Shrek the Halls. Out tomorrow. (***3/10)
Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing Shrek The Halls on DVD November 4th. I sort of get it - it’s Christmas soon, and all these things are hitting the shelves a couple of months early because there are some crazy Christmas fanatics who want to load up on Elmo’s Christmas and Fat Albert’s Christmas and Shrek’s Christmas so they can watch a new one every day between now and December 25th. I guess. I don’t really understand the Christmas fanatics, and I also don’t understand most Christmas DVDs. Like this one. Shrek The Halls is a 22-minute made-for-TV episode that is, I suppose, a spin-off of the successful series of Shrek movies. It isn’t the Star Wars Holiday Special, in terms of being truly awful, but it certainly seems equally pointless.
It was pointless to make this episode. The main joke here, as it was with the last Shrek movie, is the lame “ogres fart and burp and eat gross stuff” joke. He’s farting. Get it? The baby ogres eat slime that smells gross. Get it? And then there is the same plot as there is in every Shrek movie. Christmas gets chaotic, Shrek gets angry, he fights with everyone, Donkey gets sad, Fiona admonishes her husband, Shrek feels bad, everyone makes up and everyone comes together in one big ball of happy. So…why was this even made? More to the point, why is this on DVD? It’s 22 minutes long. Why wasn’t this a special feature on the DVD for Shrek 3? Or thrown into the New Christmas Classics DVD alongside Casper, Fat Albert, Gumby and George Of The Jungle? How did this 22-minute clip merit it’s own DVD?
Frankly, I can’t understand how this even got approved for television. Here is a sample of the wittiness of this show - the song to close it all out:
“Shrek the halls with Puss and Donkey,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la.
Christmas time can be so wonky
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la.”
If you couldn’t have written something like this when you were eleven, then you were a pretty slow eleven-year-old. And that means that even the slowest of eleven-year-olds will find this DVD unfunny, because they will recognize that it could have been written by a classmate. Or by some Hollywood writer with forty seconds to spare between takes on the set of Cavemen.