4. "And Thats How I Found Out There Was No Santa Claus" - Gremlins
Another notoriously woeful movie moment here - but it isn't just a single line, it's a full monologue. Joe Dante's Gremlins is awesome. It's an almost perfectly balanced mix of horror, comedy, and Christmas movie... this one bit aside. For the most part Dante and writer Chris Columbus manage a terrific mix of tones, and the occasional shockingly gruesome moment aside, Gremlins works as a fairly light-hearted (if also slightly twisted) adventure flick. That is until they try to get deadly serious, and have Kate (Phoebe Cates) explain to Billy (Zach Galligan) why she hates Christmas so much. What follows is a cringe inducing story about how she smelled the decomposing corpse of her father in the chimney, after he broke his neck attempting to climb down dressed as Santa to surprise the family. Some love this scene and have suggested that Dante meant for it to come across tongue in cheek, but even if that was the intention, it fails... miserably. This moment was actually parodied in the sequel, but this time Kate is interrupted before she can finish what is building up to being an even bleaker story about her childhood molestation at the hands of an Abraham Lincoln lookalike. This girl had a fucking horrible childhood. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_AW_sny6kY
Freelance writer/editor/reviewer. Resides in Ireland, where it rains 11 out 12 months of the year, and the grumpy bastard wouldn't have it any other way. He has a passion for all things film and comic related, and also dabbles in amateur film making, screenwriting and photography.