Santa's Summer House

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.

-10/10

Robert Mitchum was no longer with us when this horror was filmed. I thank God for that. His son Christopher Mitchum plays the role of "Pop" in this...whatever this thing is.

Every single scene has the acting quality of an adult film. The bouncy Christmas music soundtrack is the icing on this cow paddy.

It's truly unfathomable that this exists.

I've watched some garbage Christmas movies in my life, but this takes the Christmas cake!

Absolutely nothing happens, the acting is absolutely appalling, and there's a toe-curlingly long and pointless croquet match which appears unscripted and as if it was filmed on an iPhone.

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.

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.