The Wish Swap | 2025 Valentine's Day Movies

The Wish Swap is Hallmark’s second Loveuary movie of the year. My wish would be for Hallmark to change the word Loveuary. I don’t know why it bugs me, it just does.

Casey (Emily Tennant) and Henry (Jake Foy) happen to share the same birthday. While they are celebrating at the same restaurant, Henry finds that his family never ordered him a cake while Casey’s co-workers ordered her a giant cake. So Casey offers to share. The two blow out the candles on the cake, making their birthday wishes. Amazingly, the wishes come true. Only Henry has Casey’s wish of completing the list of things she wants to do for her birthday and Casey gets Henry’s wish of owning a farm. Now they will have to work together to make each of their dreams actually come true for them.

This was a pretty cute movie but it also felt a little empty. Casey’s first (of three) item on her wish list was to perform in Dance Your Heart Out, a Dancing With The Stars type television show where random couples perform a dance on live TV. While the theater was empty during their rehearsals, of course, it was also empty when they were actually performing. It was just the dancers, the host, and a camera. It felt eerie to me. On top of that, very little seemed to be happening at the form. Sure, Casey collected some eggs from the chickens and she fed some goats but that was it. Most of the rest of the time Henry spent dancing or talking to Casey. He was the least farmery farmer ever. I get that production probably didn’t want to deal with all of the animals but then make it like Christmas On The Alpaca Farm, a specialized farm with only one type of animal that we see more often. Film all of the goat scenes together so you can get the goats out of there.

If you can look past the emptiness of the scenes, they movie itself wasn’t bad. Tennent and Foy didn’t have a ton of chemistry together but they did seem to have fun. The script could have used a little beefing up. Maybe that would have made the movie feel a little fuller as well. Overall, it was fun but it felt like a nicely made amateur movie where the only actors are the directors’ friends. Hallmark could do better.

Rating: 3/5 out of 5 hearts

It's A Wonderful Knife | 2023 Christmas Movies

We’re ending this year with a slasher film. It’s A Wonderful Knife on Shudder. Will I regret this?

One year after a masked slasher kills a bunch of people on Christmas Eve, Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop) wishes on the aurora borealis that she was never born. She is immediately transported to another dimension where she was, in fact, never born. In this dimension, Winnie did not kill the slasher so the slasher kept on murdering townspeople. Now it is up to Winnie to right these wrongs.

This was an interesting take on It’s A Wonderful Life. Pretty much everyone in Winnie’s life who survived the original “Angel Attacks” were awful people. The only exceptions were her aunt Gale (Katharine Isabelle), Gale’s girlfriend Karen (Cassandra Naud), and Winnie’s classmate Bernie (Jess McLeod) who everyone called “weirdo.” So it’s a little understandable why Winnie wouldn’t want to be around them any more. However, wishing that SHE didn’t exist was a little much and it seemed a little out of character for Winnie. If they had made her more despondent that she had killed someone, maybe it would make some sense. As it is, it sounded a little more “emo teen” than George Bailey.

There were some good points. Justin Long is good at playing a terrible person, even though his fake teeth were a little distracting. Widdop and McLeod did a decent job at bringing their characters to life. They did a lot of dumb things that teenagers would probably do in that situation. (Instead of other slasher movies where they act like teenagers would make all of the right moves to keep from getting murdered.) In the end, it wasn’t the best slasher movie but it was a pretty good Christmas slasher homage.

Rating: Stay for the end credit song. It’s a banger.

Christmas At The Golden Dragon | 2022 Christmas Movies

When I saw the title Christmas At The Golden Dragon on Hallmark’s Christmas movie list, I wasn’t sure what to think. Hallmark isn’t known for its diversity. I was a little worried about a movie about Asian people with a title like that. Thankfully, my worries were unfounded.

Jim (Vincent Cheng) and Sue (Sharon Crandall) Chen have run The Golden Dragon for as long as anyone can remember. Now that their children have grown, they have decided to close the restaurant to allow them to live their own lives instead of spending every Christmas working at the restaurant. Prompted by the news of the closure, their regular customers start to reexamine their own relationships and what they want from life.

Christmas At The Golden Dragon isn’t just one story. It’s five different stories that are all related. Not all of the stories are great but a couple of them are actually good. Romy (Kara Wang), the Chen’s daughter, has a great story about going home for Christmas with her boyfriend, Blake (Markian Tarasiuk). She imagines the Christmas that she sees in the movies with perfect caroling, a childhood bedroom that hasn’t changed in decades, and the family gathering around to open presents on Christmas morning. When she doesn’t get that, she starts to understand how her version of Christmas (working at the restaurant every year) effects the other people in her community. She really comes to appreciate the restaurant that she resented growing up.

While I don’t think every story in here is a home run, I do think The Golden Dragon is worth watching. At the very least, you will get to see how “helping your community” can have a different meaning from volunteer or charity work. Keep an eye on Miguel (Jason Fernandes). He is someone we should all strive to be.