I

t was as if all filmmakers had gotten together and agreed to change the Christmas movie formula. After decades of mostly super sappy holiday movies, filmmakers in the 1980s decided to start adding explosions, terrorist plots, and mayhem to Christmas-themed films. Audiences dug it, so now we have the sub-genres of Christmas-action and Christmas-horror movies. This list of older and newer movies, which starts with the more well known titles, will help you balance those hours spent sitting through Prancer and Elf with a few action flicks that will give you a firearms fix—something that's especially necessary if you didn’t happen to pick up a new one as a gift to yourself. Happy Holidays!

In the late 70s, action movies, outside of westerns and war movies, started to take shape with movies like the Dirty Harry series and lower-budget fare such as the Death Wish series. In 1982 we got what many consider to be the first modern action movie, First Blood. After that, the 80s were awash in action movies helmed by actors who would become genre legends: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, and others.

By 1987, making a successful action movie wasn't too difficult, but making one that people would end up watching for decades was a little tougher. Writer Shane Black and director Richard Donner got the balance just right with the original Lethal Weapon, along with a young Mel Gibson who was more than ready to break into American movies and an extremely original saxophone-heavy score.

Black decided to set the movie in Los Angeles at Christmas, a device he uses in several other films. It serves a few distinct purposes in Lethal Weapon, like having a natural reason for people to get together, and it also gave him a way to show a lot about his two main characters without explaining anything.

It also let the production team license a bunch of cheap Christmas tunes to fill out the soundtrack.

By the time Riggs (Gibson) and Murtaugh (Danny Glover) actually meet, the audience already knows them because they’ve seen Murtaugh in his suburban house, all trimmed for Christmas, getting to work in the morning amidst his swirling family—and they’ve seen Riggs wake up in his trailer on the beach with his dog for company, the first order of the day being a cigarette and a beer, with an annoying Christmas commercial on his little TV.

The choice of firearms for the two leads is also a deliberate and obvious choice meant to bolster their respective characters. Riggs, the younger and more tactically minded of the two detectives carries a Beretta 92F. At the time, the 92 was brand-new and state of the art, having been selected as the U.S. military’s new standard issue sidearm in 1985. As the characters explain in the parking garage scene, it’s a 9mm semi-automatic with a flared ejection port that holds 15 rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber.

Riggs shows his preference for modern firearms later in the desert sniping scene when he uses a Heckler & Koch PSG-1 rifle in the attempted rescue of Murtaugh’s daughter Rianne.

In contrast, Murtaugh, the older and more traditional of the two, carries a Smith & Wesson Model 19 six-shot revolver in .357 magnum, which he refers to as a “four-inch Smith.” It was a popular choice for police at the time and is also seen as the sidearm of numerous LAPD officers throughout the film.

Being set at Christmas, we get some interesting scenes from Lethal Weapon we wouldn't have otherwise, like Mr. Joshua (Gary Busey) crashing into the Murtaugh Christmas tree in a car and then taking out the kitchen TV playing A Christmas Carol with a blast from his Colt XM177 Commando fitted with a scope on the carry handle before the big final fight on the lawn in the shower of a busted fire hydrant he also took out with the car.

When we first meet Riggs, he executes a drug deal sting set in a Christmas tree lot, providing an interesting setting for a gunfight. And the holiday provided some interesting visuals of holiday lights and decorations in the cold rain of LA in December.

Next up is a movie that makes it onto a lot of people's normal holiday movie list, and with good reason. From the score and holiday music selection to the various holiday-related jokes, the original Die Hard (1988) is as close to a Christmas movie as a film can get without actually being about anything Christmas-related.

Who doesn’t love the story of John McClane (Bruce Willis), a New York City cop who finds himself out of his element, visiting his estranged wife at her high-power corporate job in Los Angeles, hoping to patch things up for Christmas, and for the sake of their two children, who have been living with their mom?

McClane isn’t a super cop. He’s not ex-special forces or some kind of a James Bond/Jason Bourne type agent. He’s just a regular cop who finds himself in an extraordinary situation, and does what we all hope we would do: rise to the occasion to save his wife and the other hostages.

When his ordeal starts, McClane is armed against 12 terrorists with only the sidearm he carries in a shoulder holster, a Beretta 92F, much like Riggs did a year earlier. But he doesn’t even have the holster. It seems he had time to grab a spare magazine, as we see him reload the pistol at least once, but not shoes, as he skulked through stairwells to hide in Nakatomi Tower’s upper unfinished floors.

