Oct 081988
 
one reel

Carol and Mike Brady (Florence Henderson, Robert Reed) decide to skip their planned Christmas trip and bring their six children, Greg (Barry Williams), Peter (Christopher Knight), Bobby (Mike Lookinland), Marcia (Maureen McCormick), Jan (Eve Plumb), and Cindy (Jennifer Runyon) along with their spouses and children, home for a big family Christmas.  However each of the kids has a problem or secret, and Carol and Mike have their own difficulty with a client who is unhappy with plans for his new building.  Their ex-housekeeper, Alice (Ann B. Davis), also shows up when she is abandoned by her husband, Sam the Butcher.

There are fans of the 1969-1974 TV series, The Brady Bunch.  I know there are.  I don’t know what they look like, or what strange cults they belong to, but I know they exist.  And it is only these mysterious individuals who will enjoy this TV reunion flick, and they won’t like it much.  The show, with its father-knows-best dad, six always good-natured children with silly problems, comic housekeeper, and camp tone, could be fun, if you weren’t discriminating and had taken enough drugs.  Fourteen years was not going to be kind to that story structure or the actors, but with some effort, A Very Brady Christmas could have been mildly amusing.  That was as good as it could have been; it should be no surprise that it didn’t manage that.

In a bizarre move, writer-producer-series creator Sherwood Schwartz attempts to present globs of this pabulum as serious drama.  Several of the children’s ordeals lack even a single joke, and we’re given Mike in a life-or-death struggle with a collapsing building, plus two trapped and dying inspectors.  The mindless joviality of The Brady Bunch can’t support such excessive emotion.  Since we all know Mike’s going to escape without a scratch, the attempt at soap-opera melodrama is more than usually pointless.

The “deep” distress of the children is fixed in less than a minute each, which is handy as I didn’t care about their distress.  Some of them have problems that would have been more fitting for their pre-teen selves (Cindy doesn’t like being thought of as a little girl), while others show that Schwartz was deeply out of touch with 1988 society.  Peter’s subplot has him refusing to marry his long-time and apparently perfect girlfriend because she makes more money than he does.  This just might have worked as a sitcom plot in 1965, but was absurd in ’88.

Ah, there I go using the word “absurd” to describe just one part of a Brady Bunch movie; silly of me.

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