Sunday, December 21, 2025

A Wrestling Christmas Miracle (2020)


One of the more fascinating aspects of the Christmas season is how low the standard for movies gets. People will watch almost anything as long as it is Christmas themed. Those Hallmark movies? Would anyone consider them all that good? Probably not, for most of them. But those same people would watch them endlessly to get into that festive feeling. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

That’s how people came to know A Karate Christmas Miracle. I checked that out a couple years ago for this very blog. A kid’s dad went missing and they went to great lengths to pull off a miracle and get the dad back. It was a bonkers movie with fever-dream type sequences. There were main characters who did some odd things but, most importantly, weren’t cartoonish. The poster would have you believe it was a kid’s movie, but it played more adult.

When I was writing the post for A Karate Christmas Miracle, I came across something that I took note of immediately. The same people made another movie. I knew I’d get to it at some point. This is that point.

A Wrestling Christmas Miracle came out a year after A Karate Christmas Miracle. It wasn’t a sequel. It had many of the same performers. They all played different characters, though some were in similar roles. Kace Gabriel (Mario Del Vecchio) was a child wrestling star, from a family of wrestlers that included his dad, Ajax Gabriel (Ken Del Vecchio). Kace put his wrestling career on hold when his friend fell into a coma. He wanted to make the best, most funniest movie ever. That would surely wake his friend up. However, the movie was stolen by Chuck (Buddy Fitzpatrick) and Kitty Kat (Julie McCullough).


When I first watched A Karate Christmas Miracle, I was flabbergasted by how strange it was. It was a missing persons story where a mom sought out answers to her husband’s disappearance to try and alleviate the pain she and her son felt. Her husband had disappeared after a theater mass shooting. As poorly made as it was, with the weird movie screen hallucinations and the almost slapstick comedy with the college professor, it had some emotional substance. The driving force was how to deal with loss during the holidays.

A Wrestling Christmas Miracle wasn’t interested in being grounded in an emotional reality. Instead, it went all in on the slapstick comedy. It was clearly directed at children, while A Karate Christmas Miracle had been geared more towards adults. It leaned right into the slapstick comedy. Everything was about jokes. The clips from the movie within the movie were all the broadest, worst jokes. The thieves were as goofy as they could be. Everything about A Wrestling Christmas Miracle was grounded in the movie being directed at kids.

Speaking of the movie within the movie, I didn’t understand how that cast was in A Wrestling Christmas Miracle. I understood how the characters in the movie could have gotten them to be in their movie. They were famous wrestlers. Kace was a child prodigy at wrestling. But for the people behind A Wrestling Christmas Miracle, it was shocking that they got Gilbert Gottfried, Todd Bridges, Jimmie Walker, Michael Winslow, and Martin Kove to all be in this movie. This was not the kind of movie to have that many recognizable, albeit well past their peak popularity, actors. Yet it did.

And those cameos were probably as crazy as A Wrestling Christmas Miracle got. Aside from the ending. The way that they brought the kid out of his coma was one of the most insane life-saving techniques I’ve ever witnessed on screen. I’ve seen a lot of bad movies, and few have gone to this level of unrealism. And to immediately follow it up with someone saying “It’s a Christmas miracle!” before slamming the title card on screen and hitting the credits… That was as ludicrous as it could have been.

It was really the theft storyline that took me right out of A Wrestling Christmas Miracle, though. Had the movie simply been strange cameos that I didn’t understand, or moments like that final scene, I would have appreciated it a little more. However, the two thieves were played so goofy that I couldn’t help but think of every direct-to-video children’s movie I’ve seen where thieves have been the villains. For a movie that was set up as a kid trying to bring his friend out of a coma, having comedic relief villains seemed too much.

Here are a few examples. The villains were introduced as two actors, one who took the craft too seriously, and the other who couldn’t remember her lines. Yet they were a couple. It was like having Harry and Marv if they were a married couple who stole a hard drive containing the movie a child made. Their introductory scene involved the bad actor repeating her line wrong, over and over again. “Wow, my whites do look whiter.” Kind of a strange line to repeat. Then there was the climactic ransom handoff where the good actor pretended that a can of tennis balls, that everyone could see were tennis balls, was a can of explosive projectiles. He wanted to swap the movie for the money when he spelled “bear.” Then there was a whole debate over whether it should be “bear” or “bare”. It was an odd comedic moment to have when there was a ransom exchange happening.


All these elements of A Wrestling Christmas Miracle were more comedic than A Karate Christmas Miracle. Sure, the earlier movie had some comedic moments, but it was grounded in the emotional side of the story. It would have been better if A Wrestling Christmas Miracle had followed in that direction. It was introduced as a story about making a movie to help get a friend out of a coma. That was a much more serious topic than the tone of the movie would have you believe, and that’s where this one steered so wrong.

I started this post by saying that people have a lower standard for Christmas movies. Movies that they might not find good or entertaining any other time of year become the movies they’ll watch endlessly once December hits. But I don’t know who would want to watch A Wrestling Christmas Miracle besides me. Between the serious story subject, the cameos from 80s stars, and the slapstick comedy I’ve seen in many kid’s movies, I don’t know what the demographic of the movie truly was.

There have been plenty of bad movies, or movies of more questionable quality, made for holiday season consumption. People give them a pass because those movies are more about the feel of that time of year and less about pure entertainment. A kiss under the mistletoe led to Hallmark holding the holiday hostage for love. Too many people have seen their past, present, and future to become a better person. Too many dads have put up too many lights and let their house be seen from too high in the night sky. But audiences will flock to these movies to feel that holiday cheer. That’s the way it goes.


Now this post will go to the notes:

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