Christmas Creeps

It's February, and by now you've probably accumulated a fair number of Christmas cards that you've either stashed or trashed. And that's what we want to talk about today, with "The Pick", the first of Seinfeld 's two holiday episodes. "The Pick" finds Elaine agonizing over a Christmas card that features some unfortunate nudity, among other subplots that have little-to-nothing at all to do with Chr...

Welcome to season six of Christmas Creeps!  Niall Flanagan and Dwayne Moloney, cohosts of the Secret of the Sailor Madness podcast, join us once again to discuss the handmade charms of the Netflix original film Klaus ! The film tells the story of Jesper, a young postal worker sent to the farthest reaches of Scandinavia. With the help of a reclusive toymaker named Klaus, Jesper accidentally gives b...

Merry Christmas! It's time once again for our annual "July at Christmas" episode, where we take a break from Christmas to discuss something equally near and dear to our hearts: Obnoxious jingoism! Also video games! Inspired by our discussion of Four Christmases , this year we turn our attention to one of our favorite sports documentaries. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters isn't just a film a...

Happy December to one and all! This week, we present to you a Stocking Stuffer we recorded back in August. J5 went digging around the Lost Media Wiki and turned up Cranberry Christmas ! Sponsored and produced by the Ocean Spray cranberry juice company, this animated special features songs and narration from the one and only Barry Manilow! To our knowledge it has aired only once, and as this podcas...

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone, and that can only mean one thing... It's time for our third annual Shane Black Friday! Libby Cudmore joins us to help navigate all the bizarre twists and turns of Renny Harlin's 1996 action yarn The Long Kiss Goodnight . National treasure Geena Davis plays a recovering amnesiac who suddenly, violently discovers her former life as a trained assassin, and Samu...

This one has been a long time coming. Our celebration of all things Bob Clark—known around these parts as CLARKSGIVING—comes to an end with perhaps the greatest Christmas movie of them all: A CHRISTMAS STORY ! Our friends Booker and Jessie join us for a discussion of one of the true kings of holiday cinema. The adventures of Ralphie Parker and his quest for that elusive Red Ryder BB gun have becom...

Happy November, friends! It's time to pack up Home for the Horrordays for another year. But fret not, because we have one last bit of horror goodness up our sleeves. Ten years before A Christmas Story , Bob Clark directed a little horror movie called Black Christmas , which would inspire slasher cinema for decades to come. Halloween ,  My Bloody Valentine ,  Scream and countless others owe some so...

It's everyone's favorite time of year! No, it's not Christmas just yet. It's time to go  Home for the HorrorDays!  This week, we're revisiting the saga of the Caldwell family with Silent Night Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out ! Somehow, Ricky "Santa Claus Killer" Caldwell survived the last film, and what's he got to show for it? Oh nothing much, just his EXPOSED BRAIN IN A JAR WHERE HIS SKULL USED...

It's finally here! We conclude Vaughn-a-thon this week with Vince Vaughn's other holiday offering: The $100 million comedy spectacle  Fred Claus ! What happens when St. Nick's deadbeat brother Fred gets arrested for grifting money away from Salvation Army Santas? Nick bails him out on the condition that he come work for him at the North Pole. And then there are some shenanigans involving Kevin Spa...

Welcome to Vaughn-a-thon! This month we're highlighting the two holiday features produced by and starring Vince Vaughn. We kick things off with Four Christmases, which we assumed would be the lesser of two evils. We assumed wrong. From the sheer volume of A-list stars with nothing to do, to the film's weirdly antagonistic tone, to the way it forces regressive notions about family upon a couple wit...

Summer is winding down, and since we've been in the superhero mood lately, we thought it would be fun to look at a film from earlier this summer. Shazam!  not only takes place around the holidays, but makes particularly good use of it in service of its themes of family and togetherness. It's also a pretty damn fun movie, with a positive streak a mile wide. Why would a studio produce a movie set at...

Happy August, everybody! Have you spotted any signs of Christmas Creep out and about? It'll be here before you know it! Anywho, on this week's show, Joe & Johnny-5 take a look at "Christmas with the Joker", the first of two holiday episodes produced for  Batman: The Animated Series ! Batman and Robin's quiet Christmas Eve is interrupted by The Joker, who's kidnapped Commissioner Gordon and set up...

