Stream It Or Skip It: ‘I’ll Be Next Door For Christmas’ On VOD, About A Girl Who’s Embarrassed By Her Family’s Christmas Obsession

If you’ve never heard of equity crowdfunding, it’s basically a practice wherein crowdfunding is done to buy a share of a small business. While traditional rewards-based crowdfunding has been done for movies in the recent past, I’ll Be Next Door For Christmas is the first full-length holiday film financed via equity crowdfunding. And it’s a surprisingly funny movie, to boot. Read on to find out if you should add this to your holiday movie rotation…

I’LL BE NEXT DOOR FOR CHRISTMAS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Nicky (Juliette Angelo) and her best friend Stephanie (Kirrilee Berger) are enjoying their summer at performing arts camp, with Nicky playing her tuba, doing improv, and all sorts of fun stuff. After practice one day, she has a meet-cute with Tanner (Javier Bolanos), a dreamy trumpet player that she connects with almost immediately. At the end of camp, they promise to keep in touch. One problem: He lives in Connecticut, and she lives in California.

Oh and there’s another problem: Nicky’s family is obsessed with Christmas. As soon as she gets back from camp, her father Chris (Regan Burns) calls a planning meeting for the upcoming holidays, even though its only August. He and Nicky’s mother Fran (Beth Littleford) are both into Christmas, and have recruited Nicky’s younger brother Rudy (Tyson Whelchel) and little sister Noelle (London and Sedona Fuller), but Nicky’s just not into it.

She’s embarrassed by her family’s obsession with Christmas, by her father’s insane light display that he puts up every year, and by his prized possession: The Santa hat from the original Miracle on 34th Street, to the point where she lobbies her local councilman to enforce the display laws to limit what her family can do, though Chris gets around it by coming up with a “Christmas Cave” that keeps all the lights under a roof.

When she learns that Tanner wants to come West to visit, mainly to distract his father Lance (Hector Luis Bustamante) from thinking about Christmas — the day when Tanner’s mother left his father — Nicky takes action to keep Tanner and his dad away from her family. She decides to hold a dinner at the house next door, where the owner has decided to vacate to avoid the crowds at the Christmas cave. And she and Stephanie set about hiring actors to play Nicky’s parents, settling on their school’s drama teacher Ms. James (Nicole Sullivan) and a guy named Bradley (Jonathan Mangum). One problem: Their “leads” have worked together before and hate each other.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Pretty much any family-oriented Hallmark Christmas movie mixed with a bit of family tsuris, like some mild The Family Stone vibes.

Performance Worth Watching: We loved the easygoing chemistry between the two teen leads, Angelo and Berger. They play Nicky and Stephanie as two friends who support each other and do things like goofy voices for each other and joke around instead of tearing each other down. The film kicked into high gear when Sullivan and Mangum started playing Nicky’s parents. With two master improvisers playing off each other, funny things were bound to happen, and they delivered.

Memorable Dialogue: A conversation between Nicky and her parents about why Noelle is the perfect age to enjoy their family Christmas is pretty funny. Noelle is 7, which is the perfect age because “You’re young enough to see the magic, but old enough to see the meaning.” “Is there research to back this up?” asks Nicky. That’s when Fran shows Nicky books entitled, Seven: The Only Christmas That Matters and All I Want For Christmas Is My Childhood Back.

Single Best Shot: The Christmas cave is pretty insane, especially the kinda scary Santa head as an entrance.

Sex and Skin: This is family fare, so… nah.

Our Take: I’ll Be Next Door For Christmas is notable for a couple of reasons. First, it’s the first feature-length Christmas movie funded purely through equity crowdfunding, where investors get a share of the movie’s profits (we’ll be speaking to director/co-writer David Jay Willis and executive producer Jay Kogen about this later in the week). The second notable thing about this is that Willis, along with co-writer Jenna Park, have fashioned a feel-good Christmas movie that has a bit of an edge to it.

Yes, there’s family warmth, and some goofy humor. But Nicky’s embarrassment about her family is real, and her attempts to hide her family from Tanner are portrayed sympathetically, until of course it inevitably falls apart. But even with Nicky’s family, there are some funny scenes you might not expect in a movie like this, like when Rudy questions his dad Chris about how he pays for all of these decorations and if he ever goes into the office. There’s also Gramma (Eve Brenner), whose declining mental faculties lead her to calling the clean-cut Chris a hippie.

Regan does a nice job as Chris, whose obsession comes from a not-so-great childhood. Littleford is also good as Fran, though the Daily Show alum isn’t given a lot of funny stuff to do. But, as we said above, the movie kicks into gear when Mangum (who most people likely know from Let’s Make A Deal) and Sullivan (MADtv, black-ish) play Nicky’s parents. Their scenes together are the highlight of the film.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The movie is available to rent or buy on cable VOD, iTunes, Vudu, Amazon, Google Play and other outlets. Considering that the investors are people just like you, it’s worth it to rent, and it’s a pleasant and funny holiday film you’ll want to watch next year, too.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Where to stream I'll Be Next Door For Christmas