A Perfect Christmas List (2014)

(On TV, December 2022) Sigh… another December, another TV schedule filled with generic Christmas movies, most of them made-for-TV according to a low budget, formulaic screenplay and non-existent cinematic ambitions. I’ll give a shot to a few of them just to recalibrate my expectations and make sure they’re gone from my DVR by the time December 26 is done. A Perfect Christmas List certainly doesn’t reinvent the wheel, as a woman staying with her parents for the holidays ends up the victim of a scheme to re-create the Christmases of her childhood (by following the titular list), and finds a hunky piece of Christmas candy cane along the way. What brought me to the film was seeing writer-director Fred Olen Ray in the credits—someone who used to be infamous for terrible low-budget horror movies but has, over the past decade, largely transitioned to a steady four-films-a-year career as a TV movie director. Not enough attention is given to those workhorses of TV, although that can be justified by the lack of authorial voice in the results. A Perfect Christmas List, which dates from early in his transition to TV-movie-land, is remarkable in being unremarkable. The script hinges on the kind of miscommunication that could be resolved in ten seconds (or less: “Are you dying?” “No, I’m not dying!”) but propels characters to act out of their comfort zone for however long it takes to deliver the manufactured Christmas cheer. It’s hardly worth getting annoyed about the numerous issues with the script, the direction, the directing or the actor—the film is meant to be innocuous, and it’s hard to get worked up about something like that. But as a representative of how even a shock-horror filmmaker can be completely captured and neutered by the demands of a TV film formula, A Perfect Christmas List is near-exemplary: the pay cheque depends on slavish adherence to what is expected, and there’s nothing in here to suggest a director with loftier (or subversive) ambitions.