The folks out at Lifetime, as part of a grand package of Christmas fare, shipped out a copy of Holiday Switch for us to review, and this is going to be an absolutely priceless review. So sit down, strap in, and brace yourselves because the hilarity begins now.

Holiday Switch sends us over to Gary and Paula Ferguson’s house, where they’re struggling with the bills a lot like any other family. In fact, things are looking pretty bad for them, truth be told. And so it’s hardly a surprise that, when Paula runs into her old high school boyfriend, now a successful art gallery owner, she indulges in a little mental adultery…er…I mean, of course, a little harmless holiday wishing in which she wonders what life might have been like had she not married Gary and rather stuck with former beau Nick. And what she finds is that while life with Nick would’ve been a lot longer on creature comforts, it also would’ve been a lot shorter on lying to creditors. And a lot shorter on love, too.

This is where the hilarity comes in. See, that plot sure sounded familiar to me. And it might well sound familiar to you, too, especially if you were around last year when we reviewed Christmas Clause. It’s downright disturbing that their new offering actually looks like a direct to video project from MTI fully a year ago, and it’s almost the same thing, except they’ve thrown in some extra about relationships in that standard Lifetime fashion. And while it’s good, this time, that they’ve thrown over the misandry and made the woman a complete jerk for once, you still won’t find any really great examples of guy here–your choices are one of three: 1. ineffectual dirt-poor nice guy, 2. vaguely emo rich guy who spends most of his dialogue whining about love and 3. (mostly) nameless cipher who shows up for two lines (or so) and then vanishes like a puff of smoke.

They’re going for heartwarming and they’ve gone clear back around to schmaltzy, which isn’t at all surprising since that’s pretty much par for the course for a Lifetime movie, especially a Lifetime Christmas movie. If you’re watching Lifetime, then you probably already saw this movie and you probably already enjoyed it. But if you weren’t going to watch Lifetime to begin with, this is not a real great place to start.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands this sappy, schmaltzy knockoff of an MTI film a four out of ten. They tried, they truly did, but it’s a dark sign when you’re so strapped for ideas that you’re taking your cues from a low-budget direct to video project.

The folks out at Anchor Bay sent over a copy of And Soon The Darkness, and frankly, I’m terribly happy about this because I’ve been hearing a lot about it for a long time–it’s good to finally see it land. And while there looked like there might be some problems here, in the end, it turned out surprising in more than a few points.

And Soon The Darkness takes us on a little trip with Stephanie and Ellie. They’re going down to Argentina for fun, sun, and a little of that girl’s night out kind of fun. But they get into an argument one night down in Argentina, and Stephanie goes out for a while to calm down. She returns to find Ellie missing. Terrified, she goes to the police, and discovers that there’s been a lot of this sort of thing going around lately. Stephanie sets out to find her friend, but what she discovers waiting for her is going to be a lot more terrifying than she expects.

Okay, okay…so it’s riffing way too hard on Turistas for anyone’s taste here, and for added fun, it’s throwing in a little dose of the old white slavery racket. But, give them credit–they’re playing this a whole lot like a mystery movie with a thriller edge more than a “kill everything that moves” sort of thing. It does a nice job of keeping the attention focused; took me almost two thirds of the movie to even wonder how long I’d been watching it.

Even better, there will be several healthy twists to this thing, which improves the value of the presentation and makes it even more compelling than it already was. Not only do you get the “what’s going on  now?” sense but also the “man, what are they gonna do next?” sense. That’s a huge help and it really ups the watchability here.

The ending will be a bit abrupt, but still pretty good, and about as happy as can be under the circumstances, so you’ll feel satisfied, and that’s a plus.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives the mostly well done and properly put together And Soon the Darkness from the folks out at Anchor Bay an eight out of ten–it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty close. Guys out there, take note: good date movie possibility right here, I’d say. This is what Lifetime might have done if they did, you know, good movies.

I’ve told you about how the folks out at Lifetime sent out a passel of Christmas movies for me to check out for you, and I’ve got another one for you with Jennifer Grey and The Road to Christmas. It’s one of those things that’ll try and teach us that, maybe, what we have isn’t the same thing as what we want.

