Review: Black Christmas

Black Christmas, a remake of a 1974 film of the same name, is everything you would expect from the modern Hollywood, a paint-by-numbers horror film that does nothing to further the genre, and in some respects, is so amateurish it may not even quality for credit in a upper-division college course.

There’s so much wrong with this film and it doesn’t even dare to appease the audience by including the three horror staples we’ve all come to know and love: gratuitous nudity, creative deaths, and genuine scares. The only nude scene we get is a girl showering from behind, the deaths are all the same, so much in which they could have used the same death scene over and over again and you wouldn’t even notice, and the scares are all terminally forced.

Even writer/director Glen Morgan’s attempt at a twist is over shadowed by his penance for shooting people from the ankle down and almost blatant attempt to make you feel as though you know who the killer’s sister is. By the time he throws her image on the screen after a flashback you know it can’t be that obvious, and you aren’t that stupid. The prolonged ending to kill off a few more people in non-inventive ways is just a ten minute segment tacked on to a film that’s already 90 minutes too long.

The cast, composed of mostly C-list catty celebrities who can easily pull off being a spoiled sorority girl merely serves as canon fodder as the deaths pile up. Of course, in typical Hollywood don’t-go-in-there-stupid-thinking half of the deaths could have been avoided if the characters had any intelligence beyond painting fingernails and calling each other a bitch. The most notable cast member being Michelle Trachtenberg, who now appears doomed to star in a subpar movie in every single genre possible, but you’ll be hard pressed to put face to name during the end credits.

A few names you will remember are the aforementioned Miller and James Wong who served as members of the crew for the excellent, and genre-defying, Final Destination series, but it seems each has fallen on hard times and will put anything out for any easy few million.

So, in the end, Black Christmas is another Hollywood remake that doesn’t turn out so well. You’ll be hard pressed to find anything you’d like in this entire film, because you’ve seen it all done before, and sometimes better. One can only hope that studio big wigs get a clue, but we all know they won’t as long as there’s more movies from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s that people barely remember, they’ll be ready to green-light muck like this.