Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. The word on BLACK CHRISTMAS seems to be solidly shitty all down the line. This is perhaps the most positive review of the movie. It makes me sad... with the original being so good... and having such an amiguous ending. Why not set this film years later in the house where the killings from the original took place? I like the idea of remakes being sort of quasi-sequels/remakes a whole lot more than the trash I've seen lately. Enjoy the review, beware of spoilers!

I am The Southerner and am here with my thoughts on the new Black Christmas remake I caught at a recent trade screening. I posted a review a bit ago about The Good Shepherd. I was called out on a mistake, didn’t handle it very well, and went on a rant. I can’t say that I won’t make any mistakes, but I do promise to have a thicker skin. Enough about me, let’s get into it. THE FOLLOWING IS SPOILER HEAVY! (For anyone who doesn’t like my use of the words hottie, chick, or any other seemingly derogatory term for females, just remember what movie this is.)

When I saw that this was what I was going to see, I knew I wanted to write it up. There have been many negative thoughts on even the concept of redoing this particular favorite. Quint especially seemed pessimistic about this one. To Quint and the lot of you who were apprehensive- you didn’t waste any energy! Let me preface the following by letting you know that I haven’t seen the original. I was never opposed to seeing it, but there are so many other films on my list that I never got around to checking it out. I do know that after seeing this one, that there is no way it could be any worse.

If anyone wants to clarify the differences to me, that’d be great. I don’t know what was left out and added. The movie starts in the present. A sorority girl is killed while writing a Christmas card to her sister. The killer as we find out likes to put a bag over the victims head and stab them through the eye. The opening credits roll and then we are in the living room with the few sorority girls who didn’t go home for the holidays. The stereotypes that replace character for the players are quickly established. We have the alcoholic, THO-laden family hater (Crystal Lowe), the liberal conspiracy theorist (Buffy’s Trachtenberg), the ditsy self-involved THO-laden dumb chick ( Lacy Chabert regurgitating Mean Girls), the wholesome values down to earth THO laden chick (Katie Cassidy), the bizarre outsider (Kathleen Kole), the only male character who’s not a killer but a prick & the townie, (Oliver Hudson), and the overprotective den mother (Andrea Martin).

They all live in the house that once housed a serial killer named Billy Lenz. The only part of the movie that was worth a damn were the flashbacks showing the emergence of the killer inside Billy, his nutbag husband murderer mother, and his sister (or daughter!). How he came to be is disturbing but unrealistic (not that realism was should play a part, but still). The flashbacks are fun and creepy. His particular taste in Christmas cookies is rather inventive.

However, once the flashbacks end, so does the movie (critically speaking). The pacing of the entire movie takes away any tension whatsoever (think When a Stranger Calls remake) and what we are left with is a horror-less slasher flick. Adding to that, we have characters we don’t give a good damn about. I’m speculating here, but I think the studios were ready to give this a PG-13 rating. The gore seems to be added in post. A flash of a sliced apart head that seemed unlikely given the force and the weapon used, and the fact that most victims were killed with a bag over their head makes me think the producers were waiting for a sign of the times to give them their rating.

OK. The violence sucks and tension is absent. What about sex and nudity? These are sorority girls, right? There has to be some T & A, right? The only sex is in a blurry sex video and the skanky, nasty mother shot from the back fucking a dude on the stairs. Alright, so nothing in the sex category. What about shower scenes or anything that could provoke a disrobing? There is one shower scene. I sat up straight when the word ‘shower’ was mentioned, especially since it involved the hottest of the girls, the alcoholic. Then 30 seconds later, its over and all we got was the side of a boob and an ass that most definitely came from a body double! Damn! What does this piece of shit have then?!? At first, it seemed like there was going to be an interesting mystery involving the identity of Billy’s crazy sister Agnes, but it never went anywhere. It was trying to imply that she was one of the ‘sisters’, but they dropped it and went another way. Once again, the flashbacks have the only slightly decent material in this dreck. There is one damn good kill though. Billy wraps Christmas lights around a throat. He drags her in the bathroom and bludgeons her with a rolling pin for what seemed like an entire minute. He uses a cookie cutter and then…. Well see the cookie comment earlier. One last thing that deserves mentioning is the last shot of the film. There is a very good use of shadow, Christmas lights, and an impaled man. That’s it. At first I wanted to try and explain the storyline by briefly going through it linear, but as I kept writing, there just wasn’t any point. If you’ve seen a shitty horror remake, then you’ve seen the breakdown.

This whole film was rushed from beginning to end, from conception to post, that it never had a chance. I never saw the remake of Willard, so I have no reference point for the writer-director (Glen Morgan) of this, but if this is any indication, Willard will never be in my collection.

At least it was only 82 minutes. That was damn decent of them.

-The Southerner