Once again, I did zero research on Holiday Crashers before I turned it on. I suddenly heard a familiar voice…and that is when I realized that Daniella Monet, who has starred in number of shows and movies on Nickelodeon, is the secondary female lead. I definitely did not expect her to show up in a Hallmark Christmas movie. This better be good!

Toni (Lyndsy Fonseca) and Bri (Monet) are best friends that happen to work together in a card shop. When Bri finds an extra invitation to a client’s fancy Christmas party, she suggests that the duo spend the season crashing the holiday parties of the shop’s customers. They make up fake personas and have an amazing time. Until Toni, who finished law school but never finished the bar exam, gets mistaken for a working lawyer. Afraid to come clean, she drags Bri with her on a corporate retreat to Vermont to help a business with an acquisition. Will it all come apart when the truth comes out?

I have to admit that Holiday Crashers was pretty fun. I loved the parts where Toni and Bri were making up backstories for themselves, no matter how ridiculous they were. Of course, later in the movie they backfire but that is what makes it fun, right? I don’t think this movie would have worked as well if they didn’t have Monet playing Bri. Monet has an ability to give amazing personalities to characters that you probably shouldn’t like. If anyone else had this role, I can almost guarantee that Bri would have been grating and annoying instead of playful.

Another plus in the movie is that we don’t get one romance, we get two. And we actually get a little more story between Bri and Vinny (Jag Bal) than we do with the “main” romance, Toni and Justin (Chris McNally). I’m OK with that since I like Bri as a character better than Toni anyway. But for those of you looking for the romance part of these movies, this one won’t let you down.

Rating: Can I get a sequel with Bri and Vinny next year?

Hallmark has decided to give us two Christmas romance movies in one! Though in A Tale Of Two Christmases, it’s one woman and two men. This could get messy.

Emma (Katherine Barrell) is an architect living in Chicago. She has to decide whether to go home to Vermont to celebrate Christmas with her family and childhood friend, Drew (Chandler Massey), or stay in Chicago to spend it with her crush, Max (Evan Roderick). Thanks to some Christmas magic from Santa, Emma gets split into two separate Emmas to explore both possibilities.

I have to admit that this sounds like a very interesting plot. We get to see Emma experience both choices but Emma herself doesn’t know it’s happening. So instead of like a split personality type thing, it’s simply two completely separate stories featuring the same female lead with two different male leads. What could have been interesting just turned dull.

Since this is Hallmark, they are obviously going to pick one of the men over the other. There’s no way they would let both of them be The One. The result is that Max is kind of a self-centered rich douchebag while Drew fawns over everything Emma does. It would have been cooler if both men were on the same level and Emma’s big decision was to stay with her corporate job or move home to work with her father. That is a much more interesting story.

Sadly, twice the romance doesn’t mean a better movie. While I wouldn’t recommend watching A Tale Of Two Christmases, I do have to say that Massey is pretty fun as Drew. I guess if you want to sit through it, he would be as good a reason as any to do it.