“How to Ruin the Holidays”

CRITIC’S PICK: If fans of Atlanta’s Dad’s Garage ever hoped the comedy-oriented theater would make a feature film, How to Ruin the Holidays might offer the next best thing. Former artistic director Kevin Gillese produced and wrote the screenplay, which stars his wife (and Dad’s mainstay) Amber Nash and faces familiar to the theater, including frequent guest Colin Mochrie and the late Tommy Futch.

Now available on VOD, How to Ruin the Holidays initially seems like a potential spoof of the Hallmark Channel’s spate of Christmas movies. Nash plays a career woman in the big city who returns home to reconnect to her family and the spirit of the season. While Holidays has a similarly bright gloss, the script aims for something darker and more personal than Hallmark’s output. Nash plays a sardonic struggling actor who unwillingly flies from Los Angeles to Atlanta to deal with her mentally addled father (Mochrie) and her developmentally delayed brother (Luke Davis), neither of whom seem fully able to care for themselves.

Holidays gets plenty of comedic mileage from Nash’s simmering irritability and Mochrie’s deft shifts from slapstick to sensitivity. How to Ruin the Holidays doesn’t always hit the heights of humor that one might expect, but it reaches some surprisingly sentimental conclusions that don’t betray its cynical streak. Holidays comes by its hugs honestly. — Curt Holman