SCROOGED (1988)

SCROOGED (1988)

Tagline: The spirits will move you in odd and hysterical ways.

(Comedy, Drama, Abusive Christmas Present) [PG-13]

All day long, I listen to people give me excuses why they can't work... 'My back hurts,' 'my legs ache,' 'I'm only four!' The sooner he learns life isn't handed to him on a silver platter, the better!

In this one, Frank Cross is a greedy television executive trying to figure out what he can do with his network's Christmas programming line-up. He treats his assistant Grace like crap, fires Eliot for disagreeing with him, and ridicules everyone he sees. However, on Christmas Eve, he is about to get visited by ghosts with attitude. Can Frank Cross change, or will everyone get SCROOGED? 

For a bit of a disclaimer here, I have never seen this movie before this week. For me, Bill Murray (who plays Frank Cross) is either hit or miss. This was a hit. I always like Bill Murray (GHOSTBUSTERS) when he’s playing a nice guy, but this was an interesting transitional change of pace that I thought worked on a lot of levels. One of the best scenes in the entire movie is at the very beginning when Frank is being shown what his employees came up with for Christmas programming. One of the movies is THE NIGHT THE REINDEER DIED. When I saw the preview which actually starred Lee Majors (THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN). It looks like the closest thing we might get to that is VIOLENT NIGHT, but I kind of always wanted a whacky movie like THE NIGHT THE REINDEER DIED to get made. The main production also included the “Solid Gold Dancers” which I thought was pretty out there. The movie actually used the real “Solid Gold Dancers”.

Acting wise everyone did a great job, but I do feel like they went a little bit overkill on Carol Kane’s character. She plays the Ghost of Christmas Present and is really brutal to Bill Murray slapping him around and treating him like crap. Apparently, she was fairly upset that she had to do that as part of the role. Karen Allen mostly known for INDIANA JONES AND THE RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK was great as Claire Phillips. She’s basically an old love interest of Frank’s. The veritable “one that got away”. Karen Allen by the way has been in over 75 movies and TV shows, but I still never saw her in anything outside of the INDIANA JONES series until I saw this thing. I also thought the other big stand out aside from Bill Murray was David Johansen who played The Ghost Of Christmas Past. He is a big creepy, but very effective in the role. It has also been reported that Bill Murray was living in Paris and contemplating quitting acting altogether when this role came up. 

Regarding the pacing, this one is pretty smooth for the first half, but the second half feels a little clunky and almost like they are just trying to fill space till the final act. The movie is only 81 minutes long, but it feels longer and that might be because, after the story of Eliot getting fired ends, the film takes the standard “A Christmas Carol” turn and the rest is all pretty predictable. Funny, but predictable. I don’t really mind that for the most part, but there was potential to do a lot more with this. 

So we come to the question. Is SCROOGED a good Christmas movie? I always kind of divide Christmas movies into 2 categories. The first is the “secular” category. In a “secular” Christmas movie, Jesus may get mentioned in passing, but He is never the main focus. Because of that, it’s all almost like this phony world to me and anything goes. Because I view it that way, I can enjoy a bit of what the secular world has to offer for their “secular” version of Christmas, Santa Claus, Reindeer, Scrooge, and all of that. Of the “secular” Christmas movies this probably lands somewhere in the top 10? If we are talking about the second category “actual” Christmas movies, concerning Jesus Christ, the reason for the season, then this is not on that list.

Just on the merits, this is a 4 out of 7. If you strip out a few of the ideas they presented in the opening of the movie, the rest is pretty entertaining, but not mind-blowing enough to be a “yearly watch”. 

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