Next up, it's something a little more palatable with 2018’s teen farce I’ll Be Next Door for Christmas, a fun tale of parental embarrassment from director David Jay Willis. Juliette Angelo gives a great performance as Nicky, a teenager so mortified by her family’s over-enthusiasm for the holidays that she takes the drastic measure of hiring a fake family, staging a Christmas dinner next door to prevent her boyfriend from meeting her cringey parents. It’s a fun concept that they wisely stretch to its ridiculous breaking point and has a lot more laughs than your standard teen movie.
You can see why Nicky would want to hide her parents from dreamy bf Tanner (Javier Bolanos) as they’re a pair of cheese-masters, mortifyingly obsessed with Christmas, the sort of people who insist on decorating in September, blowing the kids’ college fund on holiday knick-knacks and trying to use so many lights that the house can be seen from space. I’m ashamed to admit I laugh when her dad is described as having ‘O.C.D. – Obsessive Christmas Disorder.’
I acquiesce with Nicky a little, as we have neighbours like this who try way too hard to ‘wow’ the neighbourhood on the big holidays. I often wonder if they realise how mental they seem when they set up the holographic projector every year.
Flashbacks reveal Nicky even had her first kiss spoiled by her family’s yuletide mania. Angelo acts it well, making for a feisty lead, not too glamorous or fake, coming off like a convincing, awkward teenager. This is also a bit saucier than most kids’ films, with some adolescent chatter about ‘lacy bras’ and ‘tonguing’ lending it a little authenticity.
Tanner’s obliviousness to Nicky’s familial tensions is explained by the fact that the teens have been away at a fancy boarding school, but a surprise visit for the holidays forces Nicky to do something drastic. It’s believable she’d want to conceal her doofus of a dad from her dreamboat beau – Regan Burns plays the patriarch as a phenomenally prissy, irritating guy who says awful things like “Ho ho hold it a minute.” Burns’ performance goes a little too over-the-top with the camp, though it’s funny when he reminds the kids he was wearing his beloved Santa hat “on the day each of you was born…and conceived.”
When dad’s antics antagonise the next-door neighbours, they move out for a week, handily leaving Nicky the key to feed their pug-ugly pussycat. Somewhat implausibly, desperate Nicky decides to ‘audition’ actors to pose as her parents utilising the house next door as the venue for her ‘meet the parents’ moment. The joke, of course, is that the ringer family end up being even more unhinged than her real parents. King of Queens’ Nicole Sullivan is a hoot as the fake mom, a self-proclaimed ‘improv specialist’ who goes overboard with her zany performance. The counterfeit dad (Jonathan Mangum) turns out to be a crazy, racist drunk with an alcohol monitoring bracelet and the fake parents end up hating each other, leading to various comical mishaps.
This is a fun film, done well and it’s exhilarating waiting for it all to go wrong. It does lose momentum by the end, going off on a morbid tangent involving a fake heart attack, as though the writers weren’t too sure how to tie this all up. But it’s surprisingly ballsy and hilarious for a kids’ film and an altogether pleasant discovery. Angelo shows some grand comedy chops and I could totally see her in an edgy sitcom of her own. This kid’ll go far.
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