What do you do when you are Hallmark and you want to have a movie about a very serious subject but you can’t really say the name of the serious subject? Call it This Time Each Year and throw it on the Hallmark Mystery channel. It’s a mystery if you don’t actually say the word, right?

Lauren (Alison Sweeney) and Kevin (Niall Matter) are having marriage troubles. They have been separated for a year but Lauren still hasn’t told her mother. When her mother comes to visit, Lauren asks Kevin to pretend nothing has happened. Will this bring them together or break them farther apart?

This is a movie about alcoholism that doesn’t want to actually be about alcoholism. Kevin was successfully working as a bartender and not drinking when his boss randomly fires him because he doesn’t want to tempt Kevin with holiday parties? Kevin walks everywhere (even though we don’t see that) because he lost his license the year prior, though they don’t ever say how or why he lost his license. (If it was drunk driving, you rarely lose your license in the US after only one instance.) This Time doesn’t want to make Kevin out to be a bad guy. He has to get back with Lauren, after all. But it really is disingenuous to only give him vague alcoholic stereotypes that don’t seem to have any actual consequence.

If you overlook this giant shadow hanging over the movie, it’s still pretty boring. Lauren spends the entire movie feeling bad for herself. One of the big problems they have is a house the couple bought before they split. It’s a gorgeous house that they claim is a money pit but, again, they only give vague things that needed to be fixed in the house. When we actually see various parts of the house, there isn’t anything that seems wrong. I know that you can’t always see the bad parts of a house but they literally named things like “the staircase” and “the roof” but neither needed work. Anyway, Lauren blames herself for buying the house and putting their family in financial strain and it is just so lame. Neither of these people are interesting and the movie neuters the parts it wants to make interesting.

Rating: Just sell the house already

What happens when you are in the wilderness and everything goes wrong? Nothing. Nothing happens.

Buck (Victor Zinck Jr) works for the Rescue Services for Wayne Forest. His girlfriend, Jessica (Kaitlyn Leeb), is spending Thanksgiving with his family when he gets called away to help rescue some stranded skiers in Avalon County. Instead of returning home, Buck chooses to spend a few weeks helping his old work partner, Meg (Jennifer Mote), clear some snow from the mountains to avoid avalanches. When he can’t get back home on Christmas Eve due to an impending storm, Jessica decides to go to him.

For a movie called Christmas In The Wilds, it was surprisingly boring. Every time the movie tried to make a new conflict interesting, it failed hard. Buck can't fly his plane out of Avalon County because he’s low on fuel and the fuel truck can’t get in due to snow. When Jessica decides to drive her Jeep to him, they decide to meet halfway at a family cabin. Buck and Meg take snowmobiles while Jessica drives. Jessica crashes her Jeep and changes to a sled pulled by dogs. Buck crashes his snowmobile so has to share with Meg. When the three finally meet up in the middle of nowhere, Meg decides to take one of the dogs to get a drink at the river and lets the dog step into a fox trap. Meg takes the injured dog back while Buck and Jessica continue to the cabin. But then the couple has to cross a raging river and Buck falls in and…..do you see where I’m going with this?

EVERYTHING goes wrong in this movie. And none of it is interesting because they just leap up from one issue only to run into another problem. The writers should have had someone be injured and stay injured. Like maybe Buck got hurt and Jessica had to pull him on a sled or something. But nope. Buck got injured in the snowmobile crash but we would never know because he’s perfectly fine. Then Buck, who works in RESCUE SERVICES, says it’s fine if they cross this ranging river in the middle of December? Buck is stupid.

Don’t watch Christmas In The Wilds. It’s stupid and annoying and annoyingly stupid.