Worth Mentioning - Santa Claus Is Coming to Town

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Cody has an action-packed holiday.

THE GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY HOLIDAY SPECIAL (2022)

The long wait between Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and the trilogy capper Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 will be coming to an end in just a few months, but while we get through these last months franchise writer/director James Gunn has given fans a heartwarming bonus: a 42 minute Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, released through the Disney+ streaming service.

Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), abducted from Earth back in 1988, is spending another Christmas away from his home planet, and his alien sister Mantis (Pom Klementieff) has decided to brighten his holiday by giving him the perfect gift. A meet and greet with his favorite actor, Kevin Bacon! Quill has filled the minds of his fellow Guardians with stories that make Bacon out to be one of the greatest heroes the world has ever known. He saved a town by dancing! (In Quill’s version of Footloose.) He defeated Jason Voorhees! Mantis and Drax (Dave Bautista) head to Earth in a spaceship, planning to give Kevin Bacon a ride into space... and are disappointed to discover that he’s just an actor. But that doesn’t stop them from abducting him and flying him off for a meeting with Quill. And even though this is weird and scary for Bacon, the situation plays out just like you would hope to see from a Christmas special.

The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special is a quick and amusing goof that should make for good annual viewing alongside other TV holiday specials. (As well as another Marvel / Disney+ show that was set at Christmas, Hawkeye.)

And given that the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Friday the 13th franchise are two of my all-time favorites, this Holiday Special was a special gift for me because I got to hear a reference to Jason Voorhees and Bacon’s role in the original F13 film (where, despite what Quill told the other Guardians, he “didn’t actually kill Jason”, or even cross paths with him) in a Marvel production! That mash-up of my cinematic loves put a smile on my face and definitely brightened my holiday.

VIOLENT NIGHT (2022)

Directed by Tommy Wirkola from a screenplay by Pat Casey and Josh Miller, the holiday action thriller draws some very clear inspiration from Die Hard and Die Hard 2, both of which were also set at Christmastime. The story sees a group of heavily armed mercenaries with Christmasy codenames (Krampus, Frosty, Sugarplum, etc.), led by John Leguizamo as Mr. Scrooge, raiding the mansion of the extremely wealthy Gertrude Lightstone (Beverly D’Angelo), taking her and her family – including her 7-year-old granddaughter Trudy (Leah Brady) – hostage as they work to crack into a vault believed to contain $300 million. The mercenaries in the house are backed up by a small army, a “kill squad”, of men on snowmobiles outside. And the situation would be extremely dire for the Lightstone family if there wasn’t an unexpected guest in their home. A man who – reluctantly at first – takes it upon himself to save the family and wipe out the bad guys.

The twist that makes Violent Night especially fun, and all of its Die Hard similarities completely forgivable, is that the unexpected guest in the Lightstone home is Santa Claus himself, played by David Harbour! Santa may be a drunken mess and a cookie addict, but he also proves to be quite a badass when backed against a wall... and along the way, he reveals that he was once a Viking warrior called Nikamund the Red. Back then, he liked to smash people with his hammer called Skullcrusher. He’s not sure how all of this Christmas magic stuff works, but there’s a feeling that his Santa duties are a way of making amends for all the violence he was responsible for in his Nikamund days.

Harbour does a great job playing this take on Santa, and Violent Night has a really fun sense of humor to it. Rest assured, “Die Hard with Santa Claus” is not to be taken seriously – and to let you know they don’t think they’re fooling anybody, the filmmakers even include a moment where Santa pulls “Die Hard on Blu-ray” out of his gift sack. There are plenty of humorous sights and lines in this movie, and some great displays of entertaining violence. One of the standout sequences doesn’t even involve Santa. It’s a scene where Trudy has to deal with a couple mercenaries on her own, and does so using tricks she learned from watching Home Alone. She thinks the booby-traps she has created are just as funny and silly as they were in the movie, but they dish out more realistic injuries to her tormentors than the ones we saw in Home Alone. It’s pretty nasty, but also highly amusing.

Violent Night is a great action comedy, the sort of movie I wish I would have been able to watch with my late father.