Every once in a while you hit a brick wall, and your only options are to give up or to power straight through it. That's the situation we found ourselves in this week, as we finally subjected ourselves to the astoundingly brain-dead children's comedy SANTA WITH MUSCLES . Hulk Hogan basically plays himself as a do-gooder fitness guru who gets conked on the head just hard enough to believe he's Sant...

Every once in a while you hit a brick wall, and your only options are to give up or to power straight through it. That's the situation we found ourselves in this week, as we finally subjected ourselves to the astoundingly brain-dead children's comedy SANTA WITH MUSCLES . Hulk Hogan basically plays himself as a do-gooder fitness guru who gets conked on the head just hard enough to believe he's Sant...

It's six months til Christmas, the 4th of July is right around the corner, so what better time to discuss a Jaws movie?!  Jaws: The Revenge , to be specific, the movie that IMDb's users have declared the 27th worst movie ever made. It's also the one Jaws movie that actually takes place around the holidays, so like it or not, here we come! Also in this episode, the guys take a stab at writing their...

With a brand new X-Men film currently in theaters, Joe & J-5 take it upon themselves to discuss "Have Yourself a Morlock Little X-Mas," the Christmas episode from season 4 of X-Men: The Animated Series . The Morlocks have lured the X-Men into their lair in the hopes of delivering an X-Mas miracle. Can Jubilee, Wolverine and Storm save a young mutant's life and get back home in time for Gambit's X-...

We're wrapping up Ani-May this week with one of the finest holiday films we've ever featured! Satoshi Kon's 2003 holiday opus Tokyo Godfathers is a fairy tale about redemption, miracle babies, and all the good stuff you would hope a Christmas movie would be about, all wrapped in the guise of a quest narrative that's slightly comedic and slightly melodramatic, but it all works out in the end. Joini...

We're back with another Stocking Stuffer, this week tackling "Christmas at Tiffany's", a Christmas episode from stalwart anime Lupin the Third 's second series. Lupin & Co. spend the holiday in New York City when they're offered the chance to rob the world famous Tiffany's for fun and profit. Will the heist go off without a hitch? Or will the gang find themselves behind bars for Christmas? We brea...

Welcome to Ani-May, everybody! Bradford is taking the reins this month and programming the next few episodes. Kicking things off, we're dipping into the Netflix anime series  Aggretsuko , and its season-capping holiday special "We Wish You a Metal Christmas". It's a little bit  The Office,  a little bit Dethklok, and 1000x more adorable than that description might suggest. Will this month's first...

Join us this week as we discuss the direct-to-video Looney Tunes film  Bah, Humduck! A Looney Tunes Christmas . In this shameless rehash of "A Christmas Carol", Daffy Duck is an evil department store owner visited by three spirits to teach him the True Meaning of Christmas! Or at least, that's what the last ten minutes is about. The rest is your usual Looney Tunes shenanigans executed on a shoestr...

Can you believe it's been four years and we haven't discussed a single Rankin/Bass special yet? (That live-action remake of The Year Without a Santa Claus doesn't count. It'll never count. Fight me.)  Anyway, this week we're diving deeeeeeeep into the Rankin/Bass catalog to discuss the 1981 special  The Leprechaun's Christmas Gold ! It's about leprechauns trying to stop a banshee from stealing the...

Happy Redboxing Day, everybody! Last year's holiday hits are finally available to rent, so this week we're digging into one Joe has been looking forward to for quite some time: the Scottish high school zombie musical Anna and the Apocalypse ! The trailers describe it as " Shaun of the Dead meets  La La Land " and you would be surprised to find out which half of that equation fares better. Oh, and...

Now, I know what you're thinking. "The Christmas podcast that does swears is gonna do a Bible movie?!?" Let me state right up front that there are absolutely ways to make religious movies with the artistry to back up the message. And then there are ways to make religious movies that exclusively preach to the choir. Guess which category The Star falls into... We spend a lot of time discussing what...

The office Christmas party is such a cliche at this point that every workplace comedy inevitably has to make  that episode. I mean, there's even a whole movie built around the idea. (We reviewed it once; it's terrible.) This week, the guys take a look at the Christmas special from the original UK version of  The Office.  Is David Brent a sympathetic figure? How easy is it to separate the Brent per...

If you've listened to our show for any length of time, you'll know that we don't plan things like this. The fact that this week's film is eerily similar to the last film we covered is 100% accidental. Anyway, this week we're taking our third trip into the Air Bud Cinematic Universe with  Santa Paws 2 , a film whose plot bears a striking resemblance to  The Christmas Chronicles , and which fundamen...