Claire, an ace photographer, is about to get married in a full-on storybook wedding, the kind most every little girl dreams of before realizing it’s about the acme of stupidity to go into hock for one big party. But when Claire gets stranded on her way to the altar, she meets a widower and his daughter that changes everything she knows…and everything she wants. Will she go through with her wedding? Or abandon her fiance at the altar to get together with a man she just met?

The fact that I even have to ask that last question does pretty much suggest exactly what’s going to happen here–I put this thing in the DVD player and I pretty much had it pegged that she was going to leave her fiance. I would’ve put money on it and I wasn’t even six minutes in. The question that remained, of course, was is this really that predictable? Is The Road To Christmas so very transparent that the ending is visible from six minutes in?

The answer, of course, was it is, and a little of that old-school Lifetime Misandry will kick in to help excuse the fact that this woman’s about to pull a truly low blow and leave her husband to be at the altar. Don’t worry, the movie will essentially say–she may be looking to abandon him like unwanted kittens in a burlap sack but it’s cool because husband to be is, well, I won’t spoil it because it’s a pretty decent shock to the old system, but the concept remains.

A little too convenient, I say, especially given the nature of things. Still though, as romantic comedies go–and yes, that’s exactly what we’re dealing with here, a big if significantly low-rent romantic comedy–this one is not half bad. Sure it’s weak in the plot department and it’s not pleasant to watch guys get slammed yet again, (please take a hint, Lifetime) but there are good laughs here and a few good heartwarming moments. Taken together it falls squarely into the realm of the half-decent. It may be predictable as all get out, but it will still pack a couple surprises, and I have to give it some credit for that.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives The Road To Christmas a begrudging six out of ten for being predictable and weak in the plot, but with plenty of likable parts waiting in the wings.

The folks out at Lifetime sent out a big passel of Christmas movies, one of which was Home By Christmas, a movie that will once again show Lifetime‘s darker side–not because the movie is scary, but because the movie clearly hates men.

Home By Christmas joins Julia Bedford, a wife, mother, and homemaker living the good domestic life in a suburb with her husband (who’s doing pretty well on the job front, by the way) and sixteen year old daughter. But what Julia discovers will destroy her world: hubby’s been sleeping around. And naturally, Julia thinks divorce. Hubby meanwhile has planned ahead and hidden most of his assets, meaning that Julia’s take in the divorce is slim at best. She takes a minimum wage job to help support herself and her daughter into a small apartment, and her daughter quickly chafes at the lack of space and suburban comfort. In a further blow to Julia, her daughter moves back in with her father and his new girlfriend. Julia, meanwhile, is left to move into her car–no child means no child support–and soon, Julia, now at her lowest, is left to find a little of that Christmas magic when she needs it the most.

And yes, once again, Men Are Terrible And Will Hurt You Because This Is Lifetime. Note how it’s the husband’s cheating that kicks off Julia’s grand odyssey of poverty and self-discovery, specifically set up to make him look like a jerk. On the plus side, the daughter also looks like a jerk, so there’s a note of equal opportunity jerkitude here. In fact, the daughter is a master of jerk behavior–she’s so wildly unpleasant to listen to that most of her early lines actually will cause you pain to listen to. At least, they hurt me like a big old set of knitting needles rammed into my ears.

Linda Hamilton, meanwhile, is a far cry from the Sarah Connor role that made her famous. Give her some credit, it’s a great sign that she can take her classic badass persona and turn herself into a sad cringing milksop of a woman who gets walked on so often she needs a big “Welcome” tattooed on her lower back.

The development is also something to see–in fact, about halfway through Home By Christmas starts getting downright heartwarming. Hamilton’s playing the role surprisingly well, and this woman’s resourcefulness is something of a minor miracle.

Home By Christmas watches like a Horatio Alger novel come to living, breathing life–it’s entertaining, sure, but if the thing were any more clearly scripted they’d be handing out checklists with every copy so you could tick off exactly what was supposed to happen next.

Sure, it’s simplistic, and the first half is downright painful, but the whole effect is actually pretty decent.  This’ll hit some people better than others, but then, that’s sort of the point. Guys looking for a good action flick or plenty of blood will not be satisfied by this nor were they meant to. This is, once again, Lifetime preaching to the choir, so not surprisingly, it will have somewhat limited appeal.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Home By Christmas a six out of ten because it’s pretty well done, but it’s very niche and very simplistic. It’ll never replace The Grinch as a holiday classic, but it still does the job passably well.

