Today's Feature: Christmas For A Dollar
The Kamp children expect another Christmas without presents until their father brings home a dollar.
Having never heard of Christmas For A Dollar before, I wasn't sure what to expect when I watched the movie this morning. Based on that log line, I guess I was thinking it would be some goofy comedy about a family going through a rough patch until the father finds a magical dollar bill at Christmastime. Maybe the dollar bill would somehow lead the family on a series of festive adventures, bringing them all closer together in the process, teaching them that you don't need a lot of money in order to have a merry Christmas. I don't know what those adventures would be, or how a magical dollar bill could ever lead them on those adventures, but I'm not a professional screenwriter, so that's not my problem.
I once saw an animated movie about a hand-blown glass ornament that was given the gift of happiness by a glassblower's tears of joy that was later reincarnated as an untethered avatar of jubilation after falling off a Christmas tree and breaking years later by the power of the baby Jesus. It was called Noel, it was narrated by Charlton Heston, and I did not imagine it. So don't tell me that this magic money shit is that far-fetched.
But Christmas For A Dollar is not about a magical dollar bill. Based on an out-of-print children's book of the same name that nobody has ever heard of, the film is about a poor family struggling through the Christmas season in the midst of the Great Depression during the 1930s. The patriarch, William Kamp (Brian Krause from Charmed) is praying that the local factory doesn't lay him off before the holidays so that he can continue to provide for his five children, whose mother died unexpectedly the previous year. So mommy's dead. Again. Great.
The five kids. named Vernon (the eldest daughter, who dreams of being a nurse because women can't be doctors), Warren (he wants to be a local mechanic's apprentice, but his prideful father won't let him work because he feels he should be the sole provider for his family), Alcatraz (the middle one), Ruthie (the brave little girl with the adorable dog named Violet that looks just like Toto from The Wizard Of Oz), and Billy (the youngest child, obsessed with cowboys and crippled at an early age by polio and forced to wear a leg brace at all times), are all very sad all the time because they're alive during the Great Depression and have no reason to be happy.
Then William brings home a little tin box filled with loose change that he collected at work over the year, a whole dollar's worth, and tells his suicidal children that they should use the change to buy each other a special present for Christmas, which is only a few days away, and this makes them all slightly less depressed, but not happy. Never happy.
Billy is in love with horses, and notices that his wretched neighbor, the odious Mrs. Ratbubble, has recently acquired a horse as payment from some poor sap who owed her money, and so he sneaks over to her barn every day after school to chat up his new equine best friend, whom he names Cloud despite everybody knowing that all horses are named Horse, and calling them anything else just confuses them, and a confused horse is a dangerous horse. So Billy gets kicked in the head by an irate horse and he dies, and the Kamp family is all very sad, but the kid was a dummy and had it coming, and besides, he was a cripple, so no big loss.
Warren has a crush on a local butter churner named Hilda and uses his share of the Christmas change to buy her a brand-new bar of toilet soap to replace the toilet soap she ruined by dropping in the toilet a few weeks prior, which is a pretty lucky thing for Hilda since that toilet soap she ruined was the family's only bar of toilet soap, a family heirloom that had been passed down from generation to generation since their ancestors brought it over on the Mayflower, and toilet soap is pretty hard to come by during the Great Depression, so if her family had noticed it was missing before she replaced it with the new toilet soap Warren bought for her, she would have been hanged for witchcraft.
Alcatraz chokes on a marble while reading the family Bible in the attic, and because nobody in the family likes Alcatraz, they don't discover him until the stink of his decomposing body permeates the entire house ten days later.
Ruthie and Violet go on an extended walk through the woods and get stranded in a small cave by a blizzard. Violet eats Ruthie's face while she's sleeping and she dies of exposure. The dog finds its own way home a few days later, but nobody ever finds Ruthie after the bears eat their fill.
And Vernon, fed up with being treated like a second-class citizen just because she's a woman, murders her father and wears his skin, enrolling in medical school under the guise of a middle-aged man and becoming a successful dermatologist.
I don't know. I think that's what happened. Maybe not exactly like that, but close enough.
You don't believe me, do you?
Okay, fine, that's not what happened at all. Little Billy befriends the stupid horse and even breaks down Mrs. Ratbubble's rotten walls, and by the end of the movie she's so touched by the kindness of the Kamp family that she becomes a surrogate grandmother to the children, granting little Billy's fondest wish to ride his pal Cloud whenever he desires, making his cowboy dreams come true. Warren finally convinces his headstrong father that he doesn't have to be the sole breadwinner in the family and is allowed to become the town mechanic's apprentice, after all.
Vernon, having taken on many more responsibilities around the house after her mother's death, is pushed into making her own dreams come true by her father, who enrolls her in junior college so that she can become the nurse she's always wanted to be. Ruthie is rewarded for her numerous good deeds by her brother Billy, who secretly made a treasure box for his big sister to replace the one she lost in a school contest to the town bully, some punchy dink named Lenny, who cheated to win the box and then smashed it to pieces right in front of her, all because he just didn't want her to have the damned thing.
Even William finds an unexpected potential love connection with Miss Mayfly, the new school teacher, who bakes the best sugar cookies west of the Rocky Mountains and doesn't look quite so plain when she finally chooses to wear her hair down, which is positively scandalous by the standards of these bumpkins, who promptly hang her for witchcraft. Okay, nobody gets hanged for witchcraft, but Lenny does get his hands chopped off for vandalizing Mrs. Ratbubble's stable and trying to blame the nefarious deed on poor little Billy. Okay, he doesn't get his hands chopped off, but he gets a stern talking-to from his obese mother, which is just as good.
And poor Alcatraz rots away in the attic after choking on a marble while reading the family Bible. That part's true.
Christmas For A Dollar is cheap and boring. It looks like it was shot at an abandoned Wild West theme park, and none of the costumes appear at all authentic to the time period. Everybody just looks like they're playing dress-up at the most depressing costume party ever conceived. And the story just drags its ass like a constipated dog across a freshly-cleaned carpet, lumbering along at a snail's pace until it finally sputters to its "life-affirming" conclusion, never once displaying even the briefest spark of life, remaining a thoroughly dull, mind-numbing experience from beginning to end.
If you want to watch a movie about a destitute family of somber children and their bereaved father as they struggle through a bleak Christmas holiday during the Great fucking Depression, then I suppose you could do worse than Christmas For A Dollar. The dog was cute. And nobody gets hanged for witchcraft, if you consider that a positive. Which I don't. So I'm gonna have to take a hard pass on this movie.
VERDICT: SUICIDE IS PAINLESS
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