I will admit it. I simply can’t watch “It’s A Wonderful Life” yet another time as that squeaky clean piece of cinema is beginning to grate on the nerves. Diametrically opposed to that Ivory Soap piece of cinema is “Making the Yuletide Gay: A Very Special Paul Lynde Christmas” teeming with sacrilegious smut perhaps just what your over cleansed mind may require. By December 25th aren’t we all saturated with Christmas carols and “The Messiah”? We need something naughty perhaps to maintain sanity.
If you remember early gay entertainment (no not Gary Grant) you will know Liberace and Paul Lynde portrayed overly gay when “gay” was a dirty word for about 93% of the population.
“Making the Yuletide Gay” is a parody of American television Christmas specials of the 1960’s and 1970’s including satirical of the time advertisements for shampoo, deodorant, life insurance, air travel and pizza rolls with a cutting destructive and mocking tone.
The Christmas special is hosted by Paul Lynde (Michael Arlington) with a slew of current and well-known drag queens, heavily gay stereotypical Santa dancers and out of closet men. Plenty of one liner smut filled jokes that I assume are intentionally poor and in brutally awful taste. Sugar plum fairies and fruit cakes….get the idea. The North Pole is not the South Pole but it means you know what. As Paul Lynde says, “Christmas only comes once a year just like me.”
I wonder if you weren’t even a glint in your mother’s eye in 1960 and 1970 if you’ll capture the numerous jives into the culture of the time.
What can you say about a film that is intentionally bad? Best to groan and suffer through it as you were meant to do and then take the middle road and watch “Die Hard” as your Christmas movie. Yes that political incorrect term “Christmas” lives on in “Making the Yuletide Gay” and gay in this case does not mean happy.
Will be released in North America on 15December2023 on VOD and DVD.
RKS 2023 Film Rating 65/100.
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