Holiday In Handcuffs (2007) - I’ve been visiting my parents for Xmas so wanted to watch one of the seasonally themed romcoms. This one is about Melissa Joan Hart pointing a loaded gun at Mario Lopez (AC Slater from Saved By The Bell!) so that she can force him into her car, tie him up, and drive him to her parents house to pretend to be her boyfriend. This makes the movie sound sort of racy but easily the weirdest thing about it is that the forced abduction plotline is all handled with the general style and tone of a regular romantic comedy, it sort of feels like watching one of those fake trailers which recut Patch Adams to resemble a horror film or similar. Fortunately the strange pliancy of AC Slater means it only takes about a day for him to go from protesting and trying to escape to asking “so what do you do for fun?”, admiring her paintings, standing up for her against her parents, decorating the yard etc, I guess it’s lucky he hadn’t been kidnapped by ISIS instead.
It’s true that I got slightly nervous in a scene where they’re chasing each other around a kitchen table and it suddenly shows MJH’s eyes zooming in on a nearby meat tenderizer. But it turns out she only meant to smash the phone.
This movie is slightly more descriptive about sex than I tend to associate with these things and especially the ones produced for network television, there’s a recurring and always awkward joke where various family members call Melissa Joan Hart a slut as well as ones about the mom’s sex life. The bondage element is played on by an old man running a gas station who gives them a pair of fluffy handcuffs after finding AC blindfolded in the car, and who then grates “lucky little bastard” as he’s driven away screaming.
There’s a scene where the brother announces that he’s gay at dinner and it prompts a spit take from the sassy comedy grandma.
I actually enjoyed this movie, despite the plot it actually felt comparatively grounded for the genre in that the main drama is “my parents think i’m a fuckup” rather than “will i ever meet the one??”. But I also enjoyed it as a film where the big romantic speech at the climax begins with “I just wanted to say thanks for not pressing charges.”