NUTS4R2’s Cryptic Movie Quiz - Christmas 2019

Annual Cryptic Movie Quiz

It’s that time again!

Merry Christmas and welcome to this year’s Cryptic Movie Quiz for the festive period.

If you look at the grid above you’ll see spaces for 16 movie titles running horizontally and, below this intro, are the cryptic clues to help you work out what these 'non-Christmas' movie titles are. To help you out, I’ve filled in a line of letters vertically downwards spelling out SEASON’S GREETINGS (minus the apostrophe)... so you have a letter in its correct position for each of the titles. Please don’t forget to click on the grid to see a larger version of it and maybe print it off to help yourself.

Like always, depending on my finances after Christmas... I’ll probably award a small, strange or possibly customised prize (customised if I know you from Twitter ... or even real life)... to the person with the most correct answers, pulled from a hat in the unlikely event of a draw (although that’s never happened yet).

Email your answers to me at nuts4r2@hotmail.com and, since I posted this a lot later this year, you have until the end of January 9th 2020 to get your entries in. A few days after that, I’ll stick up the name of the winner (or winners, if it’s a tie or a group effort), along with all the answers, here on my blog.

By way of an example, here’s a question from last year’s quiz, followed by the answer...

Example question:
I go with the French green.

Example answer:
The French word for green is Vert. Literally add “I go” onto the end and you get another Hitchcock classic, Vertigo.

Or just check out the January solution pages from the last few years to get a feel for how to put these things together. If you keep checking back at the comments section below, I will probably put the odd extra clue down there every now and again to help you out through the Christmas period.

Because a lot of stuff that’s been happening in my life, the quiz is perhaps a little easier than usual. I can tell you that half of the movies this year are from films which were released in the cinema in the UK in 2019. So those eight would have all been reviewed by me this year on this very blog. The first clue this year is probably the hardest while the easiest one, I reckon, is clue number five (if you know the movie, of course).

Full marks are rarely scored so... if you’re feeling a bit stuck, there’s still everything to play for. Send me what you’ve got anyway.

I hope you enjoy playing and, above all, have fun this Christmas, drink responsibly and play irresponsibly. And here are the questions...

1. No identification... but it’s only half that you’re in.

2. It’s dark but it’s all there.

3. Back in the morning.

4. MD peels back.

5. They’re not in stereo.

6. Palindromic lady assassin.

7. Two days before tomorrow.

8. The absence of violent bloodshed.

9. The ‘not very polite’ bee.

10. His life lived backwards. 

11. Cannibal serial killer is promoted to the rank of colonel.

12. He slipped into the trademark.

13. The Sun God raises his hand at the auction.

14. Ellie isn’t around as this pachyderm takes over from Peter Lorre as a Fritz Lang serial killer.

15. A file mix up ascends.

16. Plus a scrambled, heavenly body that appears as a fixed, luminous point in the sky.