Bonus Episode: Scrooged

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Merry Christmas, everybody! We're still rockin' Holiday Moviepalooza: A Big Bad O' Dickens, and we realized he had time for an extra episode! And since we couldn't get together last week for our regular recording, we did a special session and invited a friend of ours, Brian Roskey, to join in the fun! And not only that, but we even picked another movie based on Charles Dickens' classic, A Christmas Carol: Scrooged, starring Bill Murray, Karen Allen, Alfre Woodard, Carol Kane, David Johansen, Robert Mitchum, Bobcat Goldthwait, Buddy Hackett, Jamie Farr, and a ton of other great actors to round out the cast!

Bill Murray is Frank Cross, a television executive preparing for a live presentation of Scrooge on his network, IBC. He is also an incredibly narcissistic jerk who treats his family and employees like garbage, especially his secretary Grace Cooley (Woodard), whose son Calvin (Nicholas Phillips) hasn't spoken in five years, since he saw his father murdered. Can't you just feel the Christmas cheer?

During a meeting with his team, Frank is unhappy with the Scrooge promo that they have come up with, and he presents his own version, which not only sickens the team, but eventually causes a viewer to die from a heart attack when it is aired. Before that, however, one of the team, Elliot Loudermilk (Goldthwait) explains to Frank that his promo is going to scare people because "it looks like The Manson Family Christmas Special." Frank responds that he will do something about Elliot's complaint within five minutes. He then has Elliot fired and removed from the building in a little over four-and-a-half minutes.

Things do not improve after that.

Frank's boss, Preston (Mitchum), hires an "L.A. slimeball" (in Frank's words) named Brice Cummings (John Glover) to "help" Frank with the production, but Frank wants no part of Brice because, well, they're basically polar opposites. Unfortunately, Brice is tight with Preston, and appears to be slowly worming his way toward Frank's job.

That night, Frank is visited by his deceased best friend, Lew Hayward (John Forsythe), who warns him that her is heading down a dark road that could end up condemning him in the afterlife. He tells Frank that he will be visited by three ghosts, starting at noon on Christmas Eve. Then he drops Frank from his office window near the top of the office building, only for him to land in his own office chair, just as his phone self-dials his former girlfriend, Claire (Allen), who now runs a homeless shelter. Frank leaves her a message telling her that he needs to talk to her and hangs up.

Almost no makeup was used on Forsythe for this part.

The next day, while Frank is arguing with the network censor (Kate McGregor-Stewart) of a Solid Gold dancer's nipples, Claire shows up at the studio to check on him. They talk briefly before he gets distracted by noisy workers, and she sneaks away. Frank looks for her, but he can't find her, so he goes to lunch with Preston and Brice where, at noon, weird things start to happen; an eyeball appears in Frank's drink, and he thinks he sees one of the staff catching on fire, causing Preston to worry that Frank has taken on more than he can handle. Frank throws a bucket of water on the unsuspecting (and not-at-all-on-fire) waiter, and then goes outside to get a cab and go back to the office.

The cab, however, turns out to be driven by the Ghost of Christmas Past (Johansen), who takes Frank to see himself as a child. His mother is very pregnant with his brother James (later played by his real brother John Murray), and his father (his real life brother Brian Doyle-Murray) is a butcher who gives Frank five pounds of veal for Christmas.

Almost indiscernible from a regular New York taxi driver.

Next, they jump ahead to 1968, when Frank is working in the mail room of IBC. Lew spots him and tells him he needs to relax and enjoy the Christmas party, and although Frank tells him he will, he instead chooses to leave. Walking home, he meets Claire for the first time, after she hits him with a door as she's walking through it. Shortly after, Frank sees himself a year later. He and Claire are living together, and he is working on a children's show as a giant dog named Frisbee. Lew invites him and Claire to Christmas Eve dinner and Frank accepts, but Claire doesn't want to go because they had already made plans with their friends. An argument ensues, and Claire breaks it off with him, leaving Frank to continue working. Present day Frank sees what a huge mistake it was and decides he is going to talk to her about it, so he heads to the shelter she runs.

