While I don’t normally like to start the year out on a negative note, I want to get the worst movie list out of the way so we can talk about the good movies this year! A lot of the movies this year weren’t bad, just boring. I’d hate to put them on the worst list for being boring. With that said, let’s get into the worst Christmas movies of 2024.

A ‘90s Christmas - When you link your movie to a specific decade, the viewers are looking for nostalgia. This movie only gives confusion.
Five Gold Rings - A mystery movie that completely fell apart by the second ring.
Christmas On The Alpaca Farm - This was a movie written by people who heard of alpacas but never actually saw one.
Tails Of Christmas - Never, ever make dogs the focus of your movie. It always ends up making your movie bad.
Mistletoe & Matrimony - I wasn’t sure about putting this on the list because it wasn’t completely terrible. Then I remembered the bride wanted to book a horse-drawn carriage at the last minute for a Christmas Eve wedding in Chicago.
Christmas By Candlelight - Bad script, bad plot, bad acting. There isn’t much more to say.
Christmas With The Singhs - This one wouldn’t have been on the list if the writers didn’t make the Singhs so unbearable. It’s possible to make a “sucky in-laws” movie without making them whiny babies.
Leah’s Perfect Gift - I almost rage-quit this movie. We need a sequel where Leah leaves the awful family before she marries their son and finds someone awesome who actually loves her.

Dishonorable Mentions:
Deck The Walls - While this movie wasn’t awful, the product placement was so bad and so in-your-face that it gets a dishonorable mention.
Sincerely, Truly Christmas - When the main female character acts like a child, it’s an immediate ‘no, thank you’ from me.

There you have it. These are the movies I thought were the worst this year. Let me know if you want a separate list for the movies I thought were the most boring. There were a lot of them! Coming up next: The BEST movies!

Next up is Hallmark’s Deck The Walls, a movie about house flippers that is so laden with product placement it made me audibly groan. It may be a little cheesy when movies make up fake companies as vendors for the characters but it is so much better than real company logos and stores being front and center.

Rose (Ashley Greene) is an interior designer that gets tasked to help her brother, Sal (Danny Pellegrino), with a charity house flip in her hometown. Contractor Brysen (Wes Brown) is also on the job. Can Brysen get “Runaway Rosie” to stop running away from her problems and face them?

For the most part, Deck The Walls is a fine movie. The acting is fine, the plot is fine, the script is fine. What is not fine is the amount of time that Home Goods takes up. (Also Nutella but that has far less screen time than Home Goods.) This movie really should have been called Deck The Walls With Home Goods. I get that movies sometimes need product placement to help with the budget. But here is how much Home Goods is in this movie:

Rose does a web search for “stores in solon.” (Solon being where the movie takes place.) The first result is a giant Home Goods logo. The second result is mostly covered up by Rose’s hand.
Rose goes into Home Goods to look around for inspiration and has a rather long conversation with associate Oliver about how she’s going to look around for inspiration and how many aisles full of stuff they have.
After the gang gets more money for their project, Rose goes back to Home Goods to buy more stuff. We see her walking out of the store carrying at least five Home Goods bags with the logo in full view and the giant logo on the store itself behind her.

The Nutella place is bad but not as bad. Aunt Gigi (Carolyn Hennesy) says she’s going to make Christmas cookies with Nutella. Then they cut to everyone in the kitchen smearing Nutella on cookies as the camera pans past an open jar of Nutella. ‘Tis the season to be advertising.

There are a few other instances where the characters name products but I’m not sure how much product placement it really is since they are talking about products from the late 90s-early 2000s. (Pogs, Tamagotchi...things like that.) So, yeah, the movie is watchable if you can get past all of the product placement. There are even a few cute moments between characters. I just wish they didn’t try to market stuff to us so hard.

Rating: GO AWAY HOME GOODS!