Luckily, the bad guys are armed with MP5A3 submachine guns—well, that’s what they’re supposed to be. According to imfdb.org, the production team used civilian Heckler & Koch HK94s, which they chopped and converted to look like MP5A3s and to fire blanks in full-auto. The easiest way to tell is they lack the magazine release lever located behind the mag well. The mag on the HK94 is released via a button on the side of the receiver.

McClane acquires one of the submachine guns from the first terrorist he takes out during a fight on the stairway. He famously leaves a note in red on the dead man’s sweatshirt when he sends him down on the elevator reading “Now I have a machine gun. Ho Ho Ho.”

Is that one of your favorite moments? If so, you can now buy that sweatshirt, or t-shirt.

The fact that the MP5s also fire 9mm rounds allows McClane to replenish his Beretta magazines, but in the end, it all comes down to his last two 9mm rounds in the pistol taped to his bloody back with a roll of “Happy Holidays” packing tape.

Some other notable guns from Die Hard: the terrorists are extremely well armed, including Karl’s (Alexander Godunov) Steyr AUG bullpup assault rifle, likely chosen because of it’s high-tech, modern looks that would contrast against the LAPD’s M16s and revolvers; Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), in keeping with the European-made hardware, carried a hard chromed H&K P7M13 as his main sidearm that he uses once with a matching suppressor. The stubby 9mm is unique in that it includes a large grip safety integrated into the pistol’s front strap.

An interesting note: if you’ve ever thought the gun shots in Die Hard sounded different than other movies, they did. Director John McTiernan purposely requested louder blanks to give the gunfights more intensity. In fact, Bruce Willis suffered hearing damage from the scene in which he fires his Beretta while under a table at Marco standing on top.

The movie's direct sequel, Die Hard 2: Die Harder tried to recreate the same magic, this time putting McClane in Dulles International Airport in Washington D.C. during a terrorist takeover on Christmas Eve. But the super fake snow and the fact that McClane wasn't in the same boat as the hostages, who were stuck in planes circling the airport, plus a convoluted plot—along with the fact that the setting was mostly empty airfields, "snow" covered forests, and spartan airport structures—made for a less than memorable sequel. (Except for the ejector seat scene. That was awesome.)

Filmmakers tried to get lightning to strike twice by recreating the formula of the first Die Hard by setting the sequel in an airport and again having the action take place at Christmas. It wasn't quite up to par with the first one, but it was a foul-mouthed, big budget, big explosion roller coaster with tons of fake snow that was still pretty fun.

While the movie's theatrical title was simply Die Hard 2, by the time it got to home video, it had been amended with the oft mocked subtitle Die Harder.

John McClane is now a lieutenant with the Los Angeles Police Department instead of the NYPD (we assume he moved to LA with his family after the first movie), but that doesn't matter since the whole movie takes place at Washington D.C.'s Dulles International Airport. Why? Well, they're in town to be with Holly's parents for Christmas, but John got there first and Holly is flying in from somewhere else—they make excuses to get Holly in a plane circling over Dulles and John inside waiting for when terrorist take control of the airport's instrument landing system during a heavy snow storm.

They then hold the planes that are circling in the air hostage until a deposed military dictator is allowed to be freed when he lands at Dulles. The movie came under fire in the press after its release because of its incorrect characterization of a Glock pistol, which we're get to later.

In the first film, McClane carried a Beretta 92F pistol, but in the sequel, he carries the improved Beretta 92FS as his sidearm in a brown leather shoulder holster. The Dulles Airport Police also carry the same pistol, along with U.S. Army Major Grant (John Amos).

In the first film, McClane's Beretta had an extended slide release and a reversed magazine release to accommodate Willis, who is left handed. This pistol has a stock slide release, but a reversed mag release.

According to imfdb.org, the Beretta 92FS used by Willis in this movie was purchased by Cinema Weaponry for Lethal Weapon 2. After that, it appeared in the next four Die Hard movies.

Now we get to it, the infamous Glock pistols of Die Hard 2. Col. Stuart (William Sadler) and the mercenaries he employs (who pose as terrorists taking over the airport) carry Glock 17 pistols as their sidearms. Marking one of the earliest appearances of the handgun in a Hollywood movie, having just been released a few years prior. It's also one of its most infamous.

When McClane encounters two mercenaries planting gear in a luggage room at the airport, he gets into a shootout with them, killing both. He takes one of their guns and informs Chief Lorenzo that it's a "Glock 7" and proceeds to use a string of innacuracies to describe the gun, saying it's a "porcelain gun made in Germany that doesn't show up on your airport metal detectors and costs more than you make in a month."

