“My life is kind of a balancing act right now.”

Preposterous in all of the worst ways, My Secret Santa is among the worst films of the year, even despite my usual tolerance for the hammy cheer and ludicrous laughs baked into these take-and-bake frozen streaming movies. It’s not even that the film is a technical disaster either; it doesn’t look horrible and it at least feels competent behind the camera. But when it comes to the story – the real heart and soul of any motion picture – My Secret Santa is the equivalent of spoiled eggnog. Not a lick of it makes sense, and it made me want to hurl.

Single Mom Taylor (Alexandra Breckenridge) gets fired just before Christmas from her job doing some type of quality control on cookies, her daughter Zoey (Madison MacIsaac) gets accepted into a pricey snowboarding academy at a ski lodge, and Taylor just so happens to hear that the lodge is in desperate need of a Santa. Plus, employees get a 50% discount for the snowboarding program. She’ll play Santa. After all, her brother and his partner just so happen to have all of the fanciest 3D printing and molding tech to disguise her as the man in the red suit.

Complicating things is her run in with playboy Matthew Layne (Ryan Eggold). They meet at a record store and he recognizes Taylor from her days as the leading lady punk rock singer for “Screaming Kittens,” but Matthew also happens to have just taken on a managing position at the lodge owned by his billionaire father. Matthew, a 40 something man who’s never worked a day in his life, wants to show his old man that he can get the job done. Meanwhile, Taylor has to pull her best Mrs. Doubtfire impression to both play Santa and finally take Matthew up on that cup of hot chocolate he won’t stop bugging her about it (because that’s what grown adults do, not 12 year olds on their very first date ever.)

Don’t mind you this doesn’t even cover the plot point about the villainous manager (Tia Mowry) trying to sabotage Matthew, or how Taylor’s female landlord is all horny for her when she’s dressed up as Santa, or how the film somehow inevitably ends with an outdoor concert where Taylor finally finds her voice and lust for life again. Only so much nonsense can get packed into a 90 minute movie (that feels about twice that length) until it starts bursting at the seams. My Secret Santa isn’t romantic, isn’t comedic, and really isn’t even self-aware enough to know how awful it really is. I’m typically a sucker for some of these movies, but this one I spat right out.

“This is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.”

Rating: 1 out of 5