Roxanne's Best Christmas Ever (2000)

Every year at Christmas, we are bombarded with the many different holiday specials.  On network television, you get your Rudolphs, Frosty the Snowmans, and Charlie Browns.  On cable channels like ABC family, you get your 25 days of Christmas programming.  On Hallmark and Lifetime, you end up with countless television romantic comedy movies.  It’s all Christmas all the time for the month of December.  That’s just what television ends up being this time of year.

I don’t know how Roxanne’s Best Christmas Ever came about.  I can’t find too much information about it.  When I was trying to find the full cast, I had to use the credits in the movie for it.  It’s a tough movie to find anything about.  Well, perhaps it’s not a movie.  It’s only 24 minutes long.  I’m still going to call it a movie.  I consider it a short film.  The only thing separating it from most of the films that I have featured thus far in the Sunday “Bad” Movies is the length.  It’s simply not feature length.  That’s beside the point though.  The point is that I had to use the actual movie to jot down who was in it, who directed it, and how long it was.  I was having trouble finding anything about it online.

Most of you have probably never heard of Roxanne’s Best Christmas Ever.  Neither had I, until I bought the 10 Movie Holiday Collector’s Set at Walmart.  It was in the five dollar bin.  Fifty cents a movie?  Sure, I’ll buy that.  It’s another addition to my collection of Echo Bridge bad movie sets.  And I didn’t have high expectations for it.  I never do with these movies.  Sometimes they surprise me and sometimes they don’t.  In this case, it didn’t impress me.  It was as bad as I expected it to be.

What happens in Roxanne’s Best Christmas Ever?  Let me tell you.  Roxanne (Jane Seymour) is a dog living in a town full of animals.  She’s a bipedal, talking dog.  As are the other “people” of the town.  Christmas is nearing, and she still has yet to get at tree.  But when she sets out to find the perfect tree for her holiday celebration, Roxanne realizes that there are no good trees left.  What is Roxanne to do?

Now, I’m not entirely sure what this Christmas special is trying to say.  It could be saying that you shouldn’t leave your Christmas shopping until the last minute.  There is a stereotype of sorts that people wait until the last possible moments of the holiday season to finish their shopping.  And Roxanne’s Best Christmas Ever is a sort of cautionary tale about this kind of thing.  But the ending completely undermines that message in every way possible.  Everything works out fine.  It could be about Santa and his giving nature.  All of the characters believe in Santa, and the ending depends upon Santa in order to work.  Yet the story isn’t about Santa until the ending, which makes it seem less like this is the case.  So I really have no idea what the movie is trying to say.  Maybe it’s just trying to tell a story.  It does that.

Whatever the point of Roxanne’s Best Christmas Ever, that doesn’t make the movie any good.  The animation is okay, but the voice acting is flat and the story itself is more irritating than engrossing.  The saving grace for the movie is the short runtime, which even then, didn’t manage to keep my attention all that well.  But I guess losing my attention for twenty minutes is better than losing my attention for ninety minutes.  It could have been a much longer movie that bored me.

Now you might be asking, “Why would you choose a Christmas movie from an Echo Bridge set when you could have chosen something like Jingle All the Way 2, which you probably would have had a better time with?”  That long question is a pretty good question.  I have a split history with the Echo Bridge movie sets.  There have been movies in these sets that delighted me.  I’ve liked movies like Backwoods Bloodbath and Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned, which came from these sets.  There are some unknown gems mixed in with the crap that I sometimes end up watching.  So there’s that.  The other big factor in me choosing movies from the Echo Bridge sets is that I own the Echo Bridge sets.  This means that access to these movies is much easier than access to Jingle All the Way 2, which was only just released on video.  I don’t need to buy the movies.  I don’t need to illegally find them online.  I already have them.  It makes more sense for me to choose one of them, especially since there are ten movies in the set.  Get something out of the way, you know?

That’s all I have for Roxanne’s Best Christmas Ever.  It’s not a movie worth watching, and that’s most of the reason why it was buried in a set of ten movies that I found in the bargain bin at Walmart.  It’s only twenty-four minutes long, but it’s twenty-four minutes that I could have spent watching something much better and worth my time.  It’s too bad.  With the movies that I sometimes manage to find in these sets, my hopes were high.  My expectations were low, but my hopes were high.  I wanted something fun.  I wanted something decent.  What I got was a boring short film that did nothing to entertain.

And now for the little bit of notes:

• I mentioned a couple movies in the review that I have covered.  Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned and Backwoods Bloodbath.
• Have you seen Roxanne’s Best Christmas Ever?  Have you even heard of Roxanne’s Best Christmas Ever?  Are there any other bad holiday shorts that you want to bring to my attention?  How about Echo Bridge?  Do you own any of their sets?  Do you like any movies you’ve found in them?  If you want to answer any of these questions, feel free to do so in the comments section below.
• If you would like to suggest any movies for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can do that in the comments below.  Or you can message me on Twitter or email me at sundaybadmovies@gmail.com.
• Next week there will be two posts.  One inspired by the movie Money Train, which is next week’s Sunday “Bad” Movie.  The other one is a bonus post I’m going to do about my ten worst movies of 2014, out of what I’ve seen so far.  It was going to be one where you guys participate, but only one person submitted anything.  If anyone else does, I’ll include it.  If they don’t… Oh well.