Prancer: A Christmas Tale (PG)
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This is a 2022, direct to video remake of the 1989 movie Prancer. I watched it in 2024. Actually, it's a very loose remake. All the two movies have in common is that a girl and her grandfather find a reindeer and call it "Prancer". (No, wait. Upon re-reading of my review of the earlier movie, that one was a girl and her father... though I'd say he was easily old enough to be her grandfather.) Everything else is totally different. Before I watched it, I wasn't sure whether it would even be worth watching. But I gave it a shot, and I ended up liking it well enough. In fact, I think I probably liked it a bit more than the original. It's hard to be sure, because I don't remember the original all that well; I watched it eight years before I watched this. But at least I felt like this one had better production values, or maybe it just seemed that way because it was more modern. I dunno.

It starts in London, with a 10-year-old girl named Gloria missing her father, who has been away on some sort of tour for quite awhile. (I assume he's a musician, but I don't think that was ever made explicit.) She's hoping he'll come home for Christmas, but that becomes less and less likely. Meanwhile, in a small American town called Brightridge, Gloria's grandfather, Bud (James Cromwell), decides to close his hardware store after Christmas. He had run it for many years with his wife, Betty, but she had died two years ago, shortly before Christmas, and it just wasn't the same without her. Besides which, the store had been losing money. On his way home one day, he nearly runs into a reindeer, but it jumps and flies over his truck. This causes him to crash into a fence, and he winds up in the hospital. So, his daughter, Claire (Gloria's mother), decides that she and Gloria should go to Brightridge for Christmas, to see him.

By the time they get there, Bud is already back home. Also visiting are his son, Gerald, along with Gerald's wife, Erica, and their two teenage kids, Tyler and Haley. Gerald believes it's time to send Bud to live in a retirement home, but Bud is against that. On their first night at Bud's house, Gloria hears a sound on the roof and goes to investigate, which is when she first meets her grandfather, who had also heard the sound. When they go outside, they see the same reindeer that had caused Bud to crash the other day. Bud is curious, because no reindeer should live anywhere near there. Over the course of the movie, they encounter the reindeer, whom they call "Prancer", several more times, but they try to hide its existence from everyone else. However, their interactions with the reindeer eventually become known, and for reasons I won't go into, this leads to Gerald becoming more convinced than ever that Bud can't be trusted to take care of himself anymore. Gerald also hires a local hunter named Finn Wally (who Bud has hated for many years) to hunt and kill Prancer, who he considers dangerous.

Unlike the original movie, it takes quite awhile for Gloria to start believing Prancer might really be one of Santa's reindeer. And I do think we're meant to believe he is, because he seems to have magical powers, like causing Christmas lights to light up when he's nearby. But Gloria does finally believe, and gets Tyler and Haley to help her plan an event at the hardware store, and to convince Bud not to close it. And that's all I really want to reveal of the plot.

Well, there's a happy ending. I'm not really sure what else to say, except that I liked most of the characters well enough. And I liked the story. It's not a great movie, by any means, but I thought it was good.