Fish and Cherries Productions

Summary: Nicky’s (Juliette Angelo) family is crazy about Christmas… and that’s not an exaggeration. Her father Chris (Regan Burns) keeps their decorations up year round, named his children after holiday terms, and celebrates the season so fervently that Nicky’s practically been traumatized. This naturally complicates things when she meets Tanner (Javier Bolanos) at a performing arts camp and the two become romantically entangled. Specifically, he wants to travel from Connecticut to California to visit her and meet her family around Christmas because the holiday holds bad memories for him and he wants to get away from it. Naturally, that’s a problem, so Nicky and her friend Stephanie (Kirrilee Berger) settle on the most logical option: go to a vacant house and hire actors to play her parents for the evening. What could possibly go wrong?

Review: I’ll Be Next Door For Christmas is a… complicated film to judge. On the one hand, it’s got plenty of humor and holiday charm, but on the other hand, there’s something mean-spirited about a plot where our lead lies to her boyfriend by hiring actors to play her parents. Still, her motivations make her sympathetic, but that highlights how her dad’s Christmas obsession has made her life unbearable. So yeah, I’ve got a lot of feelings that split me right down the middle.

One thing I’m not split about is the treatment of the real main attraction: the adorable, Internet famous cat known as Lil Bub. Her appearance in the film was a big draw for the movie’s crowdfunding campaign but she got barely a minute of screen time, cast as the wrong gender, and ultimately turned into a punchline about malfunctioning kitty bladder. Say what you will about Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever, but at least it gave Grumpy Cat some hefty screen time. I can’t imagine how ripped off some of the backers felt.

To add further confusion to this review, I came away from this movie with mostly positive memories. True, the third act had a lot of people acting horribly to one another (including the grandmother pulling something so galling that I would have knocked her teeth out if I’d been there), but it also features a wonderful resolution where everyone meets halfway and there are a lot of staples of the holidays that bring a smile to my face. Plus, the lead couple are very sweet together, even if the guy does resemble the guys from every other straight-to-streaming romantic comedy I’ve seen this year (do movie studios grow these guys in tubes somewhere?). So here’s my final thoughts: I’m glad I saw it, but it’s not something I’d be in a hurry to watch again.

Fun Tidbit: Apparently, the original title of this movie was “The War On Christmas.” Naturally, seeing how multiple people associated with Fox News have politicized that term, they decided it would be better to change it.