Of course, the Glock 17, which is made in Austria, is not porcelain. While the frame is made of polymer, 83 percent of the gun by weight is made of ordnance steel. The entirety of the gun are visible in x-ray machines. Nobody has ever made a porcelain, ceramic, or entirely plastic firearm that can't be detected by security screening devices. Even if there were such a gun, the ammo inside is still brass and lead.

The quote from the movie built on fear at the time of Glocks being plastic, and people thinking therefore they could be concealed from metal detectors.

"I remember when we did that scene, I tried to talk them out of it. There's no such thing as a gun invisible to metal detectors, and there shouldn't be, but they wouldn't budge. They had it written into the script and that was that."Armorer Mike Papac, who worked on the movie, said according to imfdb.org.

Garber (Don Harvey) carries a Heckler & Koch MP5A3 fitted with a scope and a number of Stuart's men carried MP5 variants with two magazines taped together with colored tape. The ones with blue are loaded with blanks (that apparently cycle in the MP5s without blank adapters) and the ones with red are live ammo.

McClane gets his hands on Garber's MP5A3 and "shows" Lorenzo it's loaded with blanks.

He also uses MP5s taken from bad guys at various points in the movie.

For a very 80s, and very funny, retelling of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, there are a lot of guns in this movie.

Opening with a mock commercial for a fake Christmas special, "The Night the Reindeer Died," Scrooged starts with Santa's workshop finding itself under attack from a horde of black-clad…terrorists? Sure. After deciding to make a stand and opening the gun cabinet that's filled with rifles, a few Colt Sporter Carbines, and even an M60 machine gun, Santa hunkers down with his M16A2 when their savior arrives in the form of Lee Majors, playing himself, in full snow gear and a hand-held GE M134 Minigun fitted with an M60 handguard.

The configuration is the same as the mini-gun used by Jesse Ventura in Predator (1987), which came out the year before—so it's likely the same prop gun, as it's seen firing in the mock commercial as well, so it's not just a prop.

And that’s just the intro! When we get to Frank Cross (Bill Murray) and his Jacob Marley moment, we see he keeps a Smith & Wesson Model 60, a small J-frame pistol that has the distinction of being the first revolver produced in stainless steel.

Frank’s desk gun, kept in a drawer next to a spare bottle of vodka, appears to be high-polish stainless or nickel-plated with white pearl grips.

Before his encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Future, Frank encounters a more real-world reminder of how bad a person he is in the form of Eliot Loudermilk (Bobcat Goldthwait), an employee he viciously fired at the beginning of the movie on Christmas Eve.

“Let me tell you a little bit about my day. I got fired. My wife left me. She took our little baby girl. And ever since, I’ve been blind! Stinking! Dru-uu-uunk!”

Loudermilk barges into Cross’ office with a double-barreled side-by-side shotgun that looks to be a 12 gauge, blasting away at pretty much anything, including Frank’s shelf of Emmy awards. We see Elliot reload with shells from his shirt pocket, but at one point he fires three shots before reloading.

Elliott later uses the shotgun to persuade the control booth to not cut the feed when Frank delivers his “I’m reformed” speech at the end.

Now for something a bit lighter. Home Alone came along in 1990, becoming an instant Christmas classic for a whole generation, and making young Macaulay Culkin one of the biggest stars in the world.

The story of Kevin McCallister (Culkin), a 9-year-old upper-class kid left home by himself over the Christmas holiday when his entire family travels to Paris and accidentally forgets him. While his family tries to get back home during the busy holiday, Kevin must defend his home against two burglars who target the upscale domicile after learning the boy is alone.

While Kevin employees a number of potentially deadly and damaging boobytraps (Marv and Harry would definitely have been dead, see below) and arms himself with his big brother’s pump-action BB gun, the story never quite ups the ante to firearms.

However, there is a gun in one of the movie’s more memorable scenes, Kevin watching the movie within a movie that’s a send-up of old school Cagney-type gangster flicks, called “Angels With Filthy Souls” in which Johnny (Ralph Foody) uses a Colt 1921AC Thompson machine gun with a 50-round arm magazine to kill another gangster names “Snakes.”

“I tell you what I’m gonna give you, Snakes. I’m gonna give you to the count of 10, to get your ugly, yellow, no-good keister off my property before I pump your guts full of lead. One, two, ten!

“Keep the change you filthy animal.”

You can check out the unedited clip of the fake movie here:

Later in the movie, Kevin uses the movie in conjunction with some firecrackers in a steel pot to scare Marv away when he’s skulking around the kitchen door.

