Through my research of all the different weird and wonderful types of Christmas films, I’ve often wondered if there was ever a proper ‘martial arts’ festive film out there. My search leads me to 2019’s unfathomable A Karate Christmas Miracle. Well, holy shit , if this isn’t one of the most mind-boggingly dumbfounding and awful films I’ve ever seen.
This one’s all about Jesse Genesis (Mario del Vecchio), a ten-year-old kid who, one year after his father’s disappearance following a mass shooting, creates a list of tasks, believing that if he can complete them all, including becoming a black belt in karate, his dad will return on Christmas day. No explanation is offered as to why he believes this and the film certainly isn’t concerned with such things or, indeed, with any semblance of a comprehensible narrative.
The movie isn’t advertised as such but appears to be a sequel or ‘side-quel’ to producer Kenneth Del Vecchio’s similarly confounding Joker’s Poltergeist - a laugh-a-minute micro-budget ‘political’ horror that, in incredibly poor taste, was ‘inspired’ by the 2012 Aurora, Colorado mass shooting in a cinema perpetrated by a man dressed as Batman’s nemesis The Joker. I end up going back and watching the risible …Poltergeist, only because about ten minutes in to Karate…, I realise that, into what is presented as an inspirational, against-all-odds kid’s adventure, director Julie Kimmel keeps splicing in jarring nightmare/flashback footage that seems to be lifted from a completely different movie for no coherent reason. It turns out that these scenes of Eric Roberts and Martin Kove talking gibberish directly to the camera make a lot more sense in the context of …Poltergeist, the film they’ve been lifted from, than they do here. It’s puzzling, especially considering that Karate…’s advertising makes absolutely no mention of its relationship with the earlier film.
It’s a weird thing to do but then producer Kenneth Del Vecchio is a weird guy. From what I can find online, he’s very pro-second amendment, pals with Trump and is really into shoehorning confusing right-wing politics into his crappy, half-assed movies. I could probably write an entire book on this guy but I don’t want to give his politics or his bad films any more attention than I already have.
Anyway, A Karate Christmas Miracle is total crap, but fascinating. It’s that rarest of beasts - a supernatural, psychological mystery sequel to a bloody horror movie masquerading as uplifting cutesy family festive drama. I have no idea what these guys were going for but it’s a mess. The film and its characters have a lot to say for themselves with very little of it being remotely logical. In troubled Jesse’s nightmares, Roberts and Kove make meandering, faintly political speeches about death and destiny with no clarification of who their characters are or how this boy would even know them. These bits have been crammed in, most likely to save money, beef up the film’s scrawny runtime and to place this firmly in the extended ‘Del Vecchio-verse’, that features other ‘classics’ like The Life Zone, a ‘Pro-Life’ horror film.
Young Mario Del Vecchio - Kenneth’s son - is head-scratchingly odd as young Jesse, who constantly appears a bit blank and vacant. I wonder if Jesse is supposed to be autistic, though this is never addressed, so I can’t tell if the kid is just a terrible actor or if this is something they were deliberately ‘going for’. For a film with ‘karate’ in the title, we really don’t see the kid doing much martial arts and when we do, he’s definitely no Daniel Larusso. He seems confident of getting that belt, though.
For reasons I cannot follow, Jesse’s mom (Mila Milosevic) visits a psychic (Julie McCullough) who delivers incoherent rambling speeches about Christmas characters in weird legal situations that seem entirely ad-libbed. I have no idea what point the film is trying to make. They then follow ‘clues’ trying to find the missing dad, though these all lead exactly nowhere, though the mum learns important lessons about herself, or something.
While this is going on, the kid does lots of bad, incorrect push-ups, nudges a couple of kids over and somehow attains black belt status in four days, despite being really pish at karate. This then culminates in the probably the most unintentionally hilarious and downright confusing final 60 seconds of any film ever. (SPOILER!!! Dad just walks in the front door, no explanation, big hug, roll credits).
You’d assume the film would have a lot to do with karate and Christmas. It does not. I’d love to tell you what it actually is about, but I still don’t know. It’s definitely a must-see if you want to watch a kooky, deranged psychic lady ramble for 80 minutes. I’m not even certain Roberts and Kove will even be aware that they’re actually in this movie. The most confounding aspect of all is that this enigmatic dog turd somehow managed to spawn a sequel.
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