Holidays on the Lens: A Christmas In Tennessee (dir by Gary Yates)

Posted on December 17, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

2018’s A Christmas In Tennessee tells a story that’s as old as time.

In a snowy Tennessee town, Allison (Rachel Boston) and her mother (Patricia Richardson) run a bakery. When a developer named Matthew (Andrew W. Walker) shows up in town, he seems charming enough. Except … oh no! He’s planning on buying the town and turning it into a ski resort!

Can love save Christmas? Only in Tennessee!

Oh, stop being cynical! It’s a cute movie that takes place in a nice small town and everything works out for the best in the end. It’s simple and it’s cozy and it’s just right for the holidays.

I Watched Beautiful Wave (2012, Dir. by David Mueller)

Posted on November 27, 2025 by Dazzling Erin

After her father dies in an accident, teenage Nicole (Aimee Teargarden) is sent to Santa Cruz for the summer by her mother. In Santa Cruz, Nicole meets her grandmother, Sue (Patricia Richardson), for the first time. At first, Nicole is bitter and angry and doesn’t want a thing to do with Santa Cruz or its culture of surfing. That changes when she learns about her grandfather, Max (Lance Henriksen). Max was a legendary surfer who went to Vietnam and never returned. When Nicole comes across Max’s old map of surfing spots, she and her friend Kayla (Alicia Ziegler) go on a journey that leads to Nicole not only appreciating surfing but also discovering the truth about her grandfather.

Beautiful Wave is pretty predictable and, at first, Nicole is so sullen that she can sometimes be difficult to take even if she does have a good reason for not being in a cheerful mood. I liked the idea of Nicole and Kayla going on a journey together but I didn’t like that they brought two knucklehead surfers with them. What could have been a celebration of sisterhood instead became a film about two women having to deal with two idiots.

Beautiful Wave still won me over, with its gorgeous beach footage and its story of paying respect to the past and discovering your own roots. Even with the two idiot surfers getting in the way, I appreciated the way the film showed the bond between Nicole and Kayla. The ending was heartwarming, even if it did raise more questions than it answered. There are some movies that you have to be in the right mood for and I guess my mood was the right one for Beautiful Wave.

Horror Film Review: C.H.U.D. (dir by Douglas Cheek)

Posted on October 11, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

There’s something living under the streets of New York City.

That’s the basic idea behind 1984’s C.H.U.D., a film that opens with an upper class woman and her little dog being dragged into the sewers by a creature the reaches out of a manhole. People are disappearing all over the city but the authorities obviously aren’t revealing everything that they know. Even after the wife of NYPD Captain Bosch (Christopher Curry) disappears, the city government doesn’t seem to be too eager to dig into what exactly is happening.

Instead, it falls to two activists. Photographer George Cooper (John Heard) specializes in taking picture of the homeless, especially the one who live underground in the New York subways. He’s like a well-groomed version of Larry Clark, I guess. Social activist A.J. “The Reverend” Shepherd (Daniel Stern) runs a homeless shelter and is convinced that something is preying on the most vulnerable citizens of New York. When the police won’t do their job, George and the Reverend step up!

So, what’s living in the sewers? Could it be that there actually are cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers out there? Everyone in New York City has heard the legends but, much like stories of the alligators in the Chicago sewers, most people chose not to believe them. Or could the disappearance have something to do with the cannisters labeled Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal that are being left in the sewers by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? Wilson (George Martin) of the NRC says that they would never purposefully mutate the people living underground but Wilson works for the government so who in their right mind is going to trust him?

C.H.U.D. is a horror film with a social conscience. It’s very much an 80s films because, while you have Shepherd running around and attacking everyone for not taking care of the most vulnerable members of society, the true villain is ultimately revealed to be the members of a regulatory agency. Instead of finding a safe way to get rid of their nuclear waste, they just found a sneaky way to abandon it all in New York and obviously, they assumed no one would care because …. well, it’s New York. Everyone in the country knows that New York City isn’t safe so who is going to notice a few underground monsters, right?

The idea behind C.H.U.D. has a lot of potential but the execution is a bit lackluster. For every good C.H.U.D. kill, there’s long passages where the story drags. Considering that Heard spent most of his career typecast as the type of authority figure who would dump nuclear waste under New York City, it’s actually kind of interesting to see him playing a sympathetic role here. Daniel Stern, on the other hand, is miscast and rather hyperactive as Shepherd. You really do want someone to tell him to calm down for a few minutes. Watching C.H.U.D., one gets the feeling that it’s a film with an identity crisis. Is it a horror film, an action flick, a work of social commentary, or a dark comedy? There’s no reason why it can’t be all four but C.H.U.D. just never really comes together. It ultimately feels more like a mix of several different films instead of being a film made with one clear and coherent vision.

In the end, Death Line remains the film to see about underground cannibals.

Lifetime Christmas Movie Review: A Christmas in Tennessee (dir by Gary Yates)

Posted on December 25, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

How do they celebrate Christmas in Tennessee?

With a lot of down home love!

Or, at least, that’s what I learned from watching this Lifetime Christmas movie.