A similar scene is recreated in the sequel Home Alone 2: Lost in New York when Kevin watches "Angels With Even Filthier Souls" in his hotel room.

This 80s movie about Christmas in the 50s is full of nostalgia for two generations of Americans, and is an absolute staple for many families during the holidays. In fact, some TV networks still run back-to-back marathons of the movie on Christmas Day every year.

A big portion of the plot revolves around Ralphie's (Peter Billingsly) all consuming desire for a genuine Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle with a compass and sundial in the stock. And as everyone knows, he's repeatedly denied through the movie, being told over and over, "You'll shoot your eye out."

The Daisy Red Ryder is one of the most famous BB guns in history and was introduced by Daisy Outdoor Products in 1938 and is still in production over 50 years later. The Red Ryder is a lever-action air gun and its magazine actually holds 650 BBs.

During Ralphie's daydream sequence, we see one of the bad guys from Bart's gang armed with what looks to be a Luger P08. He is then shot by Ralphie and his Daisy air rifle and we see the gun on the ground. From the lack of details, it's probably a toy version of the Luger.

More of a modern classic to-be, the third in a series of stoner comedies following buddies Harold Lee and Kumar Patel is, oddly enough, a Christmas movie. The first one was about a late-night quest for some White Castle munchies, the second was about the duo escaping from imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. So naturally…a Christmas coming of age comedy of errors is the next step.

The results are, surprisingly, pretty funny and kind of touching. Set six years after the second movie, a grown up and married Harold has a house, a career, and is trying for his first child while also trying to get in good with his in-laws. Kumar, conversely, hasn’t moved on much since the two were roommates, has lost the love of his life, and is a grown-up slacker.

A loose plot involving a burned Christmas tree and an ensuing series of disasters in a quest to replace the 12-foot Frasier fir, including a few run-ins with armed bad guys.

Elias Koteas, one of the all-time great character actors, plays the scarred Sergei Katsov, an intimidating Russian mob boss who comes home to find Harold and Kumar partying with his underage daughter, and a whole bunch of other people.

Katsov appears to carry a stainless Beretta 92FS Inox or a Taurus clone, but the imfdb.org says it’s actually a Bruni 92 Chrome, a blank-firing replica of the Inox. Since he mainly carries it around menacingly and threatens Todd (Thomas Lennon) with it, it didn’t have to be too real.

And like any good mob boss, Katsov has a couple of armed henchmen at his side. Yuri (Yasen Peyankov) uses a Sig-Sauer P226 through the movie and Gustav uses a Ruler KP89 during the apartment shootout that ends the party and sprays a huge bag of cocaine all over the place. Talk about a white Christmas.

Later, when Harold and Kumar are tied up, Gustav is carrying a Mossberg 590 Compact Cruiser. In a continuity error, the 590 becomes a Mossberg 500 Cruiser after the pair get free and abscond with the bad guys’ guns, though the visual differences are small.

That’s the shotgun Harold uses to demonstrate why you don’t fire shots into the air…because sometimes you just might hit something, and the one he’s supposed to be carrying in the movie’s poster, though that looks like an artists’ rendering of a different shotgun.

“I shot Santa in the face! He’s real, and I shot him in the face!”

Yes, that’s right, in one of the most watched Christmas movies of all time—mostly thanks to TV networks who used to show it on repeat during the holidays before the days of On Demand or home video—we have a few firearms.

Something surprising you might not know: the classic Frank Capra flick bombed in theaters when it was released after the end of WWII.

The movie hit theaters in 1946, and as such, the end, which took place in the present while the rest of the film was a flashback, is set just before the end of the war in 1945. The plot of the climax involves the return of George Bailey’s (Jimmy Stewart) brother from a combat zone where he'd earned the Medal of Honor.

Before we get to George Bailey's fateful day and night, there's a lot of movie and we see a couple dark flashes of the main characters serving in the war, including a shot of Bert the Cop (Ward Bond) in battle carrying an M1903 Springfield rifle with a bayonet affixed while serving in North Africa (per the voiceover).

Bert, being the movie’s sole named police officer, carries a Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver as his service weapon. When he confronts Clarence and George in the alternate present, Clarence bites his hand, forcing him to drop the revolver, before the angel disappears.

Later, after Bert shows up as George is being tossed out of a bar for harassing his wife, who doesn’t recognize him, George wheels around and punches Bert in the mouth. As a response, Bert uses his Model 10 to fire six poorly aimed shots at a fleeing George, who is in fact running near buildings and groups of people in the street. Luckily, he misses, both George any anything in the background.

