Deck the Halls

A few months back when reviewing the Joy Ride films I mentioned how my mom will always get me a random movie out of the $5 DVD bin as a Christmas tradition. Last year she gifted me a Christmas-themed film in the form of 2006’s Deck the Halls (trailer). I always try to watch a couple Christmas movies around this time of the year so now it seemed fitting to get it into the rotation.

Steve Finch (Matthew Broderick) has a successful career and a nice big house for his family. All he wants for the holidays is to have a classic Christmas season for his family doing all kinds of traditional customs he was raised on like the annual family greetings photo, caroling, decorating the tree, etc. The Christmas season is thrown for a loop for him when the Hall’s move in next door. Buddy Hall (Danny Devito) is far more free spirited than Steve and it is not too long before the two get into a heated rivalry into the Christmas season.

All Buddy wants for Christmas is the absurd goal to get his house so festive with Christmas lights that it is seen from space, and Steve tries multiple times to wreck that goal after Buddy unintentionally ruins a couple of his precious Christmas traditions early in the film. The two constantly try to one up each other in their blood feud, with Steve often being on the far worse end of the deal. Eventually it gets so bad that both Buddy’s and Steve’s families abandon them for Christmas at a hotel and then Steve and Buddy must cast aside their differences to win back their families in time for Christmas.

Deck the Halls has a straightforward plot, but the journey throughout is lackluster at best. There are a couple cringe-worthy scenes where Steve rocks a cheesy wannabe-stealth outfit in attempts of cutting the power to the Hall’s. Steve and Buddy amp up their feud by seriously competing in children’s games at the town’s local Christmas festival, and I get what the filmmakers were going for, but it is just painful to get through. I could never fully buy into Buddy getting more and more lights on his house throughout the film either as it appeared he was trying to poorly legitimize the classic satirical take of Griswold fully lighting up his house in Christmas Vacation. The film’s final act where the Steve and Buddy try to work together is not that convincing, and the film gets sillier in the final minutes when the whole town tries to help Buddy realize his dream.

There are a surprising amount of extra features on the BluRay. I usually do not point out subtitle options out that often unless the extra features are subtitled (which they are here!), but aside from that the main film itself probably has the most languages available in captions than I have ever seen before with a whopping 30(!) languages available for subtitles. Ludicrous caption options notwithstanding, there are several minutes of bloopers and deleted scenes. There are three features totaling around 15 minutes about the stage and lighting setup that I would suggest checking out to see how the film pulled off shooting a Christmas movie in July and how they rigged up the ambitious Christmas lights on the Hall household. Finally there is a commentary track with Danny Devito and director John Whitesell. I listened to several random scenes of the film with their commentary, and minus an occasional lull, the two have a good rapport about filming the feature during the summer and their chemistry with the cast and crew.

Bottom line, Deck the Halls is a Christmas movie for the kiddos, and if I was before my teens I could have seen myself loving a lot of the campy scenes I loathe now. If you want a family-friendly film to keep the kids at bay during the holidays while the adults can engage in fellowship then maybe Deck the Halls would fit that bill. When I was a kiddo, that family-friendly Christmas movie was Babes in Toyland that we got for free with a McDonalds Value Meal and my siblings and I must have seen that film close to a dozen times within a few years. On a side note, I was so underwhelmed by Deck the Halls (sorry mom!) that it inspired me to chance a couple Christmas movies on streaming apps that I enjoyed far more in forms of Merry Friggin’ Christmas and Small Town Santa and I will likely track those down soon on home video so be on the lookout for potential blogs on those films.

Other Random Backlog Movie Blogs

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12 Angry Men (1957)
12 Rounds 3: Lockdown
21 Jump Street
Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie
Atari: Game Over
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
Batman: The Killing Joke
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice
Bounty Hunters
Cabin in the Woods
Captain America: The First Avenger
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Christmas Eve
Clash of the Titans (1981)
Clint Eastwood 11-pack Special
The Condemned 2
Countdown
Creed
Dirty Work
Faster
Fast and Furious I-VIII
Field of Dreams
Fight Club
The Fighter
For Love of the Game
Good Will Hunting
Gravity
Guardians of the Galaxy
Hercules: Reborn
Hitman
Ink
Joy Ride 1 & 2
The Interrogation
Interstellar
Jobs
Man of Steel
Man on the Moon
Marine 3-5
Mortal Kombat
National Treasure
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
The Replacements
Rocky I-VII
Running Films Part 1
Running Films Part 2
San Andreas
ScoobyDoo Wrestlemania Mystery
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Shoot em Up
Steve Jobs
Source Code
Star Trek I-XIII
Take Me Home Tonight
TMNT
The Tooth Fairy 1 & 2
UHF
Veronica Mars
The War
Wild
The Wrestler (2008)
X-Men: Days of Future Past