Last Christmas, I had so much fun laughing at A Golden Christmas and A Golden Christmas 2 (both still available on Netflix) that I couldn't wait to enjoy the same experience with A Christmas Puppy, also on Netflix. (Apparently, it also goes by the name Christmas Spirit, which is how you'll find it on imdb.com.)
But before I even hit play, I read the reviews of other viewers. A sampling:
Are you sensing the pattern? Me too. So I had to watch.
A Christmas Puppy opens with the voice of a HORRIBLE narrator. Is this the voice of the elusive puppy, I wonder. And the questions just keep coming from there. Are the humans actually dogs? Is this all the dream of an autistic child similar to St. Elsewhere? To put it directly: I kept wondering, where's the catch? Why the puppy with a bow on the cover?
Exactly five minutes in, a "Christmas Spirit," dressed like a victim on CSI:Touched by an Angel, appears to the teenaged boy. Before I could take in her awful acting and her fake but ever-present accent, she's magicked him into a red and green elf suit, and I was laughing about something entirely different.
For reasons that make sense to no one, in order to save Christmas for him and his single mother (special appearance by Maureen McCormick a.k.a. Marcia Brady), our teenage hero must visit the home of a rich but disconnected family and save their Christmas. I never watched Heroes, so I'm mocking in the dark here, but the whole premise is a little bit "Save the cheerleader; save the world." Which never made sense either.
There are a few lines that elicit laughter, but not because they're intending it.
- Best insult: "...you look like a slack-jawed, narcoleptic panda right now."
- Worst pickup line: "That's really cool that you like Christmas. I like Christmas, too." Newsflash! Who doesn't? Oh, wait. Twenty-five percent of characters in made-for-TV Christmas movies. Including the girl who just told you she likes Christmas.
- Worst line overall: "For someone who said the Christmas Spirit's magic was dead, you sure are doing a lot of abracadabra."
Overall, I never believed that this kid would just go off and do the bidding of the Christmas Spirit and manipulate a family he's never met. I actually found myself thinking, "Maybe 'puppy' is a metaphor since this kid keeps doing whatever he's told like a trained dog." In fact, at first I thought the teenager had a little bit of a Stacy's Mom thing going with the rich mother, but in the end he didn't even get a romantic hook-up with her daughter. In my opinion, if you save Christmas, you should at least get a pity kiss under the mistletoe.
As for the actual Christmas Puppy, it does make its first appearance thirty minutes in...but only for about thirty seconds. And there's some lame plot twist in the middle about the puppy stealing the rich family's Christmas gifts but the theft getting blamed on the teenager, but that's just another unbelievable element of this movie. Guess what? The horrible narrator was the puppy.
As Lorelai once said on Gilmore Girls, "Now I know how Snow Dogs got made."
Still to be reviewed in this oddly prolific Dogs and Christmas Genre: The Christmas Wedding Tail, starring Jennie Garth.
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