And to bookend our list we have another movie from writer Shane Black, who also made his directorial debut with this 2005 action comedy with an old-school noir flavor that's paired with Black’s favorite setting, Los Angeles at Christmas.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang stars Robert Downey Jr. as Harry Lockhart (just before his career resurgence with his role as Tony Stark/Iron Man in the MCU films), a fast-talking NYC burglar who finds himself accidentally doing well in an acting audition following a botched heist just before Christmas. He actually gets the part and is flown out to L.A. (which is fine by him as the cops in New York are on his tail) where he teams up with famous Hollywood private investigator, Gay Perry (Val Kilmer), and attempts to solve a murder and elude a group of killers in a complex Raymond Chandler-esque plot.

One of the most memorable guns in the goofy, noir-y flick is a NAA .22 Magnum Mini-Revolver that Gay Perry (he calls himself that) keeps hidden in his crotch as an emergency back up weapon, which he has given a rather pejorative name.

At one point, Perry is tied up in a chair and pretends to make a lewd gesture before firing three shots from inside his pants, allowing he and Harry to escape some bad guys planning to kill them.

However, Perry’s go-to sidearm through the movie is a handsome looking Vektor CP1, though Harry ends up with the pistol more often than not.

Harry also spends some time trying to get rid of a Ruger SP101 revolver in .357 Magnum that ends up planted in his hotel room along with a dead body. He ends up using the revolver later…accidentally, when he finds out that Russian roulette doesn’t always work the way you think it will.

Harry is a little more competent with a silenced Beretta 92FS Inox that he comes by and uses to dispatch a killer after witnessing a murder while hiding under a bed.

In 1996, Gina Davis was super popular, and starred in numerous comedies, romances, and thrillers in the 1990s. In 1996, she threw her hat into the action movie ring and did an admirable job playing a housewife suffering from amnesia who slowly discovers she is really a covert government assassin who has been hiding underground by accident for years.

And this is yet another action movie written by Shane Black that uses the Christmas holiday as a backdrop. It seems he likes sticking with certain tricks.

The movie also stars Samuel L. Jackson and Brian Cox.

Davis plays Charly Blatimore, a super spy female James Bond type who suffers a head trauma during her last mission. She washes ashore on a New Jersey beach with no memory of who she is. She re-enters the world as Samantha Caine and we find her eight years later having become a school teacher in a small town who lives with her boyfriend Hal and her daughter Caitlin.

She tries to figure out who she is by hiring a number of private investigators, who turn up nothing because of her spy background. One of the guys she hires is Mitch Henessey (Jackson).

During the Christmas season, Samantha is in a car accident and suffers a concussion. When she recovers, she finds that some of her old abilities are coming back in dribs and drabs. For instance, she suddenly knows how to handle a knife with deadly skill. And bit by bit, her memories of her former life as Charly Baltimore come rushing back.

Her accident also gets her face on TV, which lead to some bad guys from the old days to come calling. From there its all downhill as she tries to settle old debts, remember who she is, and keep her new family safe, with a little help from Henessey, who is more of a bumbling sidekick who eventually comes through.

Charly uses a number of firearms throughout the movie, from pistols to ARs and sniper rifles.

She ever gets her hands one a particularly striking silver and black Ruger Mini-14.

Henessy carries a small S&W J-frame Model 36 revolver at the beginning of the movie, as befitting a kind of scummy PI, but during the movie, he starts carrying a Colt King Cobra revolver with a 6-inch barrel chambered in .357 Magnum.

This movie also has one of the strangest gun combinations you'll probably ever see in a movie, not counting sci-fi movies set in the future that amalgam up a few different guns to make something new. No...in this movie, when the hitman One Eyed Jack comes to Charly's house to kill her, he's ricking a Winchester Model 1887 lever-action shotgun with an M203 grenade launcher mounted underneath somehow.

The shotgun has a cut down stock and barrel, like the one Arnold used in T2, and somehow the lever action of the shotgun, which is flip-cocked numerous tomes, apparently reloads the 40mm grenade launcher.

And when the "grenade"is fired, it looks like some kind of guided missile and certainly not like a 40mm grenade projectile.

The 1887 shotgun has had its front wooden foregrip removed to allow the M203, which was designed for use with the M16 rifle platform, to be attached, creating this monstrosity.

Have a happy holiday season—eat, drink, and be merry while falling asleep in front of the TV with a good movie on!