Happy POLLidays! (Happy POLLidays!) It's the ILX Holiday Movies Poll Results Thread

Black Christmas is an odd movie, but I find its quirks to be endearing & it ranked high on my list. It's arguably the prototypical slasher film, though the tropes of that subgenre were very much cast by Halloween (which Carpenter modeled heavily on BC, structurally at least), so it seems strangely anachronistic within the context of its own cultural significance.

i remarked on the noms thread, it was pretty fun seeing the Big Twist at the end and realizing that must have been the first time that now-cliche idea was used

Black Christmas is absolutely ice-cold and I love it.

Black Christmas is everything I want in a horror pic: funny, creepy, genuinely haunting and yet fun in a way that keeps it from being too grim or depressing. Also, a cast that includes Margot Kidder, Andrea Martin and Doug McGrath from Goin’ Down the Road—a trifecta of 70s Canadian awesomeness!

c/d - the bumbling keystone cops in BC. I go back and forth on this.

Black Christmas is fine but, like The French Connection, its bones have been picked clean by the subgenre that it spawned.

i remarked on the noms thread, it was pretty fun seeing the Big Twist at the end and realizing that must have been the first time that now-cliche idea was used

yes, totally! I think it was the first time this idea was used in a film, possibly inspired by the real life murder of Janett Christman? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_babysitter_and_the_man_upstairs

it says right there: Foster's Release (1971)

granted that wasn't a feature film

Foster's Release is a 1971 American short film of 14 minutes directed by Terence H. Winkless... In Illinois, it is commonly shown to classes in home economics for whom it illustrates the concepts of responsibility and deviancy.

BC was my #1, "ice cold" is right. Anyone see the allegedly feminist 2nd remake?

Wow, reading that Fosters Release stars Dan Obannon, writer of Alien, and directed by the guy who played Bingo the Gorilla in the Banana Splits!

unsung pioneers, the lot of them!

new Black Christmas is fantastic, and "allegedly feminist" is insultingly reductive given the actual content and its extremely specific connection to real world events

ok!

wouldn't want to be flippant about a movie I haven't seen that features a specific connection to real-world events :)

SEE THAT U DON'T

anyway it's good but now that Star Wars is out, all the multiplexes in town have dropped it to one screening a day

Sorry for the delay before today's final entry ...

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16. TANGERINE
Sean Baker, USA, 2015
(300 points, 6 votes)

u guys really like recent overrated films

I'm not qualified to comment on this film, but thank you for completing the day's posting. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm going to have a drink.
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I loved Tangerine

I am also a sap who voted for tangerine, a pretty good xmas movie. Thanks Eric H and Pillbox!

regarding Foster's Release, there is very scant info online about it, and it is not on youtube (neither is Judson's Release, which it is also known by). It's unclear how it would have found itself onto the radar of Bob Clark, but it seems likely that it did play a formative role in Carpenter's ideas for Halloween:

The crown jewel of the program is a short by Winkless and Lorimore and starring O’Bannon entitled Judson’s Release. Made in 1971, Judson’s Release is the blueprint for films such as Halloween, Black Christmas, He Knows You’re Alone and countless others, and O’Bannon’s relentless and emotionless portrayal of the killer resembles Jason, Michael Myers and many other film killers who would follow.

http://uschefnerarchive.com/project/shock-value-the-movie/

xp - l'chaim!

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these results are so weird

positively crawling up yr own asses with non canonical picks rmde

This is ILX. We identify ourselves by conspicuous contrarianism. (Will I think the same thing in the morning, when I'm sober? We'll see.

The older I get, and the more popular moviemaking swirls down the drain of franchise-driven content wheels, the more fondness I have for mid-level broad-market entertainments tbh.

― temporarily embarrassed thousandaire (Eric H.), Thursday, December 19, 2019 4:00 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

^otm - very well stated. The target-marketing & accompanying advertising campaign for Home Alone was absolutely immense for 1990, but quaint in comparison to our new, vertically-integrated corporate ouroboros.

xxp - VG, I think the main reason the results are 'weird' is that we only got 16 ballots for this poll, hence the 'non-canonical' quirks. A larger voter pool would have centered consensus picks more squarely.

The conspicuous contrarianism of picking such tedious obscurities as Home Alone, Miracle on 34tn St, A Muppet Christmas Carol, Elf, A Christmas Tale, National Lampoons Christmas Vacation as among the great holiday movies of all time. Rmde indeed.

Spoiler Alert: #1 is A Serbian Film

“None of the major canonical Christmas films have come up in spots 40 through 16... what a dumb poll”

blow it out your chimney

I was in my late 20s when Home Alone came out. I never saw it, because why would any single adult, ever?

Veg if none of your ballot of twenty have placed yet, maybe 3/4 of them will place on Monday (or whenever Eric is finishing)

Christmas Vacation should've been higher but didn't vote, won't moan. Whoever said Batman Returns is the only good comicbook movie ever is entirely correct, also another RIP Tim Burton moment.

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I think I'll hack away at #11-15 over the next couple days, leaving the top 10 for Monday.

34. Home Alone
Watching this as an adult, I noticed Hughes's excellect plotting. Everything in the last 20 minutes is meticulously set up. The doc on netflix is worth a watch too. also jack saint's recent youtube video on the movie's awful politics.

29. Elf
I love the north pole beginning, but then the family drama is a failure, and the ending isn't connected to anything else. James Caan and his character just don't work.

28. Christmas Vacation
Hughes's 50s nostalgia and class unconsciousness are front and center. It still has some good jokes, especially with the aunt and uncle towards the end. As an adult my favorite scene is the short discussion between Clark Griswold and his father.

23. Muppet Christmas Carol
I nominated this just so no one would complain about its absence. I think it was the weakest Muppet movie made up to that point.

21. The Thin Man
rewatched it this month. Two great characters right at the center, but nothing else works. great screengrab choice btw, that's my favorite scene.

As an adult my favorite scene is the short discussion between Clark Griswold and his father.

This and the scene Clark locked in the attic tearing up over old Christmas tapes are lovely, quietly moving moments inserted into the antic comedy without jarring the tone of the thing at all. For all of its TV-ish direction (I want to skip the sledding sequence every time, but this is one of those rare films that I never watch alone), there's a light touch to it that is all Hughes.

that youtube video i mentioned wasn't by jack saint, it was this one: https://youtu.be/9Pa8bRdDyW4

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15. TRADING PLACES
John Landis, USA, 1983
(337.5 points, 6 votes, 1 first-place vote)

Hughes's 50s nostalgia and class unconsciousness

Yes, this, very very this.

Nothing is more edifying to me than seeing the same list of canonical films over and over in a slightly different order each time so I find these results disappointing

I think I'll hack away at #11-15 over the next couple days, leaving the top 10 for Monday

A+ advent calendar simulation

One of the first movies I remember playing non-stop on cable. Definitely seen it in chunks over the years; dunno if I've ever actually sat down to watch it straight through (Three Amigos and Coming to America were my Landis jams).

my mum showed this film to me repeatedly because it has the line "I've got enough problems, Louie"

yeah, had a strong familiarity with this from cable before i ever watched it beginning to end.for a long period of my life i knew most or all of the various scenes and sequences, but wasnt 100% clear on what order they were supposed to go in

i had early little kid hetero-awakening lust for jamie lee curtis via trading places; can't have been older than 11

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14. THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Henry Selick, USA, 1993
(348 points, 7 votes)

I watches Trading Places last night. Surprisingly homophobic even for an 80s movie.