Black Christmas (Unrated Widescreen Edition)

Black Christmas (Unrated Widescreen Edition)
by Glen Morgan, Julie Ng

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Actor: Katie Cassidy, Kristen Cloke, Lacey Chabert, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michelle Trachtenberg
Director: Glen Morgan, Julie Ng
Brand: WELLSPRING/GENIUS
Producer: Glen Morgan
Writer: Glen Morgan
Producer: Bob Clark
Producer: Dawn Parouse
Producer: James Wong
Writer: Roy Moore
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Original Language); Spanish (Subtitled)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Running Time: 95 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-04-03
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Dimension Films

DVD Reviews of Black Christmas (Unrated Widescreen Edition)

DVD Review: Incoherently Terrible
Summary: 1 Stars

I can fully appreciate a bad horror movie, due to bad acting, a silly story, bad special effects, etc. Unfortunately, this movie has all of that, and an absolute lack of any cohesive element. Even good bad movies have some semblance of a plot and cinematic style that has some identifiable element. Not here. The camera work is horrible, the sets are terrible, the lighting is often so low that you can't really discern what's happening (and not in a good dreadful kind of way). Enough. avoid this movie.

DVD Review: Poorest of the remakes . . .
Summary: 2 Stars

I was sorely disappointed with this, though not entirely surprised that it flopped, and would rank it one of the most ineffectual horror remakes of all the recent wave, and that's from someone who's always felt that the original left plenty of room for improvement at a later date. The visuals are there, and that's about it. There's one too many killers (and we see them way too early for a movie about "calls coming from inside the house!"), a bloated, ugly back story that wasn't really necessary (though it's good for a few uncomfortable giggles), and virtually NO tension. I found the girls--both as characters AND as characterizations--to be so absolutely interchangeable that I literally lost track of who was who, and worse, stopped caring about them very early on. Even the hairstyles didn't help me; how sad is that? I kept getting this vibe that the director (Glen Morgan) was TRYING not to utilize the cinematic "language" and touchstones that have come to define the slasher genre sparked in large part by the original BLACK CHRISTMAS, which begs the question: why bother? Interview bites in the supplementary material reveal that Morgan does indeed hate many of the tropes of the genre he's working in with this film and was often forced to use them, and he's clearly still sore from the sting left by the critical and commercial failure of his first film, WILLARD, to the point where even he figures his directing career might be over if BLACK CHRISTMAS doesn't make a lot of money. Big surprise that it didn't. Turning genre cliches on their ears (especially with a concept like this one), or avoiding them altogether, takes a much surer hand than Morgan's. His partner James Wong probably has that hand, but then again, there's that DRAGON BALL thingy, so . . . One piece of humor I found amusing in this otherwise humorless film: when dorky Eve (the only girl that didn't blend with the others) gives one of the other girls a gift of a glass unicorn because "I know you're into the bible 'n stuff." Now THAT's a keeper. Just too bad it had to be used in such a crummy movie.

DVD Review: Eye'll Be Home For Christmas
Summary: 1 Stars

I watched the remake of "Black Christmas" last night. Now I know why it got poor reactions and reviews. All I can say to those who haven't experienced it yet is that it's not even mediocre. The original is much better... and actually scary.

Anyone who likes this new version might want to stop reading now.

(Spoiler Warning... Major plot points given away)

I'm really fond of the 1974 original movie but I wanted to give this new version a chance, just to be a fair kinda guy. Part of the original film's appeal and fright factor lies in the fact that we never really see psycho Billly, and we have no clue about his past or why he's a nutjob. (And we don't *need* to know.) This new version actually creates a detailed and sordid backstory explaining Billy's trashy childhood trauma, and also explaining about Agnes. And Agnes is actually in the film killing people at the sorority house while Billy escapes the asylum. (What the--? Huh?)
Why Hollywood feels this urge to show flashbacks and create a history for deranged killers is a mystery to me. I heard they did the same thing for the "Halloween" revamp from Rob Zombie.

Anyway, it seems the sorority house in the story used to be Billy's home. Oooh, scary. Well, to me it's just another way of ripping off John Carpenter and Debra Hill's Halloween bit about the killer coming back home. Yawn. Try something new, folks.

The filmmakers took an innovative cult slasher film from three decades ago and altered it significantly without even making the changes interesting or scary. This alone burns my hash. There are many ways they could have changed things and made it innovative and scary. But, no.

The beginning is actually baffling because during the first murder at the house, simultaneously we are shown Billy at the mental hospital preparing to bust out (leaving us to wonder, is that a flashback?); were we supposed to figure out that his daughter/sister Agnes was hiding at the sorority house before he broke out? A sign of poor filmmaking. Plus, now we have two looney killers in one movie. It makes things, well, cumbersome. Maybe the filmmakers figured two psychos equals more fright. LOL!! Guess again.

