THE FUSE

The only thing rarer in the horror canon than a good holiday film is a good comedy. “Christmas at the Kringles” manages to miss the overlap in that Venn diagram by being awful on both counts: deeply cynical about the Yuletide season but also just completely unfunny. This failure all the more baffling given a cast populated by stalwart joke-makers including Ron Livingston, Rachel Bilson, Thomas Lennon, Arden Myrin, Rob Riggle, Donald Faison and David Wain, while director Kevin Lewis (“Willy’s Wonderland”) pilfers from the playbooks of better filmmakers to deliver a movie as stale and tasteless as last year’s fruitcake.