The Christmas Consultant (2012)

Every year, numerous television movies are made for channels such as SyFy, Hallmark, and Lifetime.  A large portion of these movies are devoted to the holidays.  They come in many different forms.  There are the Christmas television movies that involve Santa doing something, there are the ones involving romantic entanglements, and there are the ones, like this week’s movie, that are about the Christmas spirit.

The Christmas Consultant is a movie about a woman learning to enjoy the Christmas holidays by way of a hired helper.  It stars Caroline Rhea, David Hasselhoff, and a bunch of other people who I didn’t recognize.  It originally aired on Lifetime channel in 2012 as part of their lead-up to Christmas.

Most people write off Lifetime films as poor quality, melodramatic schlock that quality actors participate in when their careers have taken a downfall.  There is a stigma with the movies that Lifetime puts out.  I hardly ever hear anything good about the movies.  They continue to be made, but nobody praises them.  Instead, people either don’t give the movies a chance at all, or they pan them before they see them.  It’s an unfair stigma for all of the movies under the Lifetime banner to take, regardless of the quality of the individual works.

The stigma might not have been quelled by The Christmas Consultant, but the movie sure tries it’s hardest to subvert the expectations that a viewer may have going into it.  The two things that people might expect of a Lifetime movie would be a romantic storyline or a story based on a recent real life crime.  The Christmas Consultant does not have either of those aspects.  It is about the celebration of family and Christmas spirit.  Looking at Christmas from this point of view is a refreshing change of pace and only goes to strengthen this movie.

David Hasselhoff and Caroline Rhea are the other two major strengths that The Christmas Consultant has.  Each of them turn in terrific performances in a movie that does not deserve them.  Rhea does an excellent job of portraying a mother who is fighting the loss of her family to her job and an outside personality.  The outside personality is Owen, played by David Hasselhoff.  Owen is the titular Christmas Consultant, hired to help Caroline Rhea with her family and Christmas celebration.  Hasselhoff plays the role well, overdoing the holiday glee in a way that makes complete sense as the conclusion of the movie plays out.  His character is so positive about the holiday season that it’s hard to not feel infected by the cheery bug.

These positive aspects aren’t to say that The Christmas Consultant is a good movie.  Most of the acting in the movie is fairly bad.  The fake Russian accent that a major character has sounds outrageous and offensive.  Many of the dialogue moments, though quotable, are poorly written.  From Owen’s line about his humbug detector to the youngest daughter’s need to live as a princess, the writing for The Christmas Consultant was laughable.  I do not mean laughable in a funny sense, but laughable in that awkward sense of all of the jokes being bad.  The two main performances help to elevate it; however, they cannot make it passably good.

If you don’t mind bad movies, The Christmas Consultant is easily watchable.  Whenever David Hasselhoff is on screen, he brings a contagious energy to the proceedings.  He lights up the screen with the joy he is presenting.  But the downfall of the movie is in how poorly it is scripted.  With better writing, The Christmas Consultant could be a good movie.  It’s left in some sort of enjoyable mediocrity that saddens me.

There are a few notes that I would like to give before I call it a week:

• David Hasselhoff was also featured in the first Sunday “Bad” Movie, which was Starcrash.
• Alex Paunovic was another actor from The Christmas Consultant who was featured in a previous Sunday "Bad" Movie.  In his case, the movie was The Marine 3: Homefront.
• This week, I also have a post for Monster in the Closet, a 1986 film that was Paul Walker’s first.  Paul Walker recently passed away, so I tossed this movie into the schedule.
• If you have any movies to suggest, leave a comment.  Or suggest them to me on Twitter.  Give me more ideas of what to watch.