Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever (2014)
We all know Grumpy Cat, don’t we? If not from memes and parodies then from YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. This cat has millions of likes and followers! I mean, I like cats but come on. Anyway, some bright spark apparently had the idea to extend Grumpy Cat’s fame into the world of movies, leap from YouTube to the real tube, as it were, with a made-for-TV Christmas movie. Oh, you can just hear the groans, can’t you?
Everyone loves a cat, eh? Except nobody did.
Rotten Tomatoes ratings
Tomatometer: 27%
Audience Score: 39%
IMDB rating
5.0/10
Hank Stuever in the
Washington Post quipped
Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever could use a whole lot more of Plaza's ad-libbed derision for the entire project and the suckers who find themselves watching it. The claws do come out, but the scratches just aren't deep enough
Gil Pennington of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch believed
There's a plot, which any of us could have written in our sleep.
Brian Moylan was not amused in
The Guardian:
If the people behind Sharknado could make a movie about Santa, it would look something like this.
While Libby Hill of
AV Club offered this:
The best way to describe the film as a whole would be if Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure, Home Alone, Garfield, icanhascheezburger, product placement, commercial breaks, outdated cultural references, suburban community theater, and acid had a baby.
And Josh Bell in the
Las Vegas Weekly called it
A cross between a crass piece of holiday marketing and the kind of thing that might air on Adult Swim in the middle of the night.
Audiences were not any kinder:
Half-assed and a quarter. Aubrey Plaza really phoned this one in with her higher whiney vocal range instead of her lower "give no ****s" vocal range. She could have even Janet Snakeholed it up a bit in the dramatic fantasy segments, but nope. Megan Charpentier is pretty natural for a kid actress, and Russell Peters as the inciting incident Santa is the highlight of this weird, embarrassing effort. The metatheatrical jokes are awkward and annoying
Commercial diarrhea. Avoid.
And I would leave it at that, except going back to AV Club, they had the best comment on it, and I can’t close this out without quoting it. Here it is.
the largest turd in [Lifetime's] crap crown of original programming...so unforgiving, so psychologically trying, that the process alone leaves the viewer straining to hear the dialogue over the sound of the soul being crushed wholesale, bone and sinew wrenched apart at the joint
Libby Hill again. You go, girl!
