Friday, May 15, 2020

A Christmas Story 2 (2012)



"A Christmas Story 2" isn't the worst movie in the world. If you're looking for a real "so bad, it's good" movie, this won't suffice.

Several years after the first movie, Ralphie is in his teens and dreaming of getting a car.  He's also dreaming of a certain girl at school. His dad is still wrestling with the furnace and trying to save money on a Christmas turkey by ice fishing for Christmas fish. Oddly, his father is played by Daniel Stern who was the narrator on "The Wonder Years" which was inspired by "A Christmas Story".

If you watched it having never heard of the original, you'd say it was competent, not good, but not terrible. The problem is it's SUCH a terrible, terrible idea. Every moment that you try to connect this movie to the first one in your head, you're reminded how this movie is horrible by comparison. It doesn't help that so many of the jokes are direct references to the first movie. This is a sequel 20 years removed from the first but they still try to make it a formula. There's also some bad green screen - fine, it's a low-budget movie, but, again, the first movie's low-budget never shows for even a single frame.

There's one strange, mind-bending aspect of this movie that was interesting. As Ralphie and his teenage friends get into embarrassing and compromising situations, it almost becomes a slight "teen sex comedy." But the first one was, in many ways, about Ralphie getting embarrassed; it makes sense that that would continue when he was older. In that way, there's a similarity between "A Christmas Story" and "American Pie" that I never considered.

Anyways, there are two other "A Christmas Story" sequels, making this "A Christmas Story 4" in a way. I'll be trying to find the other two.

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