BUY IT AT AMAZON: STUDIO: Paramount / Dreamworks
MSRP: $19.99
RATED: Not Rated
RUNNING TIME: 22 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• “Twelve Days of Christmas” Sing Along
• “Deck the Halls” Sing Along
• Gingy’s Dunking Game
• Shrek Carnival Craze Video Game Demo and Cheat Code
• DreamWorks Animation Video Jukebox
The Pitch
Shrek finds a new way to turn a dollar.
The Humans
Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, Edde Murphy and Antonio Banderas
The Nutshell
It’s Christmas time in the swamp, as Shrek tries to make due with his new family. Princess Fiona wants Shrek to celebrate the holidays with their fairy-tale friends. Meanwhile, Shrek is a giant ogre that does the same shit that you saw in the previous three flicks. Twenty-two minutes pass and everyone learns a lesson. Meanwhile, Katzenberg swims in a giant money bin.
Everyone’s a little nervous at their first Yuletide Donkey Show.
The Lowdown
Shrek the Halls
is a Holiday Television special designed to cash in on attention depraved kids and their parents’ income. It’s a new kind of shill show that doesn’t really need a new toyline to push on the public. Shrek is the brand and everyone buys into it. Not unlike the primetime specials that Jim Davis used to have whipped up for Garfield. But, kids had attention spans back then. Now, you get three different tales shoe-horned into a twenty-two minute runtime.
Donkey doing his best Donald Sutherland.
Gingy’s story is pretty entertaining. It plays Santa Claus off as a giant terror who stalks the candy folk like teens in a 1950s monster movie. But, that’s where the semi-entertaining jaunt ends. You get Eddie Murphy prancing around and braying like some CG animated Mantan. Then, there’s the effort to retell Twas the Night Before Christmas for the umpteenth time. But, hey! They feature unicorn poop in this one. It’s magical and edgy.
Hey! It’s pastel fervor.
The
rapid-fire approach to the Shrekverse works well in a film where you’ve got ninety plus minutes to stetch this shit. On television, it feels like everything that’s wrong with an average episode of Family Guy. But, that kind of crap doesn’t matter to you when you’re five or six. If you’re older, you skip out on this stuff. Hell, I had to do some research to find out when the show first aired.
Somebody just saw The Love Guru.
Shrek the Halls is a holdover from the 2007 Holiday Season. By now, the thing’s a little more than a year old. I don’t think I remember it a month after it aired, much less when it arrived on my doorstep for this review. The DVD sports widescreen and pan & scan transfers. If you’re still watching a Pan & Scan transfer on anything, then join the rest of us in the 21st century. Sure, the show’s kind of blah, but treat it with a little respect.
The
DVD
has a pretty strong transfer with no audio dropout. The sing-alongs and games are fun for a moment. But, kids aren’t going to want to pick up the DVD remote to repeatedly play a game on the DVD player. They’ve got a Wii and other shit to keep them disinterested in picking the special features back up for more fun. Plus, there’s the fact that the program is so short. Little kids will watch it on a loop, but their older counterparts won’t make so many return trips. So, remember that before you pick it up.