In 1983, late director Bob Clark (Black Christmas, Porky's) made what some consider the greatest Christmas movie ever made. "A Christmas Story" has gone down in history for that that simple fact; even TBS plays the movie for 24 hours straight on Christmas day. Personally, I feel the film is very overrated, not saying that it's a bad film just overrated. That being said, Warner Brothers in their infinite wisdom decided that what "A Christmas Story" needed was a sequel, almost 30 years later.
Being promoted as "the official sequel to 'A Christmas Story'", Warner Brothers seems to have forgotten that the film already has had TWO sequels before this one: a 1988 TV movie entitled "Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss" and the 1994 film "It Runs in the Family" (most commonly known as "My Summer Story"), but since Warner Brothers didn't make those films I guess they felt they didn't count as sequels and they have completely disregarded them.
Now that that's out of the way lets delve into this bear sized shit of a movie. The story is about Ralphie and he's an annoying 15-year old who wants a car. Him and his stupid friends wreck a car at a dealership and the rest of the movie is all about them trying to come up with $85 to fix the car. Daniel Stern (Home Alone) plays the father in this film and he comes off as a very cold hearted cheapskate. At the end of the film he seems to have redeemed himself and proves to be a loving father, but throughout the rest of the film he's just an asshole.
The film does what I assume they felt were homages to the original film but in reality they were just blatant rip offs. This film rehashes so much from the original film it baffles me why they even bothered making a "sequel" instead of a "remake". They rehash the tongue to the pole in a rather stupid way by having the same character stick his tongue in a vacuum at a department store and then you get to see his face stretch out inside the tube as some goofy way of making this generation of retarded children laugh. Having Ralphie dress up in a stupid animal costume is rehashed having him dress as a reindeer at a department store. Somehow the leg lamp is back at the very end, though the film never really admits who the hell gave it to the father. So much is rehashed from the original film all the way down to Ralphie's brother getting a space ship for Christmas and sitting on the floor making "vroom" sounds with it (in the original film he gets a blimp and does the same thing).
This film fails so horribly it's not even funny. I didn't expect anything at all from this film but I just wanted to give it a shot. Seeing Daniel Stern embarrass himself in this direct-to-video garbage is terrible. The man made some classic comedies in his day and he has been reduced to this trash. That being said, Stern is the ONLY good thing about this film. He does give a stellar performance but his character is so cynical it's hard to even enjoy it. The only thing this film did well (and I'm using that term lightly) is they got an actor (surprisingly the writer) to sound JUST like Jean Shepard narrating. But something that small and pathetic can't save this useless, unneeded and unwanted sequel to a film that is considered a classic.
