All I Want for Christmas

Take one street-wise adolescent (Randall), an infuriatingly precocious younger sister (Birch), a wish for Santa to bring their divorced parents back together, and stir. Throw in a couple of big names, like Lauren Bacall as Granny and Leslie Nielsen as Santa; add juvenile love interest, and voilà!, the perfect Christmas turkey. This is family fare for the '90s at its most shameless and formulaic. What makes the film so nauseating is not that it's badly acted or made, but that its motives are presented with such sledgehammer subtlety that even the youngest children would feel insulted by it.