This is just awful crap, and it's a testament to the last 30 years of the decline in American artistic taste that people have actually written in to say how much they like it and want to buy it on DVD. God, this thing is dripping in so much schmaltz and rotten jokes it defies the law of averages. But the awful writing is outpaced by the acting. Leading the pack is Jerry Houser, who just might be the worst actor God ever put on the face of the earth. He's simply execrable. His performance makes my teeth grind involuntarily. Or how about when Alice returns and says that her butcher hubby Sam left her for another woman, and it happened after he volunteered to "come over and check her rump roast." Ye Gods!! The usual awful Brady stuff is in place, and Cindy Olsen dodged a huge bullet with this one. Somebody posted a comment that she wasn't in the show because she was getting married in real life. I thought it was because they wouldn't offer her enough money. I'm sure if she'd wanted to be in this terrible film, they would have adjusted the schedule ever so slightly if she was getting hitched. Maybe Cindy wanted more money, but a million dollars wouldn't have been enough to warrant doing it. The guy playing Jan's husband is a real loser too. And how about the scene when Dr. Greg Brady and his nurse-wife go all gooey on each other, making stupid medical (bad) double entendres. I think you can see Robert Reed's AIDS starting to affect him, too, which is really sad. Watching any Brady show is like watching a train wreck, and in that this made-for-TV film surely measures up. People always laughed and said the creators did it this way on purpose: well, that ain't anything to be proud of. Can we somehow destroy all the prints of this embarrassment?
Review of A Very Brady Christmas