The folks out at Lions Gate sent out a copy of Blue Mountain State Season One, and it will be pretty much as the box art advertises, a show all about football misfits and attractive women.

Blue Mountain State follows the Blue Mountain State Goats, a college football team in the midst of scandal about to embark on its new year. They’ve got a whole new crop of freshman players, and we’ll follow them throughout their first season. You’ll be treated to a whole lot of homoerotic football images as well as thoroughly hetero-erotic cheerleader and football groupie images, and you’ll get the full first season, almost ten full half-hours worth of episodes.

Those of you with strong stomachs may well do all right here: the cookie race in the first episode, for example, is a big test for your gastric endurance. I won’t describe it in its entirety, but it basically involves four guys running down a football field holding a chocolate cooking in an unlikely place, where losers then eat the cookie. A second revolves around a plastic sex toy. And it continues on like that for several episodes.

It’s often juvenile, and frequently little more than a race to the bottom. Seriously, sometimes this show is an utter disaster. Though sometimes, it actually is kinda funny in a sad and disturbed sort of way. But be forewarned, it’s not exactly earning top marks on the gender politics scale–that which comes out of Spike is pretty much the anti-Lifetime. They could have done something really interesting here–like The Replacements or Unnecessary Roughness on a small scale. But instead, they went for the lowest common denominator, said it was too high-brow, and then proceeded to go lower.

The question of the day here is what is your tolerance for low-rent juvenile humor that would likely even disgust the Three Stooges? If you can’t get enough of women showing up as either half-naked ornamentation or vicious calculating shrews, then hey, no problem. If nothing makes you laugh quite like dick jokes, then you’re great here. If you find purposely infecting someone with syphilis because they weren’t nice to your best friend the zenith of hilarity…then you have officially reached your new favorite show.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, who enjoys dick and fart jokes as much as the next fictional construct, believes firmly in moderation in all things and thus hands Blue Mountain State season one a five out of ten for being funny, but often taking a joke way, way too far.

We’re ending out the Lifetime horror series that was just a competition out here not so long ago, with a look at The Haunting of Sorority Row, a copy of which the folks at Lifetime sent over. I have to admit, out of all the various types of horror film, I often find ghost stories the scariest, mostly because they have something of a ring of plausibility to them. Will The Haunting of Sorority Row fare well? Lifetime horror hasn’t done well for us so far, but will this one break the streak?

The Haunting of Sorority Row follows Samantha Willows, college freshman, as she seeks to join Delta Phi Theta, a sorority full of evil, unpleasant women that apparently everyone’s dying to be part of. The dying, meanwhile, will become quite literal as many of the sisters of Delta Phi Theta start dying. But what are they dying to protect? That’ll be left for us to discover throughout the film.

It’s hard to read these people–I spent most of this movie in a conflicted state of hoping they’d survive or hoping that whatever ghostly whatever was following them around would kill them off because they were, as previously mentioned, deeply unpleasant people. And yes, it’s actually fairly standard Lifetime fare–for crying out loud, the sorority girl with the “high metabolism” really doesn’t have a high metabolism at all.  I think you all probably know what she has, and the only thing high about her is the chemical burn rate on her esophagus.

In fact, for a movie that’s so much of a ghost story, there really isn’t a whole lot of ghost appearances going on in this. It’s profoundly tame for a horror title and it’s downright drab, really. I don’t know what Leighton Meester’s even doing in this–she was doing so well as a scream queen for a while there, with appearances in stuff like Hangman’s Ghost and Drive-In.

They tried, give them credit. They tried to make an atmospheric, creepy, ghost story romp, but they just didn’t have the stones to pull it off proper. It gets close, and for neophytes just getting started in horror this will likely do well. It’s low impact horror, not big on shocks, decent on the creepy but not quite sufficient for any serious horror buff. Still though, you can do a whole lot worse. The ending, meanwhile, will bring the creepy in rather nicely.

The Screenhead Ten Scale rewards effort, and hands The Haunting of Sorority Row a six out of ten. It’s not going to make any waves with real horror buffs, but new folks might get sufficiently creeped out for a good chill.

We carry on with a look at Lifetime’s big horror package by taking a look at The Gathering, a copy of which they sent out for me to review for you.

