Alone For Christmas

Alone For Christmas (known in international markets as Bone Alone) is a 2013 Christmas comedy film directed by Joseph J. Lawson, produced by David Mitchell Latt, David Rimawi and Paul Bales and written by Nancy Leopardi, distributed by the infamous company The Asylum, released as a direct-to-video release in October 15, 2013. It follows a dog who has to protect his home from three burglars from stealing the presents after his family leaves to go to Grandma’s house on Christmas Day. As the international title suggests, it is a mock buster of Home Alone.

Plot
When a family visits Grandma's house on Christmas Eve, they leave their dog at home alone. And when burglars try to take the presents from under the tree, the dog must use every trick it knows to stop them.

Why It's Alone for Christmas

 * 1) Lets get the dog out the bag (no pun intended), this film is a shameless rip-off of Home Alone.
 * 2) * Even the international poster is a rip-off of the Home Alone poster, as both show the main character screaming in terror, complete with the antagonists visible outside the window.
 * 3) The opening animation is very cheaply made, mainly because the animation is of slideshow quality levels of terrible, and that the art style used for it feels like it belongs to a Flash animation made in around two weeks by a inexperienced animator.
 * 4) *To make matters worse, the animated designs for both Bone and Columbus are shown on a billboard sometime in the film, which just shows how lazy the artists were reusing artwork.
 * 5) Atrocious acting, with some of the actors barely giving any enthusiasm into their deliveries whatsoever, a big example would be KC’s deliveries of “But Daaaad.”, where she basically sounds she was forced by gunpoint offscreen just to say the line, and another time where Jake is being attacked by forks on a treadmill, where his reaction is like a normal human-being more than someone being attacked by metal objects.
 * 6) * The antagonists actually have worse acting than the family, with Rob being the biggest example because of how little he emotes or actually reacts to anything happening to him, but the biggest case of bad acting is when Quentin is electrocuted by his own taser, who looks more like he’s having a dance off to somebody.
 * 7) * To add more to this, the voice acting for the dogs aren’t much better, as some of their problems are carried over from the human actors to them. One example is when Bone says “I’m gonna miss the big turkey dinner.”, where it sounds so monotone and bland.
 * 8) Terrible CGI for the dog’s mouth, which has mostly terrible lip-syncing, and moments where the dog’s talk, but there mouths don’t move. To make matters worse, the CGI gradually declines as the movie goes along.
 * 9) * The CGI also used for the car spinning when the tire is destroyed is so incredibly fake and cheap looking, looking like CGI from the 90s more than a 2013 movie.
 * 10) Abysmal editing, with some examples being that during the scene where the bad guys are roaming the house looking for the presents, Phil picks up the ignited candle stick and throws it, but somehow, Jake manages to magically catch it despite being on an entirely different floor than Phil. Another example being where the bad guys are driving to the house, they knock down a kid’s bike, despite the bike and the van being literally nowhere near each other. It also does not help that the actor for the child is so flat in his performance.
 * 11) Cheap-looking special effects, which feel like stock effects from an amateurish editing software, with examples being the water in the shower when Phil gets trapped in it, which looks like water from a mh:awesomegames:PlayStation 2 shovelware game, and the explosion effects, which look like something from a YouTube video released around the same time this movie was released.
 * 12) Some scenes are clearly in reverse, which is odd considering that it wouldn’t change if they filmed it normally, and it also looks so amateurish, even for a direct-to-video film.
 * 13) Bad Release Date: Like Surviving Christmas, the film was released in October, the month of Halloween.
 * 14) False Advertising. On both of the posters, it shows Columbus the dog, which will make you think he’s the protagonist. But no, it’s Bone who is the protagonist, and Columbus doesn’t do as much as Bone in this film.
 * 15) During the car scenes with the family, there is literally only a white void outside, as if the team were too lazy to actually make a proper greenscreen that looks like the family was actually driving in the world.
 * 16) Some scenes violate the law of physics, even more than an animated film, such as one scene where the car is spinning out of control because of a tire being busted, but after that scene, the car somehow manages to come to a complete stop facing forwards, which is practically impossible to do in real life.
 * 17) The trap sequence is very lame for a Home Alone rip-off, as most of it involves Bine saying terrible one-liners, and most of the traps used for very lame, with such traps as a hole near the door in the front of the house, locked inside a faulty shower, hot sauce on a towel when one of them gets flour on them etc. You see how all of the campers pale in compare to the first two Home Alone films?
 * 18) The main three antagonists in this film are portrayed as idiots, with them somehow not noticing stuff Bone is trapping them in, such as in one scene where Phil is in the toilet and Bone puts a steak tied to a rod in Phil’s pants, and Phil somehow doesn’t see the steak in his pants, which is odd considering that he had clearly enough eyesight to see Bone put the steak in his pants.
 * 19) Terrible slapstick humour, such as when Phil is pulled back due to the steak being attached to a rod, the scene is overly dragged out and mostly unfunny, mainly due to the acting for Phil, and that the joke won’t work well in a real life film.
 * 20) * Speaking of humour, the gags are very unfunny, such as Rob farting a few times for no reason, and when two of the antagonists (Quentin and Phil) search in boxes for both the dogs and presents in two different scenes. And some jokes could’ve been better executed, with an example being the part where Bone shoves a sharp lawn dart up Ron’s behind when Rob is stuck in the laundry chute, they don’t actually show the backside of Rob, instead just show Rob’s frontside screaming in pain.
 * 21) * Another instance of a terrible joke is when Bone is in the kennel and Cupcake telling him to stop the burglars, Bone then says “Stop them, how? I can’t call 911.”, which is even more unfunny or unintentionally funny due to Bone’s delivery being so flat and bland.
 * 22) **And, to put salt on the wound, the joke is immediately followed with Bone saying "And we don't have thumbs!", followed by a terrible rimshot.
 * 23) A few scenes in this movie are so drawn out and padded for so long time, such as the aforementioned scene where Phil is being pulled back by a steak attached to a rod, but also in the first trap where Rob falls down a hole in the porch, where they spend ages trying to pull him down because Rob won’t pull his arms up, even though that would be a better idea to do than pulling him down.
 * 24) It feels like this movie has to cram in a forced message about family sticking together, as it is randomly written in out of the blue for no reason other than to make it more of a Christmas film, we suppose. Not to mention, it’s brought up only a few times, making the moral underused and pointless.
 * 25) Around the end of the film, it’s then revealed that Anthony, aka Santa, is actually the father’s grandparents. Not only is this a forced plot twist that has no build up whatsoever, but how did the family not know who their grandparents were? And the movie never tells it, because after that, the movies just ends.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The trap where one of the robbers would be hung upside down a chimney is actually an interesting and original idea for a trap. Too bad it was executed shoddily.
 * 2) The dogs themselves (not their voice actors), while not perfect, did really good with acting, and they are also very cute.
 * 3) Jokes on Disney, Home Sweet Home Alone actually ripped off some of the traps in Bone Alone, such as the treadmill and the hot sauce cookies scenes.
 * 4) Just like many Asylum movies, at times Bone Alone can be a “so bad it’s good” movie.

Reception
Alone for Christmas received negative reviews from audiences, with it earning a 3.4/10 on IMDb, a 21% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 1.1/5 on Rate Your Music.

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