Today, after a dark period, I wake up feeling a little better about life but watching 2020’s execrable A Wrestling Christmas Miracle puts me right back into a foul mood. Overnight I made the mistake of further googling Ken Del Vecchio who describes himself as a “true liberty-minded, freedom-seeking conservative” but also makes crass jokes about disabled people and mass shootings. He’s a real knob.
The film itself, from first-time director Chris T. Anthony is cut from the same stinky cloth as its predecessor, though this one at least has a semi-cohesive narrative. It’s more of a thematic sequel to Karate… than a literal one with most of that film’s cast returning and with the filmmakers cribbing more massive chunks from a previous Del Vecchio production, this time 2016’s Godawful Hospital Arrest. That one, also written by Del Vecchio is a godawwful ‘politically incorrect’ comedy starring Martin Kove, Gilbert Gottfried and Michael Winslow. Please don’t watch it. It’s balls.
Here, Del Vecchio junior returns as Kace Gabriel, son of supposedly legendary gymnast Ajax. Though this is billed as a ‘wrestling’ film, the only actual grappling is shown in stock footage during the opening credits. A voice-over basically tells us that Kace is the greatest wrestler who ever lived, even though he never even trained before taking part in his first successful bout. Ken seems to be saying something here about ‘his people’ just being born awesome, which has some disturbing Nazi overtones to it.
By the time the opening credits are over, Kace has already retired from wrestling at age eleven (!) to concentrate on the quest that will inexplicably cause this film’s titular yuletide miracle. This time the boy will make his own movie that will be so damn funny that it will magically awaken his best friend from a coma. The film he makes? Yup, it’s the diabolical Hospital Arrest. Naturally, how this could possibly work - or how anyone would find that film funny - is never questioned.
Bewilderingly, the film’s not really about the making of Kace’s movie either. No, it’s actually about the theft of a hard-drive containing the only copy of said film and Kace’s mom’s efforts to get it back from two disgruntled cast members, while Ajax prepares to wrestle an elephant in the Congo. Yes, really.
There’s about an hour’s worth of the thieves, ‘Kitty Kat’ (Julie McCullough from Karate…) and her partner in crime Chuck (Buddy Fitzpatrick) squabbling and doing many appalling fake accents with about another bemusing half hour’s worth of Hospital Arrest spliced in. It’s as though Ken was so pissed that nobody saw his movie, he decided to try and sneak it into a kid’s film. It’s nuts and totally inappropriate.
We occasionally overhear radio news reports telling us how dad is getting on in the Congo, which we’re told is part of a secret coup to overthrow what’s described as a ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ regime there (it’s actually neither).
Nothing works in this film - it’s confusing, unfunny and a chore to sit through. It’s not very festive either, save for a few odd scenes of the coma boy’s mother sitting around looking morose and singing some carols. Like Karate… I feel like this film is trying to make some sort of point but I have no clue what it is, though I’m fairly certain it’s wrong. They even shamelessly make the closing credits go on for about eleven minutes to get the runtime up to feature length. It’s still probably better than watching the full version of Hospital Arrest and does generate a few wholly unintentional laughs as Kace manages to bring the kid out of his coma by doing a wrestling move on him before shouting out “It’s a miracle!”
I can’t decide which of these two movies is the worst film I’ve ever seen - it’s so close.
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