Just because you’re a self-identified bro doesn’t mean that you don’t have urges to watch Christmas flicks this time of year. But if you’re not into sappy family or romance-driven stories about folks finding out the “real meaning of Christmas,” you’re shit out of luck, right? Wrong.
Here are seven of our favorite holiday-themed movies that you won’t have to trade in your balls to watch.
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
This is our favorite of the Vacation movies and one that we’ll happily watch year after year. Chevy Chase’s Clark Griswald is one of the only characters, fictional or not, who consistently has worse luck than we do. And what’s better than a little bit of Yuletide-themed Schadenfreude?
Trading Places
You may not think of this Dan Akroyd and Eddie Murphy comedy as a Christmas movie, but it passes. It take place over that span of three weeks between Christmas and New Years that makes even the strongest man want to eat a bag of guns. Plus, the whole “discovering what really matters to you when you’re money’s gone” thing that holiday movies have been relying on since Capra was running shit is totally there.
A Christmas Story
In terms of our list, A Christmas Story is probably one of the biggest across-the-board favorites, but there’s plenty of material aimed straight for the dude set. C’mon, you think little girls ever begged for a Red Rider BB gun and wouldn’t have been perfectly happy with those rabbit pajamas? Watching this also gives you the opportunity to play our favorite Christmas game, “Wondering Aloud if That Rumor That the Guy Who Played Ralphie Did Porn or Not” (do not let the fact that the rumors have been squashed prevent you from playing. It’s truly the most delightful game.)
Scrooged
Many versions of A Christmas Carol have been made over the years, but only one of them hardly sucks at all AND includes the line, “The bitch hit me with a toaster!” Of course Bill Murray kills it as Frank Cross, a grumpy TV exec faced with the task of producing a saccharin Christmas extravaganza despite the fact that he couldn’t possibly hate the holiday more. You know where the story goes from there.
Nightmare Before Christmas
We absolutely do not advocate drug use whatsoever, but should you find yourself having just eaten one too many “special” Christmas cookies, this holiday mash up of a flick is the one you want to see. Tim Burton wrote it, Danny Elfman scored it and it’s the story of some claymation skeleton trying to understand Christmas, man. Also, sensitive, kind of dark chicks always like this movie, and they’re not too bad to have around.
Bad Santa
If you’re looking to laugh and occasionally space out and think about how much worse your drinking problem would be if you had to be a mall Santa, then this is definitely worth moving up to the top of your Netflix queue. A foul-mouthed little person and Billy Bob Thorton are far from the first things that come to mind when we think of holiday classics, but they’re on the short list of things we think makes dudes tick.
Gremlins
You really have to hand it to the folks over at the Furbie company for managing to come up with a product almost identical to Stripe (the most evil Gremlin of all) AND having it sell out nation-wide at Christmas time. You’d think that this campy 80s horror flick about adorable yet murderous toys would have made stuffed fantastical creatures obsolete.
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