Santa’s Little Helper (2015)
No, not the charming doggy from The Simpsons: this is a direct-to-DVD-to-dumpster affront to humanity, another of those movies wherein wrestlers (who, I suppose it’s fair to say, can act) try to become movie stars and without exception fail miserably. I refer you to
Santa With Muscles. Say no more. However it seems even Hulk Hogan would blush at this. It’s so bad that no critic would talk about it on Rotten Tomatoes, nor are there any audience reviews. Seems to take the basic idea from
Ernest Saves Christmas and expand it somewhat, in that Santa is looking, not this time for a replacement, but for a new helper. He chooses Dax, the wrestler known as The Miz (?) and sets him many tasks to see if he is up to the job.
The Miz is a Scrooge-like figure when we meet him, probably closer to Bill Murray’s character in
Scrooged than anything Dickens wrote, a corporate hatchet-man who is trying to close down a community centre. With magic balls, (ooer!) obstacle courses to be overcome (of course), an elf who is ostracised because of her freakishly round ears and a soppy love story, this sounds like the sort of thing even Adam Sandler would turn down.
Rotten Tomatoes ratings
Tomatometer: n/a
Audience Score: 24%
IMDB Rating
4.7/10
Metacritic rating
Not available
Oh wait! We have reviews. IMDB to the rescue! Let’s see…
There are a lot of negatives you could bring up about this movie; it's cheesy, the acting and plot are questionable, it drags in the middle, and the humour is way too basic. However it does qualify as a reasonably good Christmas movie and since that is what it is supposed to be then you can generally ignore most of those points. The only thing that might put some people off is the small amount of male-female violence that is present, as well as the assertion that men and women should be treated equally both physically and mentally. Personally I think that makes this film stand out, but it might offend some others (although a lot of the positive steps the film takes in this area is undercut by the lead female character being so taken aback by the man's insistence that she is pretty, because you know, that is all women want out of life.