Widely considered to be the most wonderful time of the year, Christmas is one of the most perfect ways to make profit. The film industry is no exception to this. We all remember classics such as the migraine inducing A Christmas Story, Elf, The Santa Clause, and finally, Home Alone. However the success of popular movies such as these doesn’t go unnoticed and companies will try to squeeze as much money out of it as they can and we get sequels.

The first one on our list is A Christmas Story 2. Everyone fondly remembers the original and it’s mind-melting effects on the human mind when TBS plays it for 24 hours. Well the horse apparently wasn’t dead after 29 years and a sequel was made. The film centered around Ralphie as a teenager, who needs $85 to pay for a car he accidentally wrecked. While the film is actually entertaining, the characters are almost nothing like their counterparts, and come off as idiotic. Most of the movie’s scenes, while fun to watch, they only seem to be reenacting the original movie’s iconic scenes. My rating for this movie is two ornaments out of 10.

Another for the purpose of milking an empty cash cow, Home Alone 3 was the worst attempt to take an already existing story and put a new twist on it. Focusing on a different kid, this time it is about a boy, Alex, who gets the chicken pox and his terrible parents leave him at home, alone, instead of stay home and take care of him. However the twist on this one is that a terrorist group on an FBI blacklist is after a computer chip installed in his remote control car. This idea sounds confusing on paper, but even watching the movie doesn’t do it any justice. Most would argue that the sequels after this one are worse, but this one takes the cake because the ones that followed are lesser known and you probably wouldn’t have know they existed if it wasn’t for this review. My rating is three ornaments out of 10.

This one is a little bit different because this sequel is widely liked by many and honestly wouldn’t have made this list if it wasn’t for the fact that the plot is a little confusing to follow. The Santa Clause 2 follows Tim Allen as Santa Claus yet again but this time he’s slowly losing his magic because he doesn’t have a wife, so while he tries to find a wife he builds a toy Santa to watch over the North Pole. Everything gets messed up, for toy santa wants to destroy Christmas because the script says so. Nothing is truly bad about this movie. Allen plays a great Santa and the rest of the cast isn’t too bad either. My only problem with this movie is it’s confusing plot. My rating for this movie is five ornaments out of 10.

Finally, we have quite possibly the worst one of them all. Elf: Buddy’s Christmas Musical is a sequel to the fondly remembered Elf. This time around however, the movie is animated in the style of something like Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer which isn’t terrible, the animation is quite good actually. However the real downfall is that it’s now a musical and nobody can sing. I won’t even bother trying to go over the plot because it’s the exact same plot as the first movie except with more music and a different cast. Jim Parsons, the actor providing the voice for Buddy the elf, isn’t actually bad in this role. The joyful elf role fits his voice well and with the right movie he could shine but it doesn’t work here; it also doesn’t help that he can’t much like the rest of the cast. My rating is one ornament out of 10.