Christmas Next Door (2017)

This was rough going for a while but it does come around. Good all around cast and decent writing. Let's get to the fact that Tara Yelland is the real star of this movie. Hot as a firecracker.

My wife and I settled in for some festive TV watching a couple of weeks ago, and we landed on Christmas Next Door from the Hallmark Channel. However, we also had things to do, so we only watched parts of this movie over the course of two hours. By the time the movie was over, I estimate that I had watched about 18 minutes of this actual movie, and my wife probably watched about 12 minutes. There was some overlap in our watching, but there were also some parts one of us watched while the other person was doing something in another room. Together, we pretty much got the gist of the story.It seems that the guy in the story, who early on had his black hair completely slicked back, did not have the Christmas spirit, and did not like decorating for Christmas. There was some annoying man who lived on Slicked-Back's block who wanted to decorate the front of his house for him, but Slicked-Back was having none of it. After not watching for a little while, my wife and I tuned in to find a blonde woman, who also lived on that block, talking to her sister about how Slicked-Back doesn't like to decorate. This part was troubling to me, and I honestly feared for Slicked-Back's life at that point. It seemed that the whole neighborhood was obsessed with him. I was afraid that the neighbors were going to drug him, kidnap him, and perform medical experiments on him where they tried to make him part reindeer. I imagine that they probably would have attached the antlers to his head, kept his face in tact, given him a reindeer torso, kept his human arms and legs, and then attached hooves. Sleep with one eye open, Slicked-Back!I guess my fear wasn't so great that I had to keep watching because we stopped paying attention to the movie for a while. When we started watching again, Slicked-Back was still alive, BUT he was hanging out with the blonde woman enjoying Christmas carols AND his hair went from being slicked back to an even side part. This encapsulated the main character's transition from being a bad boy who was too cool for xmas to the side-parted teddy bear who wanted nothing more than to buy the prized goose for Bob Cratchit's family. My wife noticed this too, and we both instantly knew that Side-Part had found the true meaning of Christmas. I was so moved that immediately hugged my daughter, but she was busy tearing napkins to shreds and therefore did not seem to care about my hug.

As a musician, it was really cringeworthy to watch the scenes featuring violin playing. They made no effort to even pretend to she was a violinist. I would hope that the story is at least a little believable. Further, I found the dialogue to be poorly written, awkward, and uninteresting.

Not that any of this year's Hallmark movies are anything special, but this one is one of the worst. The male lead, Jesse Metcalf, looks just like an overvthe hill Eddie Munster. The female lead was just another faceless bland blonde. The only saving grace of this movie is for those that play the Hallmark Christmas movie drinking game. It hits enough of the common plot points to get you good and snockered.