The Under 700 Club: Christmas Party Crashers (2022)

Hallmark movies can be found everywhere.

The Under 700 Club: Reviews in under 700 words for movies with less than 700 logs on Letterboxd (log count as of this publication: 61)

For years, the term "Hallmark movie" has elicited a certain response, and a certain expectation, among remote controllers. Every holiday season, one expects a gluttony of new Christmas movies featuring cute widows finding love back in their hometowns, hunky doctors adept at all kinds of bedside manner, and always, always, an unfortunately Photoshopped poster of "white heterosexual couples wearing red and green."

I understand that, to a certain degree, this criticism is reductive. It's tired to joke that all Hallmark movies have the same plot and it takes no effort at all to point out that 2024 titles include, and these are all real, The Santa Class, Happy Howlidays, and ’Tis the Season to Be Irish.

Netflix, with movies like Hot Frosty and Our Little Secret hitting the streamer this year, even makes Hallmark movies now. But just about everywhere you look, with few outliers, these movies are white. They're about white people celebrating white Christmases. Again, not a particularly keen observation, yet still largely true - just look at this season's batch. But Hallmark movies, used as a term to express quality expectations, can be found everywhere. This year's holiday offering for The Under 700 Club is Christmas Party Crashers, a BET+ Original from 2022.

This movie first caught my eye when I saw that it was directed by Sheldon Epps. Not known for being a television man, Sheldon has been one of the stage's finest directors for a while, running the Pasadena Playhouse for twenty years, directing in New York and all around the country. As a theatregoer in the D.C. area, I've been lucky to see Sheldon's work at Ford's Theater, like SHOUT, SISTER, SHOUT! and his racially-charged reimagining of Twelve Angry Men, which he brought to D.C. after doing it in Pasadena. I saw it twice, it was fantastic and as far as I'm concerned, definitive.

But he's been a television director this whole time! His credits include Frasier, Friends, Girlfriends, George Lopez, and Hannah Montana. In his 2022 memoir My Own Directions, he wrote about how his tv career started as a supplement to his stage work, saying he was "hoping for financial security at least, if not complete artistic fulfillment." And, well yeah, I can't imagine that an artist of Sheldon's caliber feels fulfilled walking onto a random seventh-season episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, as it's probably just more about making the show's trains run on time. The same could probably be said of Hallmark movies, but Sheldon's has a little secret sauce.

Christmas Party Crashers has a premise that lives up to its title. Tara (Skye Townsend) is an app developer who crashes swanky rich people parties in the hopes of attracting swanky rich funding from the elites often too busy devouring hors d'oeuvres. At one party, she runs into Tre (Jaime M. Callica) an aspiring fashion designer and fellow grifter, and together they pose as caterers (not only are two minds better than one, their ruse looks more realistic if they're both carrying buffet chafers) to meet one influential family, the Everests. Father Elliot (Diesel Madkins) is a well-known tech investor and daughter London (Kajuana Shuford-Marie) is an influencer who might look great in Tre's designs.

Through a series of unfortunate events, which feature deadly falling Christmas decor otherwise unworthy of explanation, Tara and Tre are hired by the family to plan their famous Christmas party. Not only do they have to pull off this brunch without any experience, they have to get their products in the right hands simultaneously. It's a fun mixup, full of the familiar, comfortable, and blanket-cozy tropes you see in any Hallmark movie.

Now, I'm not going to pretend like party crashing as a logline is a novel idea, as it was, of course, most notably done in the Owen Wilson/Vince Vaughn vehicle Wedding Crashers. But I will say that I find it curious that this year, Hallmark put out a movie called Holiday Crashers (which is an obviously worse name) and it looks, suspiciously...well...you can watch the trailer if you want. But it is very difficult to google Christmas Party Crashers now without Holiday Crashers taking most search engine spots. Coincidence? Probably not.