Even if I had a gun to my head I could not think of a worse viewership experience, let alone a worse Christmas movie, than the audacious slap-in-the-face that is Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, an animated adaptation of the equally loathsome novelty song of the same name. The best way to summarize it would be to say that it is what capitalism’s pet leech sucks out of a nondescript pile of Christmas movie clichés. Objectively speaking, its animation is subpar, its writing is insultingly simplistic, and its songs – oh yes, it’s a musical adaptation – are abject. It’s not a fun movie. But Cartoon Network has aired it like it was running out of other programming every year since the turn of the millennium, a tradition my adolescent self came to retch at.
What flummoxes me the most about this film is, as I’ve said before, its audacity. The premise, very generously on loan from Elmo & Patsy, clearly can’t fill a feature-length narrative despite being stretched to its breaking point so the bulk of the film is awful legal drama about some ridiculously cliché wealthy businessman wanting to buy out Grandma and Grandpa’s saccharinely wholesome general store. It’s also worth mentioning that this wealthy businessman’s sole venture is making Christmas more convenient and impersonal for the residents of, no joke, Cityville, USA. Instead of being a potentially satisfying supercut of Grandma getting clobbered by reindeer at all conceivable speeds and angles, it’s a desperate stringing together of stale Christmas clichés (quaint town, doubts of Santa’s existence, Santa being sued by the villains, etc.) and bottom-of-the-barrel stock characters. It's so shallow and such a cash grab; every aspect of its existence offends the values and themes we associate with Christmas so it's an egregiously shallow cash grab.
