francesfarmersrevengeonseattle Absolutely the WORST. There is LESS than no chemistry between the leads Belle and Hunter They go from being gruff enemies to love in a split second after an abusive session with Hunter almost halfway into the film. The estate manager, Angie, intervenes and -voila- bad behavior gone poof! Background music never stops and has no holiday feel at all. The story is lame and Tony's pursuit of Belle using her scatterbrained father is dated and ridiculous. This movie has as much Christmas appeal as Armageddon. Hayley Duff isn't a terrible actress, but she moves like a cardboard cutout doll with no depth. Her look for most of the film is matronly, shes overweight for such a young woman, and her prominent nose is three times the size of the male lead -- well just about everyone else in the cast. Maybe some acting lessons and an appointment with Hillary's plastic surgeon...

utgard14 I'm not someone who rags on TV movies. I enjoy them most of the time, despite their flaws. But this one is absolute garbage that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. For starters, the other reviewers were right about the music. Oh my God the music! It's this cheesy canned e-card piano music that never ever stops for one single second. It will drive you insane! I cannot stress enough how awful it is and how it ruins any chance this movie had of being a good experience. However I did try to look past it and see if there was anything of worth in the movie that the ear-bleeding music was hiding. Sadly, there was nothing. The story is a flimsy take on Beauty & the Beast. The Christmas part is irrelevant. Haylie Duff is the beauty and, while she's certainly giving it her best, after awhile you get tired of her character being a doormat for every man in the movie and you just give up caring what happens to her. Nicholas Gonzalez is the beast, a jerk with few redeeming qualities who seems to suffer from an unfortunate shirt allergy. His character's tragic backstory does little to make us care about him. We just want him to shut up and (some of us) want him to put on a shirt. He also "gets the wrong idea" repeatedly just to give the movie some manufactured angst. So annoying and yet another character trait you'll find yourself asking "Who wants to deal with that?" It's nonsense like this that makes it hard to root for the main characters to get together. Supporting cast is not much better, led by a supremely annoying C. Thomas Howell as the worst dad ever. Then we have Mark Famiglietti as one of the most despicable characters I've ever seen in one of these TV movies. He's the 'other guy,' the one the girl is never going to end up with and we all know it from the first minute of the movie but have to suffer through feigned uncertainty for the sake of the predictable plot. This guy is given no positive traits and, as the movie goes along, you begin to wonder if there's some kind of fake-out going on and this is actually going to be a thriller where he kills Haylie Duff and the beast guy must solve her murder. At least then some of the movie would have made more sense. Anyway, avoid this trash at all costs. It's poorly acted, written, and directed. It's sappy, schmaltzy, corny, cheesy, dumb, obnoxious, and offensive to the senses. That music! That *expletive deleted* music!

teresa_girlie My wife made me watch this pile of crap and I agreed because it is Christmas night. And C Thomas Howell is in it. I was hoping for some Red Dawn action WOLVERINES . But nothing of the sort here. Just garbage piled on top of crap for 90 minutes. Now I watch a lot of crappie Christmas movies, this is by far the worst. The elevator music does not stop. Seriously it never stops. The whole movie is filled with music. It's like the red balloon with a horrible script, horrible acting and nothing to do with Christmas. It's as if they took a porno, cut all the porn and replaced it with 2 people pretending to fall in love. Please God. Wives do not make your husbands watch this.

Me Lee WOW! I think my eyes are bleeding.● Script => PAINFUL● Dialog => COMICALLY AWFUL ● Music => INCESSANT, JARRING ● Wardrobe => AWFUL ● Set => HORRIBLY MISMATCHED (Location and Writing staff NEVER talked) ● Direction => AWFUL The two men competing for the affection of the lead actress (no names are used here to protect the innocent) are both so "over the top" in their inappropriate behaviors that it's a wonder she doesn't go screaming into the night. The main setting is supposedly an old, high-end, family home, but the house is obviously newly built. The script is constantly referring to a cluttered home full of the lifetime memories of the previous owners, but all we see is a sparsely-decorated house -- no photos, no memorabilia. It looks like a generic model home. Descriptive dialog doesn't accurately describe the settings. And camera angles are often so tight that it's not always clear that the home exteriors are to the same house. Some shots look like the exterior of an upscale mobile home.The "responsible" dad character does inappropriate things left and right.The lead actress is pretty, but she is way above her ideal weight in this movie. The first half of the movie has her dressed in slimming clothes so you don't really notice her weight. But the second half sees her outfitted in clothes that highlight her ... um ... Reubenesque figure. (At times she looks like she outweighs her male lead.) Was the wardrobe department eliminated in the middle of the production? Was there some falling out between the actress and the wardrobe supervisor? Was the catering department fired, so somebody brought in day-old donuts everyday as a substitute? Was the Wardrobe Department actually the local thrift shop? Wardrobe choices are so bad at the end, you'll want to look away.The 'Beauty and the Beast' allusions are tortured at best. They feel like they were tacked on at the last moment. Change two or three words in the script and the connection disappears.The script calls for the man's dog to display a new preference for the lead actress. But when he calls the dog to himself, it appears that the actress is holding the dog in place to keep the dog by her side. Either there was no budget for a trained dog, or nobody bothered to storyboard the scene, or they didn't understand how to capture all the elements of the scene separately and combine them as needed during editing, or the film editor was a hack. Take your pick.A "solarium" plays an important setting in the story, but it's a room built from stone with a window on just one (north-facing?) wall. The sun literally does not shine in this "solarium". So the points of the story that presuppose sunshine in the room are not possible.The "Christmas" setting is completely superfluous. It could easily have been any other holiday. Or last Saturday for that matter. In fact, the movie looks like it was filmed in the late spring. There are "blooming" roses (although some of them look and sound like they were cannibalized from dried flower arrangements). Stock footage of new green grapes on the vine is used, etc. This is supposed to be the middle of December? You can't take a spring day and tack a red ribbon on the wall and think it will effectively convey "Christmas". But that is exactly what the set decorators did in multiple scenes.The movie is chock full of these jarring, incongruous moments. It wouldn't surprise me if this movie started life as a standard "springtime" Rom-Com flick, but in the middle of production it was canned because the dailies were so bad. Yet somehow they won a reprieve after the writer promised to turn it into "Christmas movie" fodder on the cheap.I like corny Christmas movies, but the main attraction here is the epic awfulness. This is a strong candidate for the worst Xmas movie ever. If you ever hold a "bad movie night" with friends, this would be an easy target for MST3K treatment.★ ONE STAR for some of the supporting actors who do a fine job in spite of the writing/direction/cinematography/editing (which often seems little better than what you might see in an uninspired school project). I had considered giving it a second star because at least it does not have an (implied) sex scene (which wrecks so many otherwise acceptable Xmas movies for family viewing). But then I remembered the many interminable and pointless shots of the "good" man without his shirt on. (They become so ridiculous that even the lead actress pleads with him to stop -- but to no avail.) If I think about it anymore I may need to take away the one star I gave it, so I'll stop here.