D-

There must be an underground contest going on in Hollywood to see who can make the worst Christmas movie. Is it “Christmas With the Kranks”? “Surviving Christmas”? “The Santa Clause 3”? A close call, indeed.

Here’s the latest entrant, and it makes a strong showing, in the worst possible sense. It’s a tedious battling-neighbors slapstick farce involving a squabble between Steve Finch (Matthew Broderick), a prissy optometrist, and newcomer Buddy Hall (Danny DeVito), a car salesman who moves in across the street and promptly decides to festoon his house with every variety of Christmas decoration known to man so that, ablaze with light, it will be visible to satellites roving around space. (Buddy mumbles that he’s doing “something important” for once in his life, which seems rather an overstatement.)

Soon the guys are competing against one another in every possible way and trying to undercut each other through nasty tricks, with Steve suffering most of the damage in the process. (Apart from the audience, that is.) Watching it all unfold from the sidelines are their supportive but increasingly concerned wives, Kelly Finch (Kristin Davis) and Tia Hall (Kristin Chenoweth). And of course there are children: Madison and Carter Finch (Alia Shawkat and Dylan Blue), she a plain Jane and he a chubby teen, and twins Ashley and Emily Hall (Kelly and Sabrina Aldridge), a pair of buxom blonde bombshells.

It would be a tedious business to catalogue the lame efforts at one-upmanship Steve and Buddy make against one another, but an ice-skating race in which both stars are subbed for in much of the footage by extremely unconvincing stand-ins is probably the nadir. (The only brightness here is on Buddy’s house, not in the script.) Nor need we dwell on the lack of chemistry between the bland Broderick and the mugging DeVito–this is not a team made in comedy heaven–or the vapidity of the supporting cast, all of whom are admittedly hobbled by the weak hands they’ve been dealt by the scriptwriters. (It’s notable, however, that whatever charisma Chenoweth might exhibit on stage has once more evaporated on screen: her persona is, as in past outings, more irritating than adorable.) And it’s unnecessary to write at length about the limpness of John Whitesell’s direction, or the unconvincing character of the outdoor set that’s supposed to represent Massachusetts in mid-winter but doesn’t look realistically cold or snowy. (Characters wander around in skimpy attire, and there’s nary a hint of their breath as they speak.)

But the real problem with “Deck the Halls” is that there isn’t a spark of true humanity in it. The characters are just comic conventions, the situations sitcom constructs, and the outbreak of sentiment at the close completely phony and unearned. And what’s with the sexual gags–usually involving those twins–that punctuate the movie? In a supposed family film they seem grossly out of place, as does a bit about a cross-dressing cop that runs through the picture. And the makers accentuate the contrast between the junk they’ve fashioned and what they’re presumably aiming for by dropping brief excerpts from real Christmas classics periodically onto the screen–“Miracle on 34th Street,” “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” they’re all here.

So what we have here is yet another dreadful holiday movie. “Hang the Crepe” would be more appropriate.