The Gathering follows Michael Foster, a surgeon with a family, a great job, and the life most would always want. But when his wife disappears suddenly, he’s going to embark on a path that will take him through his wife’s secret life, and let him discover how deep the rabbit hole goes. He’ll discover that there’s a whole lot more going on behind the scenes of the world around him than he ever thought possible.

You may not know this, but I got my start in reviewing direct to video horror movies so I’ve come to learn something about them. And it was always my experience that, when a movie’s DVD menu was just the box art, with no music or animated portions or anything like that, it was about to be a total disaster. There were exceptions, of course, but most of the time when the menu was the box art, it was a catastrophe.

Thankfully, The Gathering isn’t a catastrophe, but it’s just short of one. It’s got enough twists and turns for any three movies, but they’re assembled in a really logically shaky fashion that doesn’t quite balance out right. There’s almost too much going on here to keep track in a fully logical fashion. And plenty of things will be too outlandish to be believed, such as the mystical firebomb at the end of part one, for example (and yes, this is a two-parter, almost three hours long). It’s plenty involved, though a bit overlong, and likely better suited to a series than to a movie.

Is The Gathering a bad movie?  Yes, but that’s not a fair question. It’s a bad movie because it’s entirely too much for a movie, it’s too long to be a movie, and there’s just so much going on in here that it almost cheats the audience by being a movie. There’ll even be loose ends at the end that don’t get resolved.

If they follow it up with a full series, as this probably merits, then that’ll be different. But for right now, we get a big movie that’s wholly dissatisfying because it leaves too much unsaid, even while it says probably more than it should, and some things it shouldn’t.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives The Gathering, an overambitious romp, a four out of ten for effort, but effort that doesn’t manage to quite pull off success.

You just finished competing for these not so long ago, and we’re well on our way to wrapping up our review of them by filing this piece on Still Small Voices, part of a series of horror flicks from Lifetime. We haven’t had the best of luck with them so far (current count: one good, one bad), but will this one break the string? Let’s find out!

Still Small Voices follows Michael Summer (and surprisingly, Michael is a woman’s name here), a 911 operator who’s lived through some serious nastiness in her life. But when she starts having hallucinations of a terrified child begging for help, she begins to wonder if she’s losing her mind on top of everything else. But she discovers the child she’s hallucinating was a drowning victim in the past. Her hallucinations–and her dreams–eventually lead Michael to Starlight, Pennsylvania, where she learns the child she’s been seeing may have been real, and may have met a fate much more horrible than previously imagined. But as Michael gets closer to the truth, the more she finds that maybe she should have left well enough alone.

This is a perfect example of why Lifetime is often accused of being misandrist. Not for nothing did Family Guy once make the joke about a movie on Lifetime entitled “Men Are Evil And Will Hurt You Because This Is Lifetime”. Seriously, anything with a Y chromosome that shows up in Still Small Voices is either a meaningless cipher, a nagging shrew, or the Big Bad of the day played by a guy who looks just like a Satanic version of Santa Claus in a wife-beater who carries an axe around, presumably for the express purpose of menacing women. It only gets weirder when you find out what he’s really doing here.

Come on, Lifetime–get it together, huh? This is why no one’s watching!  I like a good ghost story as much as anyone else, but raging sexism like this isn’t going to get anyone anywhere.

Worse yet, large portions of this movie will turn into disjointed messes, or outright comic portions, like pretty much any time Evil Santa In A Wifebeater shows up, because then things start breaking and he gets all growly and unpleasant until we realize that Michael’s just hallucinating him.

Oh, and by the way, the ending is just a huge pile of preposterous, really, in which most of what happened before it is just turned on its head.

It’s really sad to see a horror movie ruined, and as such, the Screenhead Ten Scale slaps this misandrist pile of writing sorrow upside the head with a three out of ten. If it could keep a plot together, it’d be one thing, but the weak plot couple with the downright sexist attitudes here keeps this one firmly in the “don’t” pile.

The folks out at Lifetime sent me another one in the set of five that we’re still working on giving away out here (better get moving if you want in on that prize, folks!), so today we’re going to segue right into Hush Little Baby, second of five, and one of the funniest horror flicks I’ve ever seen.

