Black Christmas (Unrated Widescreen Edition)
by Glen Morgan, Julie Ng
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DVD details
Actor: Katie Cassidy, Kristen Cloke, Lacey Chabert, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michelle TrachtenbergDirector: Glen Morgan, Julie Ng
Brand: Wellspring Media INC
Producer: Glen Morgan
Writer: Glen Morgan
Producer: Bob Clark
Producer: Dawn Parouse
Producer: James Wong
Writer: Roy Moore
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Unknown); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 95 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-04-03
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Dimension Films
Product features:
- Condition: New
- Format: DVD
- Closed-captioned; Color; DVD; Subtitled; Widescreen; NTSC
DVD Reviews of Black Christmas (Unrated Widescreen Edition)
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.
Description of Black Christmas (Unrated Widescreen Edition)
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