A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong – ‘Tis the Season Cinema

I am tagging a long a bit with Lisa at Boondock Ramblings and Erin at Cracker Crumb Life with their Christmas movie watching (‘Tis the Season Cinema). I haven’t really watched much for movies in ages, some of it comes down to time, and some of it comes down to not knowing what’s worth watching. For those reasons, it seemed like joining might be a good way to change things up a little bit.

Oh, boy, was this something else. From what I see, the cast did a special called “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” and people who had seen that may have known a little bit better what to expect. Having never heard of this before, I had no idea what was coming.

First of all, the total run time in 51 minutes, since it was a BBC special. Secondly, the premise of this is that it was a BBC special but because of “circumstances” the BBC actors have been replaced at the last moment by members of the theater troupe of a local polytechnic college.

I must admit, even with the short length, I didn’t watch this all in one go, but actually in three chunks. Oddly enough, I think this kind of helped, because I was very confused by the beginning, and by stopping and thinking about what happened, it made figuring this out a little easier – I think. I think, now that I know what is going on a bit better, watching the whole thing might be a lot of fun.

“A Christmas Carol” is one of the most well-known and most-filmed books in the Western canon, and putting a new “spin” on it is difficult. What took me a while to grasp here is that this isn’t actually about “A Christmas Carol” but that the story is a backdrop to another story going on, one in which just about anything that can go wrong does go wrong, there’s a huge clash of personalities, and somehow it works to the end.

I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about this, but on the other hand, there were places where I was laughing out loud at the humor and absurdity of it all – and these days, it seems like humor takes more and more courage to do. In some ways, it might be easier creating humor with a piece that is well over 100 years old, but none of the humor was inappropriate for younger audiences. This seems to be rare, too. Did all of the jokes and pranks work? Probably not, but I do feel that I want to see it again and that it might work its way into “things to watch just to laugh” list.

I haven’t read the other reviews, but if you’re interested, Lisa’s review is here: https://lisahoweler.com/2022/11/17/tis-the-season-cinema-a-christmas-carol-goes-wrong/ and Erin’s is here: https://crackercrumblife.com/2022/11/17/tis-the-season-cinema-a-christmas-carol-goes-wrong/

P.S. If you would like to watch this, it’s available on YouTube for free (with ads) and can be found here:

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