Local b-word Karen hates just about everybody, including baristas, cashiers, the black family across the street (stand-in for the Cratchits, with 6-year-old Nia having leukemia) and her gay brother (stand-in for Scrooge's nephew Fred). On Christmas Eve, she's visited by several ghosts, including her dead fat whore business partner Jackie Morley, the Ghost of Christmas Past (a gay black caricature ), the Ghost of Christmas Present (a fat white woman ), and the Ghost of Christmas Future (I think he's supposed to look sort of emo? ). After realizing that just about everybody hates her, Karen turns over a new leaf.
A Christmas Karen speaks the cinematic language of a DVD designed to babysit 6 year olds, but all the jokes are about s*x, gays, or racism. My guess is this was a cash grab based on a few unfunny adults' idea of what 13-year-old TikTok zombies would think was a funny movie. Unfortunately, those kids are not going to find their movies in the bargain bin at Best Buy, or on Tubi, the only two places A Christmas Karen could possibly be found.
Miscellanea:
She doesn't like black people because when she worked at a bar there was a black waitress who was better at twerking than her
She doesn't like gay people because her little brother would steal her underwear as a teenager but he somehow became gay instead of trans
Despite having a budget of $39.50 for sets and costumes they had the budget for multiple terrible CGI effects
The Christmas Past backstory depends heavily on parental neglect, to the point that the filmmakers "neglected" to cast actors for her parents. Pivotal childhood moments happen completely offscreen and the narrative is an utter mess
Each ghost's traversal follows a set of different arbitrary "rules" that only exist to manufacture """slapstick""" """comedy""" out of her having to constantly be touching different parts of them
Occasionally, background characters are watching an old black and white Christmas Carol adaptation. I slowly realized this isn't actually a real movie, it was made just for this, which is kinda cute
The last joke in the movie involves anime tits and I laughed at it
Despite lecturing the audience about racism and homophobia, the movie heavily mines black/gay stereotypes for comedy, including the cinematic buck breaking that is the entire Christmas Past character.
The set design is somehow bad enough that they couldn't even make the not-Cratchits look poor.
I was going to give this 1/10, but I found myself laughing a few times during the end sequence where she's reformed and starts doing the right thing, while remaining extremely clueless and racist. The switch from cringey comedy to cringe comedy is a significant improvement. And while Peepeeens and previous Christmas Carol adaptations deserve most of the credit for this, it's always fun to watch a giddy Scrooge character making a fool of themselves on Christmas morning. Karen may be cartoonishly bitchy, but the movie treats her as redeemable without requiring her to learn the language of . This means, for all its faults and unfunniness, the movie has a scrap of empathy that the kinds of people posting "Karen" videos will never have.
Score: 2/10
Don't actually watch it, just imagine the whole thing based on reading this post and you'll probably be right.
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I'm morbidly curious about some of those Tubi movies. Thanks for the review.
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