My wife's grandmother was watching one such movie recently during a visit.
CW: Emotional abuse.
spoiler
It is about some HOA president (yes, that's how the movie describes him over and over, as a full time job) that keeps showing his romantic interest in the leading feeemale character by fining her and citing her for insufficient holiday decorations and other such "why don't you smile more " abusive shit for the first half of the movie.
The rest is other people in the Black Hole Sun music video worthy town passive-aggressively reminding that feeemale character how the HOA president was looking at her while she scoffs and rejects the abuse... until she doesn't. And that's the happy ending.
Scary shit. It's intersectional: providing what the demographic wants and expects and further normalizing and expanding upon it.
I watched a Wisecrack video that stuck with me on the unique evil of the Hallmark movie. It's really that real deal hard-line capital L Liberalism straight into your fuckin' dome. It's really the niceties of Christmas with all of the dressings of cheer and goodwill with none of the substance. Hallmark movies wear the flesh of Christmas cheer to hide the Eldritch great beast underneath.
(For the record I love Christmas as any holiday that promotes goodwill, kindness, giving, all that stuff is dope. Also people do a lot of home cooking during Christmas season which is also rad. It really bums me out all the
happened to it.)
Charlie Brown's Christmas movie was way more pleasant even while having an outright (brief) sermon of sorts from Linus.
Agreed!
The Hallmark movies truly vile (and generally bad movies), and the summation of all of them don't have a decimal percentage of the charm the Charile Brown's Christmas has. Linus doing his pulpit sermon takes infinitely more creative courage than the Hallmark by-the-numbers factory film-making they do. I always think the "content" of streaming services is bad, and then the Hallmark channel movies remind me there is a whole quantum subatomic backrooms of slop beneath it. The Hallmark movie machine I think became self-aware long before any A.I. did. It's crazy how they are all exactly the same.