A Christmas In Tennessee is the latest in a long line of Lifetime Christmas movies that make a big deal about where they’re set. In the past, we’ve had Christmas in Mississippi and a Christmas in Vermont and I imagine that, at some point, we’ll have a Kansas Christmas or an Iowa Christmas. The thing that these films always have in common is a strong sense of nostalgia. These are films that tell us, “You can run off to New York, California, or Toronto but your heart will always remain in either the South or one of the smaller New England hamlets.”

In the case of the film, it’s Alison Bennett (Rachel Boston) who attempted to leave town, heading off to the big city so that she could become a big time French pastry shop. However, when she became pregnant, she moved back home and got a job working in her family’s bakery. Now, years later, it appears that the bakery is about to go out of business and her daughter, Olivia, is writing letters to Santa in which she begs Santa for money. Since the town traditionally publishes all letters to Santa in the newspaper, Alison is worried that everyone is going to realize how bad her situation is.

Meanwhile, Matthew (Andrew W. Walker) has come to town. Matthew is charming and handsome and actually rather nice but he works for a real estate developer who wants to buy the town square. Matthew is ambitious. He wants a promotion. The only way he’s going to get it is to get his hands on that property. However, to do that, he has to convince Alison to sign over the land to him. Alison could really use the money but there’s no way that she’s going to betray the town that she calls home. That’s not the way things are done in Tennessee!

And then …. okay, let me stop to catch my breath here. There’s a lot going on in this movie.

*breathes*

Okay …. and then, two mysterious strangers stop by the bakery. One of them has a white beard and a jolly manner. The other is his wife and is played by Caroline Rhea. Olivia takes one look at these two strangers and decides that 1) the man is Santa Claus and 2) Santa loves her mother’s cookies! It’s time to write another letter to Santa.

Well, of course, Olivia’s letter about Santa’s favorite cookies goes viral. (It even appears as a story on “Buzz News.”) So, can Alison use her new found fame to save the town?

A Christmas in Tennessee is okay. How you react to it will probably have a lot to do with how you feel about Lifetime and Hallmark Christmas films in general. If you like them, you’ll like this one. At heart, it’s a sweet movie and both Rachel Boston and Andrew W. Walker give sincere performances. It’s an idealized version of Christmas and who doesn’t love that this time of year?

I look forward to discovering which state we’ll visit next year.

Hallmark Review: Smart Cookies (2012, dir. Robert Iscove)

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Valerie Troutman

This is the second Hallmark movie in row I’ve watched where a woman in expensive clothes falls in mud. Why? I guess if kids can beatbox in R.L. Stine’s Monsterville: The Cabinet Of Souls, then this movie can also fall back really tired and old things such as rich peopling falling in mud.

That butt belongs to real estate agent Julie Sterling (Jessalyn Gilsig). This movie was made in 2012 and was meant to commemorate 100 years of the Girl Scouts. This movie doesn’t even try to give an excuse for Sterling to get involved with the Girl Scouts. Her boss played by Patricia Richardson just shows up in her office, says a girl scout troop needs a leader, and that she has to go be it for 90 days. End of story. I like it when a Hallmark movie doesn’t bullshit, but just says, this is a thing that’s happening, so onward with the movie. The Gourmet Detective: A Healthy Place To Die did that too.

Julie may not be good with kids, but she does come prepared with a purse big enough to hold a severed head in it. As I’m sure you already know, she isn’t assigned the “good” girl scouts, but the ones who really need help. Kind of like herself. Bailee Madison plays one of the scouts and once again she is cast just to be super cute.

While she is working with the scouts she is also trying to sell a house. That part is really just a barometer so we can tell at what stage in her character arc she is based on how her professional life is affected by her time with the kids. Also, it’s how she runs into a handy man played by Ty Olsson who kind of reminded me of tech journalist Patrick Norton. Only with more hair.

His performance really is the highlight of this film. Of course he is also the father of Bailee Madison’s character. He’s nice, he doesn’t act zany, he cares about his daughter, etc. He’s the best part of the movie.

Since the Girl Scouts are probably best known for their cookies. The end of the film becomes her troop facing off against the best scouts to sell the most cookies. The scenes where they are fighting each other in street for sales by changing their deal every few seconds till they finally capture the crowd are the majority of these parts. I wish they had cut some of the unnecessary adapting scenes such as the mud part and given us some scenes of her doing the work that the scouts are supposed to be doing. Instead, we get a brief flash of her coming out of a Kinkos type place and then the kids are complaining about her doing everything for them. Would have been nice if they had shown that rather than just telling us it happened.

Honestly, what this movie did for me is remind me of why I enjoyed watching Troop Beverly Hills (1989) as a kid. However, there is one last thing to mention and that is that for once in a long time, the romance part really takes a back seat to the stuff with the scouts. Yes, she warms up to the father and we can see that they are good friends and are going to see where that takes them, but it’s not forced down our throats. He never proposes at the end or anything. The end is her realizing that her boss has helped make her a better person by giving her these 90 days with the girls and that she would like to continue doing it.