Scrooged

Director: Richard Donner

1988 / 101min / DCP

An updating of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol for the “Greed is good” ’80s, Donner’s salty-sweet comic morality tale—co-written by Saturday Night Live legends Mitch Glazer and Michael O’Donoghue—stars Bill Murray as a nasty executive at IBC Television who, heartlessly keeping his underlings at work on Christmas Eve to complete a live telecast of Dickens’s classic, finds himself visited by three very novel versions of three familiar ghosts—among them Carol Kane’s sweet-voiced-but-savage Ghost of Christmas Present. Murray’s star turn is backed by a veritable army of celebrity cameos and a once-in-a-lifetime supporting cast that additionally includes Karen Allen, Michael J. Pollard, and Bobcat Goldthwait, here calling Robert Mitchum a “flatulating butthead.”