kiss Bang Bang earlier this year, but it definitely deserves a mention, especially since a lot of nerds never heard of Robert Downey Jr. before Iron Man so this is a good pick to re-introduce them to his work.

 

[tahrey]

Die Hard +++++

But I think our dear old BBC has just trumped everything by trailering ... Armageddon as one of the big films in their Christmas lineup. I couldn't think of hardly anything less cheesily, cheerily Christmassy (I may be wrong, but don't they... like... fail in their mission?). Someone at the corp must have some serious yuletide issues they need to work out.

All different from when I was a kid when you couldn't move for The Santa Claus Movie, Big, Miracle on 34th St etc. Though I somehow still haven't seen either It's a Wonderful Life OR The Great Escape.

I'd like to get a small tradition going of showing Laputa every Xmas, as the first time I saw it as a snotty-eyed nipper was on a snowy boxing day in the 80s, when everyone else was in too much of a food coma to play with me in the garden, and it's an excellent, feelgood family movie with a slight wintery flavour but none of the usual sickening tweeness or overt christmas overtones.

 

[octafish]

You have four of my five favorite Christmas films, Die Hard 1 and 2, Gremlins (hey it's mentioned) and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, my fifth favorite is A Muppet Christmas Carol, but that wouldn't make this list I guess.

 

[Actual]

I love Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but I don't think it ever really registered with me that it is set at Christmas. They're in Hollywood, it's not like a real winter, it's like an English summer.

 

[mjc0961]

No Reindeer Games?!? Oh my...

Oh yeah, that's a good one too. Although now I want some pecan-fucking-pie and there is none to be had here... Rats.

 

[Sabrestar]

If you can ever find the network dub of Die Hard 2, it is utterly hysterical.

The dubbed-over voices aren't even close to the actual actors. The "clean" Bruce Willis is about a full octave higher than the real thing. Seriously, they're so far off you won't be sure who's actually speaking. And since there are so many F-bombs in the movie, you'll be hearing it a lot. It's a laugh riot.

And "Yippie-kai-ay, Mister Falcon" is the absolute pinnacle of the silliness.


Also worth noting, is my family's true Christmas movie: National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Sure, it's a Christmas movie, but it's so cathartic.

 

[Joe Comatose]

Hard to believe no one has mentioned Edward Scissorhands yet. One of the best Christmas movies that really has nothing to do with Christmas except for explaining why it snows at Christmas. Always in the DVD player at Christmas in our house.

Grimlins 1 & 2 get played as well.

 

[Clunks]

Title's a bit misleading - I was hoping for a list of anti-christmas movies like Black Christmas (not the remake) and Bad Santa. So not explicitly christmassy but just-about-seasonal-enough movies...that's one of the few areas were British terrestrial programming really pays off. The BBC in particular tends to show Wallace & Gromit specials, Pixar movies, Babe etc.

Oh, and Batman Forever is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Worse than either of Joel Schumacher's Batman movies, even.