She uses the funds the shelter raises to stalk  an archaeologist she knows.

After being confronted by a group of homeless people who think he is Richard Burton, Frank finds Claire and offers to take her away from the city so they can spend time together. She wants to, but there are problems that need to be handled at the shelter. Frank tries to convince her to let the other volunteers handle it, but she wants to get them started before she leaves. Frank gets impatient and tells her to forget it, and then he leaves.

He returns to the studio in time to catch Brice calling dinner break, and after a few unfriendly words between them, everybody leaves except for Frank. As the lights in the studio shut off, he sees the Ghost of Christmas Present (Kane) -- a relentlessly cheerful fairy with a dark side that enjoys roughing him up through their journey. She takes him to see Grace's family, where he learns about what happened to Calvin, and watches as the whole family gets into a tickle fight. They seem pretty happy despite being so poor because Frank is cheap.

She also checks his lip tattoo to make sure he's not a Wakandan spy.

Next they visit Frank's brother James and his friends, who are playing Trivial Pursuit and talking about, of all things, Frank and why James keeps inviting him to Christmas dinner despite knowing he will say no. James points out, "He's my brother and I love him." The Ghost points out what a turd Frank is and then nearly tears his lip off before hitting him with a toaster, which sends him to the sewer under the street.

While Frank is trying to get someone's attention to get him out of there, he finds Herman (Michael J. Pollard), one of the homeless people who thought he was Richard Burton, frozen to death. Quite reasonably upset, he searches around for a way out of there and finds a door, which he shoulders open, only to find himself stumbling around the Scrooge set again, knocking things over and, once again, injuring the censor, who is now heavily bandaged and sitting in a wheelchair.

Brice and Grace get him calmed down and send him up to his office (after a brief scare at the elevator by what he thought was the third ghost) to check on the satellite feed for the show. As he sits, drinking a vodka and Tab (with the minimal amount of Tab), a giant skeletal hand reaches out of his TV monitors to grab him, but is interrupted when Elliot returns, very drunk and armed with a double-barrel shotgun. He wants to kill Frank for destroying his life, but he's pretty drunk, so he's not the best shot, and this gives Frank an opportunity to dive into an elevator to escape. Unfortunately, he is not alone in the elevator; he is joined by the third and final ghost: The Ghost of Christmas Yet-To-Come.

This is the kind of problem you get when you do a live broadcast.

This ghost takes Frank to see what will happen to Grace and her son Calvin, who still doesn't talk and is now in a mental institution. Then they visit Claire, who took Franks advice to "scrape them off...If you want to save somebody, save yourself." She's rich, rude, and has no time for poor people anymore. And finally, the Ghost takes him to a funeral. Unsure who it is for at first, Frank spots his sister-in-law, Wendie (Wendie Malick), and assumes it's hims brother's funeral. But when James shows up, he realizes it is his own, and he goes into meltdown mode.

But will it make a difference? Will Frank quit being a jerk and start treating people better? Will he learn to care? Let's be honest; you know how this story goes. But hey, there's a singalong at the end while Bill Murray yells at the viewers to take part and quit talking through the movie! So there's that!

Brian has seen bits and pieces of this movie before, but had never seen it all the way through, which made him viewing it this time pretty fun for everybody. He seemed a bit confused by some of the references -- Lee Majors, Solid Gold Dancers...That sort of thing. But the guys explained them to him.

Derek has liked this film since the first time he saw it. He still does. The jokes hold up, even if the very eighties references don't. Bill Murray is truly the gift that keeps on giving, and both Carol Kane and Bobcat Goldthwait alone make this movie worth viewing regularly.

Jake also has enjoyed this movie since he first saw it, and nothing much is going to change that. In particular, he seems really excited and amused to hear Robert Mitchum say the word "butthead". Like, excessively excited. It's a little worrying, to be honest.

So break out that company towel, fire up your VHS home video recorder, and check out this week's episode!