The movie is stylish but it comes off as a "Suspiria" copycat with similarly garish colors. The characters are all whiny, vapid, pretty b/i/t/c/h/e/s whom we care nothing about. Speaking of characters, we meet the 'plain Jane' of the bunch, Eve, very briefly after the house mother (Andrea Martin, one of the sorority girls in the original) tells the story of Agnes. Eve is the nerdy, creepy librarian type; she'd make a good killer, really, though stereotypically. Were we supposed to assume she might be Agnes? Snore...

Even if I try to look at this as a stand-alone film (not a remake) it doesn't work; it's dull and stupid. An icicle falling eight feet can kill a person? I'm all for employing suspension of disbelief during a movie but this is that to the Nth degree, lol.

This thing will leave you restless and looking at your watch as you try to figure out if there's going to be a heroine who will survive, and if there's going to be one solitary eyeball left. It seems the screenwriter has a thing about the removal of victim's eyeballs. That wasn't in the first movie (luckily). The laughs here are all unintentional.

The most pathetic part of all this is that here you have a situation pregnant with horror possibility-- a sorority house with a handful of girls on Christmas Eve, a snowstorm, and a maniac on the loose. But it's wasted on this klunker of a movie.
The original film played with our heads, trying to make us believe that Olivia Hussey's boyfriend Keir Dullea might be the killer. In *this* clumsy version they try to make us think that every character might be the maniac. Possibly that's another way of distracting the viewer from realizing they are experiencing crap.

The movie is poorly arranged (flashbacks, scene sequences, editing, camera angles, etc), and it should have ended earlier. The whole hospital sequence was just a reason for me to fidget more and look forward to the end credits. "Oh, everyone die already", I was thinking.

I must confess that there was one thing that was tolerable. The music score had some nice touches (the incidental, spooky background music... not the endlessly irritating use of Tchaikovsky's 'Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy' from his Nutcracker Suite. After the fourth time hearing that as background melody or cell phone ring tone, it's like "We get it, it's Christmas time, enough already").

I was bent on making it through this sham to at least say "I finished it. I am strong. I can make it through utter drivel". Yes, I had been warned about this movie, that it was an insult to the original and that the characters were non-dimensional. And now that I've seen it, I must agree. This flick is just fodder for mockery, nothing more.

DVD Review: should not have been remade
Summary: 2 Stars

The original "Black Christmas" is a classic horror movie. It's on blu ray now too. It has great actors of a high quality in it like Margot Kidder and Olivia Hussey. This one has a guy dressed up as a woman and it's absurd. It's ok at best if you look at it like a bad b movie. But it used the name and basic plot of a true classic and that's a shame. Get the original "black christmas' on blu ray or another edition before you get this
bad b movie version (black x-mas). As a bad b movie this competes with 'Orlock and the invisible man" or 'robot monster" and others for being inept so it's one of those type of movies. (which are ok in their own way) but not horror classics.

DVD Review: good slasher
Summary: 4 Stars

if u like the scream-esque type of horror, beautiful cast, elaborate deaths, creepy moments and brutal killings this movie is for u would like to see this. also the other positive is that the killer gets a back story. the only negatives are that its not that suspenseful if u watch alot of horror, the killer is already known from the beginning of the movie and girls doing very predictable slasher-esque things like trying to open stuck window when she could just smash it open.

Description of Black Christmas (Unrated Widescreen Edition)

(Horror) A remake of the 1974 horror classic that inspired slasher films like Halloween; A group of sorority sisters are terrorized and murdered, one-by-one, during Christmas Break.

Needless and unnecessary are two words that have little meaning in Hollywood, especially when you're talking sequels or remakes. Case in point: Black Christmas, the revisionist version of the 1974 horror thriller largely thought to be the proto-slasher movie (this was four years before the first Halloween installment). The original, from director Bob Clark, is still considered a masterpiece of tension, understatement, innovative camera perspective, economic efficiency (a polite way of saying "ultra-low budget"), and killing off pretty young girls in grisly ways without any cumbersome exposition regarding the psychopath's motives. This, by the way, from the same Bob Clark who would soon bring us the beloved Porky's franchise as well as Black Christmas's polar opposite, the sweetly nostalgic classic A Christmas Story. Anyway, as needless and unnecessary as this remake is, it certainly delivers the goods on 21st-century slasher conventions as the sorority sisters of Alpha Kappa are picked off during Christmas break in ever more gruesome fashion. There's nothing wrong with all of this, particularly for fans of impalements, crushed skulls, ripped-out eyeballs, and some good old-fashioned Christmas cookie cannibalism. Writer-director Glen Morgan, who earned his own credibility as co-creator of the Final Destination series and the interesting 2003 remake of Willard adds a few clever visual homages to the original along with the amped-up extreme gore. Clark's device (was he the first to use it?) of creepy, mouth-breathing phone calls from killer to victim remains intact and creepy. He also resurrects Andrea Martin, one of the then-unknown actor victims who, now famous, plays the prim housemother. Another addition, which may not be so welcome to purists of the genre, is a load of exposition and backstory for the killer. Disturbing as these flashback set pieces are, they're also somewhat distracting to the foreboding tone. But you get what you pay for, and lots of people are going to pay dearly to dream of the shocking frights another Black Christmas will bring. --Ted Fry

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