Small Town Santa (2014)

Great Film overall

Good movie but grossly overrated

Fresh and Exciting

Admirable film.

...that it was ever made at all.Killing time in the afternoon, I turned on this movie in Netflix. I was looking for something light and entertaining, but what I got was the worst acting found anywhere.The script might have been fine, but it's hard to tell with all the campy acting going on throughout the movie. The speech is stilted, the actors are over-emoting both with their actions and their facial expressions, and I think someone else said it best when they said the Santa Claus came off as a perv, rather than a benevolent old man. And it's not just one actor/character, but all of them! This played like a movie filmed in someone's basement or as a college film school project, a bad one!Had it been just one or two of the actors, okay, I can live with that, but for it to be everyone was astonishing. I was thinking throughout the entire movie how bad the director must have been to think this was okay.I gotta say, it's the ex-wife that totally threw me. After being a shrill, screaming, horrific woman who treated the sheriff like crap throughout the movie, calling him awful names at every turn, becomes all sweetness and light as soon as she needs something from him and no one bats an eye.This is a movie that needs to just go away, never to return, and I'm not recommending it for anyone with any sense.

Honestly, I don't know why this film has such a low rating (just 3.9 as I'm writing this). I mean, sure, it's obviously an ultra-low budget film, but it's adorable! A very sweet film. Dean Cain is, of course, fantastic as the lead character. I assume he did this on a volunteer basis (maybe as a favor to a friend?), because I'm pretty sure his salary alone would've been more than this film's entire budget. Santa and the town drunk are also wonderful. The only 2 REAL faults I can find are some overacting on the part of some of the female roles, and I'm not quite sure what the point of Tom's drunk mother-in-law was. She's just generally very bratty, not adding comedic value, and doesn't really seem to have a purpose in the plot, either.

Bad script with the usual formula done in a very lazy way. It misses the mark in all its attempts - there's not enough romance to make it romantic, not enough religion to make it Christian and the "Santa is real" theme has been done a lot better elsewhere. The actors do what they can with the material given, but their efforts are not enough to patch up a predictable storyline that feels off from the start. I can think of a lot of Christmas movies that are preferable to this - "Pete's Christmas," "12 Dates of Christmas" and "Northpole" are part of a long list. There are so many titles to choose from when looking for a feel good Christmas movie - do not waste your time with this one.

Dean Cain, former superman, stars in this mesmerizing train wreck, where the only joy to be had while watching is to make fun of it.You aren't going to recognize anyone else in this movie unless you attended church with or went to school with the group of friends behind the production of this low-budget Christmas movie. But if you're looking for family-friendly, you found it. Only the most puritan of minds would find fault with this well-intended film where every story in the movie gets a happy ending. In fact, the only thing offensive about it is the writing, acting, and production values, which are below the scale of a bad made-for-TV movie. The dialog is laughable, the acting is atrocious, and yet we couldn't turn it off. Santa plays more like a dirty old man than a kindly old elf, and the other cast of one-dimensional characters is on par with an after-school special.Fun fact: look for the plaque on superman's desk that reads "Real heroes don't wear capes."