Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Christmas on Repeat’ on Hulu, Which Launches Made-for-TV Xmas-Movie Season with Steaming-Hot Bowlful of Dreck

The made-for-TV Christmas-movie cottage industry has begun plopping its sugar plums into your streaming menus, and Christmas on Repeat (now on Hulu) is among the first. It stars Jennifer Taylor of Two and a Half Men fame as an overworked advertising executive and family woman who finds herself trapped in a dreaded yuletide time loop, forced to relive her shitty Christmas over and over and over again. If you ask me, she should’ve called Rick Sanchez to help her out, but it’s pretty obvious that the movie’s budget had no room for that – or a visually convincing layer of snow, either.

CHRISTMAS ON REPEAT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Andrea (Taylor) has slept at the office – again! She pretty much lives there. She’s an ad wizard who works for a boss whose moral fortitude is identifiable by the miniature putting green in his office – so yes, I’m saying that golf is the sport of total d-bags who order their employees to work on Christmas morning. She’s already half-assed everything this Christmas, getting her assistant to buy craptacular gifts for her family, husband John (Gary Poux) and teenage offspring Lexi (Julia Terranova) and Paul (Terry Woodberry). On her way home, Andrea stops at a retailer with a storefront that looks like the backside of a building on a studio lot hastily splattered with drippy fake snow. She chats with a donation-grubbing Santa (Peter Xifo) outside, and is shocked to learn that he knows her name, and he says something about wishing upon a shooting star that night. Here, I have to apologize for losing some of the details of their exchange, because I was distracted by the least-convincing fake storefront in the history of the moving picture.

That night she looks up and sees the shooting star and makes a wish and now it’s Xmas morn. Andrea gets up. Paul’s friends are playing basketball in the driveway. She makes her specialty breakfast, immolated pancakes, before heading to work, which is a disaster of a commercial shoot starring an influencer who can’t remember the name of the product. Andrea gets pulled over for speeding on the way home. John sighs when she arrives and hands her some potatoes to mash. She fails miserably at dancing along to an internet video with her daughter. Grandma Millie (Roberta Hanlen) stops by. The fam opens up her gifts and the result is an array of disappointed faces. I mean, the gifts look like they fell off the truck on the way to Dollar Tree and got trampled by a herd of gnus, a reflection not on her assistant’s choices, but the movie’s budget, which had to have been in the lower quadruple-digits. That night, John shrugs and goes to bed, leaving Andrea to look ruefully upon a plate of cookies, where rests a frosted gingerbread heart that BROKEN in HALF. AUGHH. A symbol of despair.

Eager to put it all behind her, Andrea wakes up the next day and is flummoxed, FLUMMOXED I tell you, to learn that it’s Dec. 25 again. Her boss calls and asks why she’s not at the shoot, and she stumbles through the rest of the day – basketball, influencer, cop, potatoes, dancing, Grandma, trash-ass presents, busted gingerbread heart. On Dec. 25 no. 3, she stops at Cement Wall-mart to interrogate Santa, who speaks in riddles that would make the Sphinx jealous. Guess she’s just gotta figure it out for herself, you know, maybe do things differently. She builds a styrofoam snowman with the fam, has a heart-to-heart with Grandma, learns to make pancakes without the fire extinguisher, etc. Will she learn things about herself and bust that damn aggravating time loop? HO HO NO SPOILERS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Most days, I don’t wish Groundhog Day had never been conceived. This is one of those days when I didn’t not wish that.

Performance Worth Watching: No performance escapes the unmitigated embarrassment of this sub-inane teleplay. The earth is scorched. No survivors.

Memorable Dialogue: “You can’t unwish a wish. There are rules for this sort of thing, you know.” – Santa

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I know. Made-for-TV Xmas movies are cornball comfort-junk food meant to be enjoyed for their simple pleasures (or ironically). But Christmas on Repeat isn’t exactly the Citizen Kane of made-for-TV Xmas movies. Hell, it’d be lucky to be the Baby Geniuses of made-for-TV Xmas movies. It’s amateur hour, cheap from the top down, its comedy stemming wholly from its scratch-and-dent flea-market production values. The only thing less convincing than its visual presentation is the third-act emotional whiplash it tries to force upon us like grandma with a spoonful of castor oil.

Any elaboration on the movie’s flaws would read like Santa’s Rikers Island naughty list: just one godawful thing after another. Its fundamental problem is the script, a dashed-out single-drafter that crassly and unapologetically rips off Groundhog Day and presents adult-ish themes (work-life balance, marital problems, etc.) within a childish framework (Santa magic!) and sloppily doles out life lessons like it’s slapping us with sopping-wet dishrags. No sir, I don’t like it.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Christmas on Repeat? More like Christmas Ejection Seat! SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.