“Oh. Wow. That’s why I’m sensing clowns.”

Justin’s rating: Do I look like a letter of the alphabet to you?

Justin’s review: If you came to this movie based on its title alone — and perhaps the knowledge that The Karate Kid’s Martin Kove is in it — where would your assumptions go? Exactly. And you’d be wrong. So, so wrong. Because unless your twisted imagination went, “What if a kid who lost his father decided that karate mastery might resurrect him?” then you’re not even close to being in the ballpark with A Karate Christmas Miracle.

This is a bizarre family vanity project which inexplicably has a sequel of sorts (A Wrestling Christmas Miracle). And it has to be explained and then qualified with many assurances that I’m not making this up. I couldn’t make this up. My mind isn’t this broken. So please trust me when I tell you that I’m simply relaying the facts of the matter.

Now, there’s setting a Christmas film against a slight tragedy or an unfortunate Tiny Tim-like situation that must be overcome — and then there’s A Karate Christmas Miracle, which starts with a grieving family of two that is going into their first holiday season after their father was killed in a mass shooting by a “killer clown” at a movie theater that is tastelessly referencing the 2012 Aurora shootings (just in case you don’t make the connection, the theater owner is named Aurora).

But was the dad actually killed? Nobody is sure, because his body was never found, which is something you think would raise a few more lines of inquiry with law enforcement than seems to have happened. That’s so random and weird and grotesque of a premise, and yet you have no choice to accept it because it only gets more bonkers from here.

The dad’s bratty son Jesse becomes hyper-fixated on completing a “12 Days of Christmas” task list because he figures that if he does it all, it’ll grant him a wish to get his dad back. This is all very normal, very healthy to do. And at the top of that list is teaching himself — a yellow belt in karate — to become a black belt in a few short days without any help.

As he’s doing this impossible task (I shouldn’t have to point out that no dojo is going to let you jump from yellow to black in five days no matter how plucky you are), Jesse also has nightmares of the killer (Eric Roberts) and victims. Ho ho holy crap what kind of movie is this. A kids movie? How? Just how?

But wait, it gets even more bizarre. Jesse’s mom Abby thinks that there might be some sort of supernatural connection going on, so she enlists the help of a psychic law professor who acts all wAcKy and gOOfy. That’s like two character traits too many shoved into this weirdo. The two of them embark on a cross-town scavenger hunt to find out the truth about the dad, who was apparently hiding secrets. Such as — steel yourself — the fact that he was a black belt too and never told his family. Dun dun DUNNN.

I cannot get over how weird this professor lady is, and I’m not only talking about the fact that she keeps using non sequitur Christmas analogies for law examples. The best way to describe her is like she’s the subject of a real life YouTube video of some crazed lady having a really off day getting into others faces and babbling conspiracy theories. When she looks frantic and upset on camera, I actually believe that she was.

This is not a movie designed to answer questions — it only generates them. It’s a factory for madness that will break your mind. I can’t even begin to imagine how someone might come up with such a tonally unbalanced storyline, jam it full of elements that make zero sense, and then pass it off as some kind of family Christmas movie that’s also a Twin Peaks-style serial killer detective story.

Every scene piles it on. Jesse never stops wearing his red karate outfit and talks back to his mom every chance he gets. Every karate “fight” ends up in a wrestling match where a kid gets choked out on the floor. The music whiplashes from deeply ominous to kooky lighthearted fare, sometimes in the middle of a single scene. The psychic professor looks like she’s on a drunken bender and they kept the cameras running. At one point, Jesse goes into this soliloquy about the meaning of the different karate belts while a semi-animated series of nature backgrounds flow by. Everyone in this town seems to be lovingly obsessed with Abby’s husband Bob, who looked like a chubby loser in every flashback but built a gazebo one time. Abby hires a nanny to watch the kid so she can keep getting drunk with her new BFF. At one point they use footage of xenophobic natives from North Sentinel Island for no real reason.

It goes on and on until your sanity is ground into a pulp.

And these dream sequences are so nonsensical that by the time that Martin Kove shows up as the serial killer clown and Eric Roberts is ranting to no one about nothing in particular and a bunch of people look like they’re still trapped in a theater (is this purgatory? hell? Cleveland?), the only response is a nervous giggle and an uncontrollable eye twitch. I only learned afterward that Roberts’ scenes are from a completely different movie called Joker Poltergeist that were shoved into this one for some reason.

The reward for stoically plodding through this hour-and-a-half of pure, uncut insanity is to reach the end scene where Jesse breaks a single board with his hand, earns a black belt, and his dad walks into the house. Right as they’re hugging and you’ve just started to open your mouth to form SO MANY follow-up questions, the credits appear and usher you back into your normal life.

I would dearly love for some of you to see A Karate Christmas Miracle, not because I think you’ll enjoy it or that it’ll benefit your life, but because I need someone else to experience this and then form a special therapy group with me about it. I have to have someone in my life that I can nod at and go, “Applesauce is the new jello” and get a knowing nod back.

Intermission!

• When your movie is using Papyrus font in 2019, you know that this is going to be a quality film experience
• That lady’s hair is very shiny and never stops moving
• All of the dad’s photo backgrounds are blinding white
• The mom’s incredulous look at 2:20 is the same look you’ll have for this entire film
• “He’s not gone — he’s just not here!”
• Is this karate or wrestling?
• Jesse backtalks his mom so much I want her to smack him with a pillow
• This house is terribly decorated for Christmas
• “Critters” is not a forbidden term for students
• Reindeers reminds her of Satan because of the “horns?”
• This teacher obviously think she’s an amazing stand up comedian. She is so not.
• “BAM! Santa broke a chair over some greaser’s head!”
• This office scene has the most ominous music
• “I don’t want to see dead bodies any more!” is something we hear in every Christmas movie
• Psychic predictions are like a “terminal disease”
• Lots of lawyers wear deep V-necks to show off their chest hair while delivering lectures
• “Gravy speaks Christmas!”
• Jesse’s 12 Tasks of Christmas chart doesn’t have 12 items
• Wait, she didn’t get her kid a therapist after his dad died? Because he “seems fine?” Abby gets Worst Mom of the Year award.
• Her class is one student?
• “Go home for clown’s sake!”
• That’s a sad little soup kitchen, just two small tables
• “Do I look like Jay? J is a letter of the alphabet, and I’m not a letter. It’s also a bird, and I’m not a bird. Do I look blue?”
• Bob’s phone still had a charge after a full year of being stuck under a booth?
• The amazing karate belt speech
• Bob… was a black belt?
• He has a nightmare, tells his mom that he’s got to be silent for a few days, and then starts doing situps in bed?
• I can’t get enough of these two women getting drunk together
• So he’s talking to Martin Kove on the phone in his dream while Kove is in hell?
• Applesauce is the new jello!