A Karate Christmas Miracle (2019)

From the 1960s through the 1980s, true crime was a big thing. That was a result of heightened awareness to serial killers. That was the era when television had established itself in households. The first inklings of criminal profiling and 24-hour news coverage snuck into culture. These three things combined put serial killers on people’s minds more often than they had been when people were a little more cut off from the world and knowledge. At least, that’s how I’ve been taught. This was all before I was born. Movies and television shows have certainly made it feel this way.

Things seemed to shift in the mid-1980s. It may have been due to the war on drugs and the AIDS crisis. Numerous serial killers preyed on addicts, sex workers, and gay people, many of whom were targets of these two parts of the 1980s. Since these three groups of people were villainized, the vast majority of middle Americans didn’t care as much when they were the victims of serial killings. Murderers who targeted those communities could fly below the radar, relatively speaking, while serial killers who targeted straight white people or children would garner attention. There weren’t a lot of serial killers targeting those more attention-getting communities. With the fading of serial killer attention came the fading of true crime from the popular media. For the most part.

True crime bubbled beneath the surface for a few decades. It was always there. Jeffrey Dahmer was captured in 1991, the O.J. Simpson trial happened in 1994. Unsolved Mysteries, Cops, America’s Most Wanted, and Forensic Files aired. Police procedurals became CBS’s thing. Se7en and Zodiac were around, too. None of this stuff had the same cachet as when the news seemingly always covered new murders and serial killers in those earlier decades.

That all changed when Serial came out. The first episode hit podcasting services in October 2014, and would change the podcast world. People who didn’t listen to podcasts before were listening to podcasts at that point. They wanted to know anything they could about Adnan Syed and his trial. In the wake of the podcast’s popularity, a bunch of other true crime podcasts started popping up. Documentaries, both feature and series, became popular thanks to true crime subject matter. Some of the shows and movies that had been released in that under-the-surface time rose to prominence. True crime was back, and it was as strong as it had been so many years before.

Now, you’re probably wondering why I just wrote nearly 500 words about true crime to start a post about a movie called A Karate Christmas Miracle. That would be a good question and I’m kind of wondering that myself. I do have an answer, though. It was a movie that played out kind of like a true crime podcast. A fictional true crime podcast. It was based around a shooting at a theater, inspired by what happened in Aurora, Colorado.

Abby Genesis (Mila Milosevic) lost her husband, Bob (Ken Del Vecchio), in a theater shooting on Christmas Eve. He didn’t die. He simply disappeared after the shooting and his family hadn’t heard from him since. A year later, Abby found her son, Jesse (Mario Del Vecchio), trying to do a series of tasks over the twelve days of Christmas to bring Bob back. It didn’t make any sense to her. She needed some closure to get her son some closure. Abby enlisted the help of a criminal law professor and psychic, Elizabeth (Julie McCullough), to find any clues about what happened to her husband.

As you can see, A Karate Christmas Miracle was about an investigation of a man’s disappearance following a theater shooting. That may not be true crime in the most straight-forward sense, since it was fictional. And it didn’t relay the facts about the shooting all that much. The details were vague. They didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Mind you, the movie didn’t make a whole lot of sense, so that was par for the course. There was that investigative angle, however. It was an angle shared by true crime podcasts like Serial and shows like Making a Murderer. It was looking for some deeper truth that may not have been uncovered in the immediate aftermath of the crime.

The investigators were Abby and Elizabeth. There wasn’t much to Abby’s character. Elizabeth, on the other hand, got a whole bunch to do. She was the more heightened personality of the two. Elizabeth was introduced during a lecture where she questioned her students on what Santa would be charged with if he smashed a bottle over a guy’s head while defending Rudolph in a bar fight. It was a lecture that highlighted Elizabeth’s personality, before throwing her head-on into the story with Abby. Jesse interrupted the lecture and Elizabeth immediately knew his name, piquing Abby’s interest. She had seen Elizabeth long before for a psychic reading, and Elizabeth still remembered details. Maybe she would know what happened to Bob.

Elizabeth’s part of the investigation was her psychic visions. She had vague hallucinations of what happened before, during, and after the shooting. She saw James Whitmore (Eric Roberts) on the theater screen, spewing off some sort of manifesto. Sam (Martin Kove), the owner of the theater, also appeared on the screen. He talked directly to his daughter, Aurora (Lacy Marie Meyer), the only known survivor of the shooting. She saw a clown with a gun walking around. She saw Bob watching over Aurora while she lay in a hospital bed. None of it answered anything. It left more questions. Kind of like a psychic reading, I guess.

