Alternative Christmas movies

Greetings and a very merry Christmas to all you lovers of cinematic goodness. I'm Ben Howard, and in a break from our normal schedule, and with the oncoming festivities, I thought it an ideal opportunity to take a look at some of my favourite alternative Christmas movies. So, if you're fed up with endless re-runs of Dudley Moore in Santa Claus: The Movie, or sick of the sight of Bob Cratchit and Ebenezer Scrooge, you might want to check out these titles over the festive period.

First up is one of the least-reverential Christmas movies ever made... 2003's Bad Santa features Billy Bob Thornton in the role he was born to play – as a part-time criminal and full-time alcoholic who decides that posing as a shopping mall Santa will give him and his dwarf partner the perfect opportunity to commit some big-time burglary.

This is a bigoted, sexist, foul-mouthed Santa who hates kids, despises Christmas and thinks nothing of urinating in his suit. Okay, there is a little bit of redemption for Billy Bob by the end of the movie due to his relationship with an overweight 10-year-old, with the fantastic name of Thurman Merman.

But for the most part Terry Zwigoff's film is the Christmas movie for all those who despair at decorations going up in November, hate having to deal with hundreds of screaming brats whilst shopping, and who only really like Christmas because it means a week off work. And just think how much fun Billy Bob would have been in movies such as The Santa Clause, kicking the shit out of Tim Allen and having his wicked way with his wife.

The second of our alternative Christmas picks takes us back to 1974 for the original Christmas horror movie. In fact, Black Christmas can also lay claim to be the original slasher movie as it lays down the template for all those killer-on-the-loose films that followed at the end of the decade.

It was directed by Bob Clark, who ten years later made one of the most-loved festive favourites, A Christmas Story. This is a very different affair, however, as a bunch of girls in a college sorority house – including a pre-Superman Margot Kidder – are stalked by a psychotic Scrooge hellbent on ruining the holidays for them.

Black Christmas did, of course, suffer from the watered-down Hollywood remake treatment last year, but it's the original that will appeal to those seeking some proper winter chills. Unlike 80s Christmas horror flick Silent Night, Deadly Night, this one doesn’t feature a murderous Santa. In fact, Christmas features only as a backdrop, but all the carols and lights provide an interesting juxtaposition to the bloody murder. It comes highly recommended to all those wanting to see a different kind of bird carved up on Christmas Day.

Joe Dante’s Gremlins proved to be one of the most controversial Christmas movies ever made when it came out in 1984. Weirdly, it was released in the summer in the US, but us Brits saw it in December and for a big-budget, Spielberg-produced blockbuster it remains a pretty damn subversive slice of seasonal scares. We all know the story – annoying chirping fuzzball produces destructive scaly creatures when wet and fed after midnight.

From Phoebe Cates' immortal 'Why I hate Christmas' speech to the climactic scenes of the creatures running riot throughout the snowbound, light-strewn streets, Gremlins is one anarchic festive treat. Unbelievably, it was written by Chris Columbus, who as a director later made such cinematic atrocities as Bicentennial Man, Stepmom and Nine Months. Perhaps he felt so bad about trashing Christmas so conclusively in this film that he felt the need to atone by unleashing such saccharine garbage upon us?

Santa himself doesn't always have much fun on the silver screen – having to share a movie with Tim Allen or Dudley Moore is enough to put anyone off their mince pies. But the 1964 cult favourite Santa Claus Conquers the Martians gives the red-suited fella the opportunities to really show his stuff when he not only has to fight off extra-terrestrial invaders, but also survive a movie frequently considered one of the worst ever made.

Actually to be fair to the martians, all they want is for their kids to experience Christmas themselves, so bundle Santy into their spacecraft and head back to Mars.

Sure, the sets are cheap, the acting horrible, the songs ear-tearingly bad and the script clearly the work of a 4-year-old with ADD. But compared to the likes of Jingle All The Way and, yes, The Santa Clause, this is a work of genius. It's one of John Waters' favourite movies, going so far as to cast its young star Pia Zadora in his movie Polyester 15 years later.

Not only that, it's got a bubble machine, Richard Nixon jokes, spelling mistakes in the credits and, most bizarrely of all, some of the same military stock footage that Stanley Kubrick used in Dr Strangelove.

Finally, I don't know about you, but there's no-one I'd rather spend Christmas Day with than Chevy Chase. Luckily if Chevy himself isn't available I have his immortal comedy classic National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation to put on after my Christmas pudding. This was the third outing for the disaster-prone Griswold family, and the last to feature a script from 80s comedy king John Hughes. In this one, Clark Griswold and clan try to throw the ultimate Christmas for a variety of relatives, friends and an unbelievably annoying Randy Quaid.

Whether it's Chevy fusing the entire street while he attempts to light up his house or the Christmas Day turkey exploding at the dinner table, the comedy here is about as broad as it gets. Some people might think that the movie Hughes released the following year – some long-forgotten obscurity called Home Alone – is the definitive Christmas comedy of this era. But they'd be wrong, because that film doesn't have Randy Quaid emptying a chemical toilet into the street, killer squirrels or an early role for Juliette Lewis.

With Ray Charles and Bing Crosby on the soundtrack and no sign of Tim Allen anywhere, who could resist this festive funny?