Ru Paul

(On Cable TV, December 2022) Ugh. It’s barely mid-December and I’m already sick of Christmas movies, with their formulaic premises, too-nice characters and bland execution. Which probably explains why I like The Bitch Who Stole Christmas a lot more right now than I would at any other time of the year. Hastily put together by Ru Paul’s Drag Race creative team, this is a film that applies maximum drag camp to the usual Christmas movie clichés. There’s something like only one cisgendered woman in the cast and it doesn’t matter, because the result is a direct takedown to all of those Hallmark Christmas romantic comedies that all look and feel alike. Obviously, the story has to do with a big-city girl returning to her Christmas-obsessed small-town roots and falling in love again with an old flame. But it’s all in the details, and despite a miserable production budget, The Bitch Who Stole Christmas goes all-in on sight gags, quippy dialogue (some of it right at the edge of its TV-14 rating), inane plotting and ridiculous set-pieces. On purely objective grounds, this is not a good movie: the acting is obvious, the story makes little sense, the directing is indifferent, the sets are built with hope and baling twine, and the entire thing is so self-indulgent as to defy audiences unfamiliar with RuPaul’s growing media empire. But if, like me, you have little interest in drag but a huge score to settle with bland Xmas romcoms, there’s still a good chance that The Bitch Who Stole Christmas will make you chuckle a little. It’s fun, and it’s clearly very aware of what it’s trying to do. I may even watch it next year—if dull Christmas movies are the poison, this is the antidote.