Black Christmas
Starring:  Katie Cassidy, Michelle Trachtenberg, Oliver Hudson, Macy Elizabeth Winstead, Lacey Chabert, Kristen Cloke, Andrea Martin, Crystal Lowe, Karin Konoval, Robert Mann, and Kathleen Kole
DIRECTOR:  Glen Morgan
WRITER:  Glen Morgan (based upon the 1974 screenplay by Roy Moore)
PRODUCERS:  Marty Adelstein, Marc Butan, Steve Hoban, Scott Nemes, Dawn Parouse, Victor Solnicki, Glen Morgan, and James Wong
GENRE:  Horror
RATING:  R for strong horror violence and gore, sexuality, nudity, and language
DISTRIBUTORS:  2929 Entertainment and MGM Distribution Company

Stuck in their sorority house for Christmas, a group of sorority sisters and their sorority mother find themselves receiving harassing and threatening phone calls.  They don't have clue, but someone is also stalking and killing them one by one.  The killer may be Billy (Robert Mann), a maniac who long ago lived in that very house with his deranged parents whom he killed (on Christmas day) before being institutionalized.

Black Christmas is a remake of the 1974 film of the same titled and that was directed by Bob Clark of Porky's and A Christmas Story fame (Clark is an executive producer on this remake).  The new Black Christmas is truly a terrible movie, and only because it actually has some really creepy atmospheric moments is it not an absolute disaster.  There are times when Black Christmas made me wonder if it were a farce - perhaps a horror movie played absolutely straight, but meant to be an outrageous comedy.  That might be giving the filmmakers too much credit, or maybe not.  This is strange flick, and it's hard to get a bead on it, other than to get the idea that Black Christmas is more annoying than scary.

Black Christmas is gruesome enough to capture the interest of horror fans that want gore, and this has blood thrown about by the buckets.  There are so many deaths by sharp objects that it's a wonder the MPAA didn't rate this "NC-17."  Writer/director Glen Morgan clearly went retro for this, as it seems like one of those grisly and macabre slasher horror flicks that came out after John Carpenter's 1978 movie, Halloween.  In fact, much of Black Christmas seems like a pastiche or sorry homage to 1980's horror films.  It reminded me of Happy Birthday to Me, The People Under the Stairs, and any horror movie where inbreeding and incest come into play.

The murders are ghastly, and even the sex scenes in this movie are mean-spirited and common.  The actresses who play the sorority sisters have beautiful bodies, but they play characters that are so witchy that it makes their faces look hard and mean.  Not one of the characters is sympathetic, so caring about their demises other than as a ritual of horror movies just doesn't happen.  The methods of their horrific murders are also as obvious as the script's sequence of events.  That there is more than one killer is, like so much in Black Christmas, painfully obvious, and the killers are about as crummy as stepping in dog feces with really good shoes.

D

Another version of this review appears at http://www.negromancer.com.