Review: "Make the Yuletide Gay" Makes the Holidays Mildly Amusing at Best

There’s really something of a holiday movie curse, isn’t there? Hundreds of Christmas movies have been made over the years, but most are terrible. You can count the number of decent ones on one hand.

I’d love to be able to say that Make the Yuletide Gay, the latest film from gay indie writer-director Rob Williams (Long-Term Relationship, Back Soon), breaks the holiday movie curse.

It doesn’t.

I feel like I have a lump of coal in my heart writing a negative review of this sweet, simple gay-themed holiday comedy. But it’s just not a very good movie.

Gunn, a young gay college student who is totally out on campus, still hasn’t come out to his parents. On the way home for the Christmas holidays, he stops at a public restroom to “de-gay” himself, changing his clothes and messing up his hair (but disappointing the local tea-room-dwelling troll).

Once home, everything is fine until Gunn’s boyfriend’s Nathan, played by Adamo Ruggiero, gets unexpectedly stood up by his uncaring rich parents and shows up to surprise Gunn at his family’s house. Nathan didn’t know Gunn was still closeted.

Keith Jordan, Adamo Ruggiero

As it almost always does, the movie’s problems boil down to a sub-par script, which is full of over-the-top characters, plot clichés, and bad jokes about who gets to sleep on the top or bottom bunk.

The movie also suffers from low production values. Despite the presence of well-known actors like DeGrassi: The Next Generation’s Ruggiero, the film was obviously made on a micro-budget, and it shows in everything from the lighting to the music to the pacing.

Some things work. Keith Jordan is charming as Gunn, although his presence is sometimes so low-key that he almost disappears into the scene. And Ruggiero has a definite impish appeal as the more flamboyant half of a very cute gay couple.

Alison Arngrim has a very small role as the oversexed neighbor, and she chews it for all its worth. After playing Nellie Oleson on Little House on the Prairie for eight years, she an old pro at this kind of thing. It’s a shame she has nothing to do, and her character ends up having nothing to do with the plot.

(Gates McFadden, Beverly Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, has a small role too, but it's nothing more than a brief cameo.)

The movie also has a great theme song played over the closing credits.

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