The unexpected star of my 2024 Christmas binge? Lacey Chabert. I knew her as Gretchen Weiners from Mean Girls and the cute little girl on Party of Five, but I wasn't aware that she has slowly been building an empire over on the Hallmark Channel. After I finished Hot Frosty, Netflix suggested A Merry Scottish Christmas, also starring Chabert. I was so impressed with her ability to make completely implausible dialogue sound natural that I figured I'd check out more of her catalogue. Besides, I'm a sucker for a Scottish castle, so why not?

Would you believe that this isn't the first movie I've seen featuring a snowman who becomes human? There's the Michael Keaton classic Jack Frost, where a man comes back from the dead as a snowman and a boy utters the classic line "Snow Dad is better than no dad." Brutal. There's also another Hallmark-y kind of movie called Snowmance that I watched a couple of years ago where a woman builds a snowman with her best friend every year and makes a wish for the perfect boyfriend, but eventually realizes that her best friend was the perfect boyfriend all along. Given my wide breadth of experience with the snowman-becomes-human genre, I can comfortably say that Hot Frosty is the best of the bunch. Is it the best of any other bunch? Probably not, but we all know that Christmas rom-coms are graded on a candy cane-shaped curve.

I don't like scary movies. Or, at least, that's been my line for at least twenty years. I don't like to be scared and if scary movies aren't scary, they are dumb, and I don't like to watch dumb things either. But my husband has been waging a quiet campaign to get me interested in horror. When we first got together, he offered to watch all seven seasons of the Gilmore Girls if I would agree to watch Alien and The Conjuring. Then we watched Get Out and Midsommar, which are incredible pieces of cinema that just happen to be scary. Lately, we've been watching our way through the Mike Flanagan shows on Netflix, like Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, which are basically eight-hour-long explorations of Flanagan's feelings about addiction and religion with some scary stuff thrown in. And...like...maybe I'm starting to like scary things? Scary-ish things?

Not that Lisa Frankenstein is scary, per se. There's a lot of ickiness: bugs, decay, grave dirt, blood, and multiple electrocutions. But while Lisa may appear to be a plucky rom-com heroine at the beginning of the movie, by the end she's something else entirely. She's the villain, and it's fabulous.