On the ninth day of Christmas my rancid ex gave to me Christmas Survival.

Also on the ninth day of Christmas I started to think that maybe there are too many days of Christmas.

This movie is called Christmas Survival but it is really about a family that doesn’t quite get along. It’s almost two hours of arguments and bad parenting. There were too many characters to keep track of so I wasn’t even sure who belonged to what family most of the time. It’s got the standard stuff like ruined dinners, holiday mishaps, family tension etc. I found none of it interesting.

Look if you are going to call your movie Christmas Survival I expect some deadly dangers appearing.

Here are a few suggestions about what this could have been about.

• Dracula comes to torment the family and they have to survive together.
• Ditto the wolf man.
• The family eats a Christmas goose and half of them turn to zombies.
• The family is a pack of serial killers who lure people in need for their annual feast and then hunt them but this time the tables turn and the family gets hunted instead.
• The family is in an airplane crash and all they have to survive on is the holiday food they brought with them.
• There’s a secret underground fight club that the family get hoodwinked into joining and their only hope is the eight year old son who has watched a lot of television wrestling.
• Or you know, go with what this did and just make it a long boring conversation with such parental disorganization that the kids aren’t even allowed to open their presents on Christmas day and have every adult act like an incompetent jerk the whole time.

There is only one Christmas movie that works as an antidote to this. Die Hard. It takes place at Christmas and really is about survival.

Merrily Yours,

Slick Dungeon