All the while, Jesse was off in his own world trying to finish his list of tasks before Christmas came. He named a bunch of presidents and capitals of states. Boring stuff like that. Capping off the tasks was the most exciting thing. He had to earn his black belt. The little dude had to go through so many belts to get there, and he pulled it off in less than twelve days. That was a crazy amount of work.

That didn’t have much to do with the “true crime” storytelling of it all. That side of the story was contained in the visions that Elizabeth had, and the places she and Abby checked out after the visions. Mostly the front yard of a church Elizabeth saw Bob at in a vision. They never went to the theater or found Aurora. Nah nah. The closest anyone came to that was Jesse having a dream where he talked to Sam and was told to be quiet until he got his black belt. The investigation wasn’t poorly done.

The last thing that should be talked about with A Karate Christmas Miracle in regards to the true crime investigation story is the ending. Spoilers ahead. The ending made no sense. Jesse earned his black belt. As soon as it was presented to him, in his own house, Bob walked in the back door. Bob put the belt on Jesse, everyone hugged, and the movie ended. How did Bob get there? No idea. Where was he for a full year? No idea. Who was the shooter in the theater? Possibly James Whitmore, but I have no idea. What was his relation to Aurora? No idea. Why did he abandon his family? No idea. After all the sleuthing and bonding by Abby and Elizabeth, there were no answers. Bob was just back and that was that. What?

I started this whole thing by comparing A Karate Christmas Miracle to a true crime podcast, show, or movie. In terms of what was happening, that felt like a right comparison. There was a tragic event that people investigated in the aftermath. The problem was that there were no conclusions. Not that all true crime stories tie up all the loose ends. None of the loose ends were tied up, though. Everything was left hanging. The shooting, Bob’s whereabouts, why Jesse had his dreams, and why his list of tasks worked to bring Bob back. Everything was resolved with Bob’s return, but none of the answers that anyone was looking for were given. That was where my comparison fell apart. Well, that and the part where it wasn’t a true story. It was clearly referencing one, however.

Going into A Karate Christmas Miracle, I didn’t know what to expect. Maybe it would be better to say I expected something a little more uplifting than what it was. I expected a kid doing karate for some silly Christmas reason. I wasn’t expecting a theater shooting and people who needed psychiatric help in the aftermath. It was much darker than the name made me think. It was nothing like what I expected.

A Karate Christmas Miracle was a movie made in the wake of true crime popularity rising and the number of mass shootings increasing. It brought elements from each of those into a family Christmas movie. It tried to find some success by relating to things people were invested in, whether for good or bad, and didn’t do a particularly good job of it. The movie could easily be one of the forgotten pieces of true crime media produced in the post-Serial boom.

That’s a boom that has kept on going. True crime is still as popular as ever. Things like Serial and Making a Murderer have fallen by the wayside. Other projects have come and gone, as well. Yet there’s always something new in that genre to whet people’s appetites. It doesn’t seem like it’ll be going away any time soon, and I’m interested to see what other ways people will find to blend it into projects you might not see coming.

Here are a few quick notes to tie everything together:

• You may have seen me mention Eric Roberts was in A Karate Christmas Miracle. That’s his seventh appearance in Sunday “Bad” Movies. His other appearances were in A Talking Cat!?!, Chicks Dig Gay Guys, The Human Centipede III, DOA: Dead or Alive, Miss Castaway and the Island Girls, and Amityville Death House.
• Martin Kove also returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in A Karate Christmas Miracle. He previously popped up in 2 Lava 2 Lantula and I’m in Love with a Church Girl.
• The final returning actor was Julie McCullough, who was in Sharknado before A Karate Christmas Miracle.
• Have you seen A Karate Christmas Miracle? What did you think? Let me know in the comments, on Threads, or on BlueSky. Because I’m in those spots now.
• If there’s a movie you think I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know. I’m up for suggestions. Comment or find me on one of those social medias.
• I don’t know what’s next for Sunday “Bad” Movies. I was going to go with Where is Winky's Horse, but that's a Christmas movie, so I'll save it for next year. Something will pop up. I'm sure. I'll see you soon with another post.