Scrooged screens in our parkinglot Drive-In. Tickets are $40.00 per vehicle and include a $14.00 concession voucher. Snacks will be delivered right to your car door by our busy cinema elves- The perfect contactless cinema experience!
"Scrooged hit theaters on November 23, 1988, and is, indeed, phenomenally loud, and also very mean, and somehow also ultimately heartening, in a loopy yuletide sort of way. A Charles Dickens update spiked with Reagan-era boob-tube cynicism, it stars Murray as the tyrannical Frank Cross, “the youngest president in the history of television,” who is overseeing a live Christmas Eve production of A Christmas Carol by terrorizing everyone in sight. “Oh my gosh, does that suck,” he declares to a conference room full of cowering underlings, furious that the show’s promos are too tepid. “Now I have to kill all of you.”
He grudgingly gives towels as gifts. He steals cabs from old ladies, and recuts the live Christmas Carol ad with so much random violence that it scares an 80-year-old woman to death. He throws down Tab-and-vodka cocktails. He fires a cowering underling played by Bobcat Goldthwait who later returns, stinking drunk, with a shotgun. He heckles a crew of NYC sidewalk buskers that includes Miles Davis. He ignores his saintly brother and menances his even more saintly assistant, Grace (Alfre Woodard), ripping down a picture drawn by her young son, Calvin, who went mute after witnessing his own father’s murder. (Try to guess Calvin’s only line, Dickens fans.) He turns his back on his true love, a homeless-shelter worker played by a beaming Karen Allen. And yes, apparently per his director’s instructions, he barks most of his lines, including “Bah humbug.” Naturally, he is visited by three Christmas spirits, one of whom kicks him in the nuts.
Every December, a dozen or so Christmas movies clog up America’s basic-cable channels and holiday-themed DVD displays. It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story are the nostalgia-drenched benchmarks. A Charlie Brown Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and How the Grinch Stole Christmas are the kids-of-all-ages delights. Home Alone and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation are for the slapstick misanthropes. Love Actually is for the rom-com fanatics. The Nightmare Before Christmas is for the goths. And Die Hard is for the internet wiseguys.
Scrooged tosses all of that—the nostalgia, the misanthropy, the goopy sentimentality, the cartoonish violence and Spielbergian horror imagery just gnarly enough to spook young children—into the noisiest possible blender. Its 1988-specific theme, TV Is Rotting Our Brains, more or less positions it as a Christmas reboot of Network, which might seem like an awfully dated concept now, until you watch it again with your family and observe that they all spend half the movie staring at their phones. Murray’s performance is so caustic for so long—“The bitch hit me with a toaster,” he observes, of the Ghost of Christmas Present—that his eventual redemption has to be very lengthy (and extra loud) to be remotely convincing. The whole thing is remarkably shrill, which, alas, makes it remarkably well-suited for our fraught present moment. Watch it on video and you’ll see."
(Source: Rob Harvilla, The Ringer)
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