Tis’ the season for holiday movies. The universal experience of the winter season is spent on the couch, with a lit candle, and the lights dim, but most importantly, a movie turned on. If you have watched every holiday movie and do not know what else to watch, well, you are in luck because a new movie was recently released by director Reginald Hudlin called Candy Cane Lane.

Candy Cane Lane stars actors and comedians Eddie Murphy, Jillian Bell, and Tracee Ellis Ross. The movie follows Chris Carver, played by Eddie Murphy, who is on a mission to win his neighborhood’s annual holiday home decoration contest. It is a big extravaganza and all the houses are in it to win it. The house with the best decorations receive $100,000, which sounds very pleasing for Chris Carver and his family as he got laid off his job. With the Carver family striving to earn the money, they stop by a Christmas pop-up shop, where they buy an extravagant 12 Days of Christmas tree that can sing and light up the whole neighborhood. However, what the family did not know is that the he accidentally make a deal with Pepper, played by Jillian Bell, a mischievous elf that brings the 12 Days of Christmas to life. Chaos sets loose and the Carver family makes it their mission to stop the mischievous elf and collect the gold rings to bring back the characters from the tree by 8:00pm on Christmas Eve.

Along their adventure, they meet little talking figurines named Pip and Gary in the Christmas pop-up store who were once in fact not figurines. They too once accidentally made a deal with Pepper and when they did not meet her deadline, they turned into her figurines. This caused the adventure to be more serious as Mr. Carvers life was on the line, so they family worked together to make sure that their father was safe and sound.

Candy Cane Lane is a great movie to watch with family and friends. As this movie was very comedic and follows an entertaining adventure, I was annoyed with Pepper majority of the time. While I know that she was an antagonist in the movie, her acting and character was not my favourite and I was just not a fan. There were some parts that did make me feel uneasy, which is how an antagonist should make you feel, but she was very bothersome. Also, while some humor was comedic, there were some unfunny jokes. Overall, the story was wholesome and presented a very nice adventure of a family trying to save their family for Christmas.

Watch it now included with Amazon Prime.