Black Christmas

This movie is bad. My god, it's just wretched. This is probably one of the worst of the horror movie remakes, at least on par with House of Wax. The original, though not a brilliant piece of film-making by any stretch, was at least able to take the concept of Christmas, and create a seriously dark twist- long before Tim Burton did that with Edward Scissor Hands. This remake, however, takes all of that dark wit, and ignores it, in favor of an attractive cast that's simply put on screen to get butchered.

I'm not going to lie: I was actually attracted to this movie from the cast. Lacey Chabert, Michelle Trachtenberg, and recent horror movie stars Kristen Cloke and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Final Destinations, Death Proof). This almost promised to be the makings of a fun horror movie in the same vein as Scream. Unfortunately, none of this panned out. It's fairly clear where writer/director Glen Morgan's talent lies. This is his second directorial feature (the first being the underwhelming Willow- starring Crispin Glover). He also penned the first and third Final Destinations, as well as several X-Files episodes. I think this covers the breadth of his ability. It's a shame his work early on in his career with the X-Files was his best.

For those of you who care, the plot is as follows: sorority girls are celebrating Christmas and they start getting killed one by one by Billy, a serial killer who lived in their house as a child. The truly astounding part about this movie is that there are many more characters than it seems at the beginning. Supposedly all but a few of the sorority sisters have gone home for break, yet more and more keep popping up just in time to get killed. A movie like this should not be hard to follow, but I honestly did not know who half of the characters were. It's a little hard to care about someone getting killed when you didn't even know they were in the movie.

A movie like this actually has potential to be fun. Slasher movies can be done very creatively, albeit cheesy, but still creative. There are many flicks that feature utterly unique and creative murders. The only potential that Black Christmas had in this regard was quickly quelled. All of the deaths were exactly the same. Maybe this is me simply being desensitized, but these scenes were boring. Although, there were several sequences that made me very squeamish, and I couldn't watch. These were a tad too graphic for me. If you don't like things with eye-balls, stay clear of this movie.

I wish there was something good to say about Black Christmas, but there's not. Even the twist ending was boring. In summation, there are no words strong enough to describe how truly wretched this movie is. If I had not been watching it online, there's no way I would have ever even taken the time. The acting is bad, the characters are pointless, the story isn't even there, and except for a few gut wrenching scenes of grotesque violence, it's just boring. Very boring.

0/5