It follows Jamie Ashford, a woman who’s been having a rough time of things lately. Her daughter drowned in a river, and a year later, she finds herself pregnant (despite being on the pill, something someone should have mentioned, and yet didn’t) and about to move with her husband’s new job. The pregnancy proves difficult, but soon enough, baby Caitlin is born. And that’s when things get weird. Suspicious accidents begin taking place, and Jamie seems to be their target. Is baby Caitlin somehow responsible? Or is something else happening entirely?

You know, I’ve heard of post-partum depression before, but man, this takes the cake. When the mother of a new baby’s first words after her difficult birth are “Keep her away from me. She tried to kill me.”, you know something’s going to be seriously out of whack here.

Someone clearly didn’t bother with subtlety. Normally, when you get an evil-baby movie–and there have been evil-baby movies since long before Jamie Ashford cluttered up the landscape with sheer weapons-grade stupid–you get some hints that the baby is harboring evil spirits of some kind. You don’t get oddly atonal crying. You certainly don’t get a baby drawing blood when it breast feeds. I was baffled by this–surely no newborn has teeth! And as it turns out, one in every three thousand babies do in fact have teeth as newborns (it’s called “natal teeth”, and it’s actually recommended they be removed from what I could tell, and close to birth, too), but that’s still just patently ludicrous.

You ever heard that phrase “it’d be funny if it weren’t so sad”?  That’s the case here, as watching Jamie Ashford take on her evil baby is a disastrous combination of comedy and occasional horror. She’s a weird combination of cliche and defiance of , this woman–from her flouncing out of a psychic’s shop after she hits too close to home with her knowledge of the child that died, to her bizarre response to her child’s death, to the strange conviction she has that the baby is evil right from the word go.

I will admit, though, that when the movie get started properly–about halfway through, give or take–it does get a little bit scarier, but this is still pretty low-tension stuff, horror appropriate for, convalescing surgical patients or the elderly. And frankly, the worst part is when the first five minutes of the movie is rendered pretty much invalid by the rest of the movie. There is at least one cripplingly massive continuity breach here that makes me wonder if anyone actually edited either the script or the movie before putting it out.

It’s a little too mild for horror buffs, who will see through the endless skein of logic bombs and plot holes here with ease. If you like your horror extra, EXTRA, mild, you might do all right here. Points, however, for the last minute and a half, which straddles the line between creepy and hilariously poorly done beautifully, complete with godawful CG dancing-baby.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands Hush Little Baby a four out of ten for being a weak, poorly put together romp that does have a little good to it but can’t quite be the horror movie true horror buffs will want.

You’ve been competing for copies of these, folks, and now we’re going to take them on in review to see how they boil out. We’re talking today about Devil’s Diary from the folks out at Lifetime, who are going to show me that even Lifetime can be scary. But how scary? Oh, we’ll find out.

Devil’s Diary follows a group of high school kids, who one day get their hands on the titular tome and discover that this book has a doozy of a table of contents. Any evil thought written in it comes true–from “I wish so-and-so would break their leg” to “Man, it’d just be nonstop happy times if the entire country of Botswana suddenly burned to the ground”. And, as you might well expect from an object of evil with cosmic powers unlike anything ever seen before that lands in the hands of high schoolers, they quickly use the evil book to settle old grudges. But that’s not where the book’s power stops. No, just where it begins.

I have to hand it to Devil’s Diary for actually doing something original for a change, which is definitely a step up from the ordinary. But while I give them credit for doing something original, I can’t say the same for their execution, which falls apart badly in the last fifteen minutes. That whole strip of real estate is downright incomprehensible. It’s weird, I know, especially given that they were actually doing nicely with what led up to it, but still–they blew an entire hour or so of lead.

If you can accept a movie that’s reasonably original and not half bad (but maybe about fifteen percent bad), then you’ll do pretty nicely here. Sure, you’ve seen better horror flicks than this, but it’s certainly not any worse than the mundane crap we typically see in this genre. In fact, we’ll do better than a lot of the ordinary, which is a definitely plus.

The Screenhead Ten Scale finds itself utterly astonished to hand Devil’s Diary, a horror movie from Lifetime (which may well be the scariest thing I’ve said yet) a six out of ten. It’s mostly pretty good, and given the originality going on here, it’s not too hard to forgive it its troubles. It may have botched the dismount pretty profoundly, but it’ll still put up at least most of an original and surprisingly interesting title.