Santa's Summer House

Well, this movie was never going to win an oscar but it is free from zombies, vampires, slaughter and mayhem which seems to be the general television fare these days. It has the lovely Jessica Morris to add a bit of glamour. It is a film you could watch in the height of summer or the depths of winter.

It's true the acting in this movie would be improved if a computer read the lines and the croquette scene felt like it would go on for hours, but the story is as wonderful as a Lifetime or Hallmark Christmas film.

Either the acting gets a bit better after the croquette game or I was just worn down, but the unsurprising pay off at the end was worth the trouble. You have to be a sucker for Christmas movies to buy into any of it, but that's the joy of Christmas movies, they are just delightful indulgences that are probably the last bastion of good guys winning and bad guys either being put to shame or repenting, where the hero is actually someone trying to do the right thing. If you enjoy that formula you will like this movie.

I watch a lot of these daytime Christmas films and surprisingly find most of them ok around the 6/10 standard but this one was woeful.

The plot was not actually the worst, but acting was atrocious, the married couple worst of all, along with Mrs Claus. The wife of the arguing couple seemed to have no interest at all in even being in the film or acting.

They were not given much by lines to work with and that added to one endless game of croquet, with no dialogue, no idea how the the game worked and awful editing where one of the phases of play was shown twice and images of Christmas items between scenes made it a arduous watch.

The guy who played Santa tried his best and the young boy and girl were fine but could not improve it.

In this low budget film a feisty family go to have summer vacation on the Argentinian presidential palace, having as hosts no other than Cristina and Néstor Fernández de Kirchner. They do many local traditions, like eating pasta (it is well known half of Argentinias own an Italian passport), doing a traditional "Amigo Invisible" in which they randomly give each other lousy presents, or play an endless cricket game. I was hoping they were training and that the 3rd act would be the Kirchners fighting the British Royal Faimily in a game of cricket for the Falklands, but I fell asleep and missed the end, so I'm not really sure how it ends.

Saw this as a Rifftrax presentation. Which is the only thing that made this remotely watchable (more so than most). Question 1: Who backs these movies? Question 2: Why? Question 3: Isn't this against the Geneva convention? As noted in other places, this has martial arts people but strangely does not make us of this talent. Not that they should be in this movie to begin with, but shows how much diregard the director has towards filmmaking and using acting talents. The dialogue is suitable for unlearning the English language or acting like an alien on their first contact on Earth after crashing their spaceship and suffering multiple brain injuries. The is no real plot, it's entirely predictable, the cute music is insufferable. Belongs in Lifetime's pantheon of 3 am Xmas filler spots 18 days before Christmas.