The holiday comedy “Surviving Christmas” opens with a montage of people miserable at Christmastime, including a grotesque scene of an old woman sticking her head in an oven.

And the movie doesn’t get much better from there.

“Surviving Christmas” stars Ben Affleck (whose charm is wearing thin, thanks to too much media exposure in the past few years) as affluent executive Drew Latham, whose gold-digging girlfriend dumps him after he “insults” her with tickets to Fiji for a Christmas holiday.

Alone on Dec. 25, Latham follows a psychologist’s advice to make a list of past grievances and burn them at the place of his childhood to feel better. Latham travels to Illinois to burn the list at his old home, now inhabited by the Valco family.

The Valcos wonder why someone is burning something in their front yard and investigate. In one of the best scenes in the movie, patriarch Tom Valco (James Gandolfini) takes a shovel to Latham – a la Tony Soprano – and knocks him out. (Who hasn’t wanted to hit Ben Affleck with a shovel in real life?)

After explaining himself to the Valcos – wife Christine (Catherine O’Hara) and the computer-porn obsessed son Brian – and taking a tour of the household, Latham has an epiphany: he can rent out the Valcos to avoid another blue Christmas. Latham offers to pay a sweet $250,000 to stay until midnight on Christmas.

The Valcos put up with Latham in a series of events that are supposed to be funny but fall flat like a kid whose butt just got kicked in a snowball fight. The tension between Latham and the Valcos isn’t as funny as it’s supposed to be.

A trite script and a convoluted plotline are to blame for this X-mess. None of the Valcos ask Latham why he won’t spend Christmas with his real family until their daughter Alicia (Christina Applegate) shows up and points out the ludicrousness of the situation. Unfortunately, she ends up being just as stupid as the rest of the family as the “modern woman” stereotype, and her best moments are as a possible mistletoe-mate for Latham. Applegate and Affleck’s chemistry is decent, and it should have been exploited more than in just a few make-out scenes.

“Surviving Christmas” is hypocritical in its criticism of Latham as someone who believes he can buy whatever he wants and shows his affection too often with expensive things. But isn’t the movie premiering two months early to cash in on the Christmas spirit?

The movie’s climax sequence is its lowest point – the moments that are supposed to be the funniest include penis jokes, incest and Affleck dropping a turkey.

Thank you, Hollywood, for the early Christmas gift that is “Surviving Christmas.” If it were a real gift, it would be promptly returned.