Christmas Bounty

Sam kicks-off this year's Winter Bizarre with 2013 ABC Family/WWE made for TV movie Christmas Bounty. Tory Bell is an average private elementary school teacher living in Manhattan and dating a handsome, wealthy man named James. All this changes when she gets a mysterious phone call from a gangster threatening her for putting him in jail years ago. So Tory bails on her boyfriend to return to New Jersey to seek the help of her family, all of whom are bounty hunters, to bring this gangster back to justice. This includes working with her ex-bounty hunter partner and former boyfriend Mikey Muscles (a.k.a. Beefcake). Somehow, this family of professional bounty hunters cook up the dumbest plan, which involves finding someone named Big Donna at a mall and putting a brick-sized GPS tracker in her purse. Against all reason, this works and they find the gangster in the only location this movie seems to have paid for: A dingy warehouse. Through a series of circumstance too contrived to relate, James shows up in this warehouse, and Tory scrambles to hide her bounty hunter past from him, for some reason. Eventually, after a shootout at a Christmas tree lot (yes, really) James is kidnapped and Tory must risk crashing a mob wedding to save him. Also, this whole time Mikey Muscles has been pursing Tory, never having gotten over her, even though she's dating what is possibly the best man in the world. It's no spoiler to say Tory returns to her small-town roots and boyfriend, though what is a surprise is that she does this in just the worst way imaginable. James, we're sorry, you're a prince and you deserve better. Be sure to check out the Mind Duck Books podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.