Santa's Summer House

Only watched this movie because Cynthia Rothrock was in it. Who would have thought that a star of martial arts could look so good. Producers wanted to extend the film so they plonked in half an hours footage of a croquet match. Waste of time and so boring.

The only thing that made this movie enjoyable was the fact that it featured 3 world champion real life martial artists weirdly.

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.