So this is Christmas, and what have you done? If your answer is “my Christmas shopping”, move along folks, nothing to see here. But if your answer is more along the lines of “a whole lot of substances I shouldn’t have and now I have no idea where I parked my car, let alone what to get my loved ones”, then this list of the top 10 gifts given in movies is for you! And if you could get those people who’ve already done their Christmas shopping to come back and read this too that’d be great, we need all the hits we can get.

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10. Brewster’s Millions
Below-par baseball player Monty Brewster (Richard Pryor) is given $30 million dollars in his great-uncle’s will, but there’s a catch: it’s all in pennies and it’s dropped on him from a passing plane, killing him instantly. Wait, that’s not it at all: if he can spend the $30 million in 30 days he’ll inherit $300 million… which he then has to spend in 300 days to inherit $3000 million, and so on until the end of time. Wait, that didn’t happen either. Sorry, this movie wasn’t all that great so I ended up making up my own version in my head.



9. The Toy
The world’s richest brat is given a real live black man (Richard Pryor again) to be his plaything. No, there isn’t a scene where the kid whines “But I wanted Eddie Murphy!”. Nor is there a scene where the dad says “If you don’t shut up I’m taking him back and you’ll be lucky if you get Chris Tucker!”. The amazingly racist undertones of all this were slightly defused by the casting of Pryor (AKA the angriest black man currently available) which tended to make people think if he was cool with it then it must be cool. Pryor went on to sign a $40 million dollar contract with Columbia Pictures to appear in crap like Superman III, Stir Crazy and See No Evil, Hear No Evil, which seemed to suggest Pryor was mostly cool with getting paid.



8. The Gift
Okay, so the “gift” here is psychic powers, not a Tickle Me Elmo. But you know the rules: if a film has the subject of a Top Ten as its’ title it automatically makes it onto the list even if it has nothing to do with what the Top Ten is actually about. So we’re stuck with this actually fairly effective tale of a psychic Cate Blanchett trying to solve a disappearance that’s almost certainly murder. Still, that much-loved shot of a topless Katie Holmes was certainly a gift to a certain segment of the audience. A segment you didn’t want to be sitting next to at a screening.



7. Child’s Play
For every child that was terrified by the idea of getting a doll that turns out to be possessed by the spirit of a dead serial killer, I swear there must be a hundred that were seriously pissed off when their Xmas present didn’t come to life and start killing at random. How cool would it be to have a toy that kills people? Perhaps that shouldn’t have been my childhood argument for why I should have been given a slingshot. And a chemistry set. And an axe.



6. Scrooged
It’s a sad fact of life, but sometimes you give gifts because you’re expecting a gift back. And once you start thinking like that, it only makes sense to tailor your gift-giving to meet your projected returns. Next thing you know, you’re a complete prick played by Bill Murray at his smarmiest and you’re giving people you consider important a fancy VCR players (hey, it’s 1988) while everyone else is lucky to get a towel. Then ghosts turn up and start treating you like crap.



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