Where do you think you're going? Nobody's leaving. Nobody's walking out on this fun, old-fashioned family Christmas! No, no. We're all in this together. This is a full-blown, four-alarm holiday emergency here! We're gonna press on, and we're gonna have the hap-hap-happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap-danced with Danny f**king Kaye. And when Santa squeezes his fat white ass down that chimney tonight, he's gonna find the jolliest bunch of a**holes this side of the nuthouse!

-- Clark W. Griswold (Chevy Chase)

After European Vacation, no one had any reason to believe the Vacation series would get back on track. Not to mention, almost without exception, movie series tend to get worse as they go along, right? Well, not this time.

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation ranks just slightly behind the original in terms of laughs, and it packs in even more heart without resorting to schmaltz. Again, I'm going to give a lot of the credit to John Hughes, the sole writer this time out. He makes just about every line funny, memorable, and quotable. He gives us a whole lot of characters, each well-defined and amusing. Hughes may have hit his peak here unfortunately, because after the following year's Home Alone, the man never wrote a great script again. (I think Dutch is hilarious, but even with all my Hughes love I can't call it "good.")

It was a "last hurrah" of sorts for Chevy Chase, too. Chase is really terrific here in what is, I'm sad to say, his final funny starring role (although I didn't see The Karate Dog). Oh, Chevy. What happened? Beverly D'Angelo returns, and is typically great ("Clark! Slow down! I don't want to spend the holidays dead!"). And my Lord, does Randy Quaid step it up here as Cousin Eddie. Chase's exchanges with Quaid are some of the film's funniest moments ("Can I refill your eggnog for you? Get you something to eat? Drive you out to the middle of nowhere and leave you for dead?"). If Quaid's delivery of gems like "Merry Christmas! Sh*tter was full!" and "That's the gift that keeps on giving the whole year!" don't make you laugh, well ... lighten up.

This story should come as no surprise to anyone: religious groups are upset with the horror flick Black Christmas bloodying up their holiday. Matthew Staver of Liberty Council called the release "ill founded" and Jennifer Giroux of Operation Just Say Merry Christmas said the movie has "assualted" the most sacred of holy days. If I was head of Dimension, I'd use those quotes in an ad.

Dimension has at least issued a statement in response to the complaints: "There is a long tradition of releasing horror movies during the holiday season," the company said, "as counter-programming to the more regular yuletide fare." That's the truth. A power search on the IMDb of Christmas and horror reveals 53 titles (sure not all of them really apply here).

What I want to know is, how many Christmas movies made these days do Staver and Giroux approve of? Certainly Black Christmas and other holiday horrors aren't as bad as some truly inappropriate and damaging Christmas movies. I'm not even referring to cynical flicks like Bad Santa and Christmas Vacation. I mean the badly written family films that center on the consumerist Christmas yet insincerely present a moral tale about how family is more important than presents. Or, worse, the awful slapstick Christmas comedies like Deck the Halls that have no redeeming association with Christmas whatsoever. C'mon, there are so many movies that are more sacreligious than Black Christmas. Care to name a few?

Related posts:

Guilty Pleasures: Silent Night, Bloody Night

12 Days of Cinematicalmas : The World's Most Obnoxious Xmas Comedies

John Waters Jingles for Christmas and Evil

Review: Deck the Halls