We are so back, baby! Merry Christmas!

Normally I’ve watched about a thousand more Christmas movies and romcoms by this time of year. It’s nearly American Thanksgiving! But I watched Two Weeks Notice and was extremely lukewarm, then tried to watch another Lacey Chabert romcom (something Scottish Christmasy) and got bored out of finishing it. The struggle is real, y’all.

Thank you to Netflix for another marvelous Christmas miracle!

Hot Frosty is what it sounds like: Frosty the Snowman, except he’s a hot guy. Dustin Milligan plays an amazing himbo. For his sake, I hope the movie took two days to film. I can’t remember the last time I saw a beefcake as dehydrated as this one. It was funny how they were trying to get him to look sweaty when he looked like he’d had nothing but a couple sips of water for the duration of filming. The striations, y’all! Frosty is three layers of spray tan away from a physique competition. Somehow, even though he must have had nigh zero energy, he was an incredibly cute and charming example of the Born Sexy Yesterday trope.

I like 00s/10s sitcoms, so the appearance of Joe Lo Truglio (aka Charles Boyle from Brooklyn 99) and Craig Robinson (Doug Judy/B99 and Darryl Philbin/The Office) would have made the whole thing watchable if the main couple wasn’t. Honestly, every romcom should just grab a couple comedians and let them mess around on set for our entertainment. These two are evergreen.

Speaking of evergreen, does Lacey Chabert ever stop working? Although Lindsay Lohan has definitely earned a Holiday Romcom Queen crown of her own, she’ll never be able to touch Lacey’s intimidating IMDB page. Thirty Hallmark romcoms! I watched her being warm and sweet in this movie and had to wonder how many random guys she’s “fallen in love with” over the course of her career. What a dream.

I mention in my review for Two Weeks’ Notice that romcoms can be formulaic without being rote. Hot Frosty is a great example of this. It hits all the normal marks you expect, but it does it with joy and energy. Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. It’s silly and fun. All the frisky older ladies cracked me up. Is that so much to ask for?

Five stars for another great Christmas romcom doing all we want and nothing we don’t.

(image credit: Netflix)

My spooky season starts in August every year. Halloween is my favorite aesthetic, I’m low-key goth anyway, and I never run out of horror movies to watch.

I’ve already been watching so many movies.

I used to be easy to scare: basically, if it had ghosts, I was terrified. This still works on me a little bit — I struggle in particular with the suspense leading up to a ghost reveal — but for the most part, nothing scares me anymore.

Being afraid isn’t the only emotional experience you can have with horror, though. There’s sad horror, like The Sixth Sense and Martyrs, and there’s exciting gory horror like Saw. You can experience dread and nostalgia and anger and a genuine self-questioning depression.

Yet there’s one movie that nails fear in a way that nothing else does — a primal fright that makes me feel small and helpless like when I was a child, unsafe in your own home, and where nothing is the way it seems.

That movie, of course, is Coraline.

It’s a classic setup: a young girl and her family move to a house away from the life she used to know. It’s an old, scary sort of house, where she lives in close company with total strangers. Her stressed, busy parents don’t have time for her.

When she explores, she finds herself in — essentially — the most horrible portal fantasy you can imagine. She has to overcome fable-like trials in order to save herself, her family, and her friends.

This story is familiar. You’ve read it in a lot of fairy tales and coming-of-age stories about that weird, difficult time in a kid’s life where they shed the last trappings of young childhood and start hurtling toward adulthood.

That familiarity is why it’s so effective, in part: we all read stories like this as a kid, and it takes you right back to childhood to read them again. More than that, growing up is a universal experience, and the metaphors at hand are terribly effective.

I was already a proper adult when Coraline came out, but I’m still not immune. Being a child was a scary experience. Far worse than being an adult, where my problems are much bigger, more tangible, and higher stakes. Childhood is a time of being very small with very little control. When your parents aren’t friendly, there’s nowhere safe to go.

There’s so much more to Coraline than its flawless execution of ancient tropes, though. It’s one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. The stop-motion animation is incredible. The art direction is unmatched. The eerie, lovely score matches the beauty-terror of the rest of the movie.

Coraline also pulls no punches. It knows kids can handle the worst of the worst, and at times, it savagely attacks with imagery that still chills me.

It might be a movie made for young people, but it’s great at any age. If you let it take you on the journey, you might find it’s one of the genuinely scariest movies you’ve ever seen.

(image credit: Focus Features)

Paranormal Activity 2 is a really clever follow-up to its predecessor. In the first one, we met a couple being tormented by a demon; the second is actually a prequel that helps establish and contextualize the first one. These aren’t expensive movies, so I’d have expected the execution to feel cheap. It’s not! It’s really nice to see Katie again. Micah is there too. I wasn’t thrilled to see him again, but his presence did emphasize the extremely distinct characterization relative to the dude in the new family.

Yet again, we have one of the sisters (Kristi instead of Katie this time) with a demon hanging around, and the demon is only slightly eviller than her husband. It’s a solid formula! PA2 demonstrates that the makers of PA1 understood what made the first one work. They don’t mess around getting back to business.

While Micah’s obsession with his handheld camcorder was the entire excuse for having the first movie’s “found footage,” the second has home security cameras indoors and out as a reaction to a robbery. So we don’t need a dreadful personality like Micah’s again in order to make sure we have footage of every moment — although handheld cameras are also used, so it still gets to feel intimate and immediate.

The explanation for the demon’s origin is lightly handled. I expect the third movie will get more into the reason a demon goes after Kristi and Katie, but they provide sufficient explanation for the demon’s existence within the context of PA2 as well. Research from teen stepdaughter shows that demons can be summoned to give power and success to men in exchange for their firstborn son. Classy! Dad is a tasteless crapsack.

The crapsackiness of Dad is a throughline here. He doesn’t really believe Kristi at any point. When his daughter gets involved, he becomes more rageful. Gaslight, gatekeep, get attacked by demon! And he makes the biggest crapsack of all crapsack decisions to help set up PA1 as well. It’s extremely satisfying from a narrative standpoint.

The slow build is very similar to the first movie, and it gets very exciting in a similar way too. The most obvious demon influences feel a lot more high budget. I won’t spoil you — it’s fun to be surprised! They get a little carried away with the shaky camera and night vision, like they aspired to be as good as Rec, but I’ll forgive them. I’d badly emulate Rec too.

One jumpscare in this movie actually worked on me.

All in all, it’s extremely fun to watch and yell at it with your family. The Paranormal Activity movies just do such a good job establishing their goals and meeting the goalposts. It’s quite a flashback to the year 2006 in terms of fashion and home design, too.

If you’re like me, and worried about the safety of the baby and dog: Baby is menaced but never in much danger, and dog gets injured off-screen but does survive. I was not bothered by the baby and dog elements of the horror. Truly, this is a great horror flick to watch with the family. We’re looking forward to the next one.

(image credit: Paramount Pictures)