Review #324: Black Christmas (2006)
The Twelve Slays of Christmas #10 - Black Christmas (2006)
I'll get the synopsis out of the way: the 2006 Black Christmas remake follows a group of sorority girls who get killed off one-by-one in contrived and inexplicably unnoticed ways by an unseen serial killer on Christmas Eve. There's a couple small subplots going on but that's pretty much it.
This movie is, in a word, terrible. It does two things very, very wrong: it took a story about a mysterious killer with unknown motivations and a clever whodunit twist, and gave the killer a complicated and winding backstory about a boy who was born with a liver disease that turned his skin yellow and then his mother hated his father for some reason so she killed the father and locked the boy in the attic but then one day the mother had sex with her son and she got pregnant and gave birth to a daughter so she loved the son but then the son broke out of the attic and killed his mother and ripped out his daughter/sister's eye and then the boy and his daughter/sister both spent thirty years in an asylum so the daughter/sister became a serial killer obsessed with cutting out people's eyes I guess. Because that's why the first one was good, right? The killer had twenty minutes of convoluted backstory?
That's the first thing this movie does wrong. The second thing is they took a couple memorable moments from the original film and said, "Hey, people loved that part, let's do it ten times and people will love this movie ten times as much." Imagine if someone was remaking Star Wars and they said, "People loved the moment when Luke finds out Darth Vader is his father. Let's rewrite it so every seven minutes someone else finds out Darth Vader is their father. People will love that." That would be ridiculous, right? But here, they saw how people loved the jumpscare near the end of the original Black Christmas where Billy's eye is visible through a crack in the wall, and so they manufactured no less than ten separate instances where Billy's eye could be visible through a hole or crack in something. Also, the bag suffocation kill was really memorable- it was kind of the film's defining moment. So in turn, they had Agnes suffocate (or attempt to suffocate) literally every single character she comes across, because that would surely make this one a hit!
The plotting and logistics of this film are absurd and you can't go one scene without something impossibly stupid happening. The house where this movie takes place is a massive 8+ bedroom home, which makes sense as a sorority house but doesn't make sense in Billy's backstory as a home for a single mother with one child. But throughout the movie it's revealed to have more crawlspaces than any home ever built (between the rooms, beside the attic, under the second floor, under the first floor) and any given crawlspace always has a serial killer in it at any given moment (and that serial killer is definitely looking through any hole available). Despite only being accessible via a ladder or similarly vertical crawlspace, the killer(s) manage to bring seven or eight different corpses up into the attic without anybody ever noticing. In Billy's backstory, his mom locks him in the attic by putting a padlock on the door despite it being shown plainly that he didn't use the door to get up there in the first place; he broke through the attic floor from a crawlspace next to a bedroom, yet the padlock keeps him up there for several years (and during that time, the only relevant moments in his life all happen on Christmas). Billy's mother gets a phone call from him and immediately goes to look for him in the attic- why would she think he had access to a phone in the attic? At the end of the film Billy and Agnes both get taken to the morgue in body bags despite neither of them being dead, and once in the hospital, they immediately know how to traverse the building through secret ceiling passageways and they immediately know what room the surviving protagonists are in. (Also, they inexplicably move a body from a hospital room up into the ceiling, and the body leaves a puddle of blood despite not being killed via any injuries that would have bled.)
It's like night and day comparing this movie and the original, in so many different ways. The original took place over several days, with the police being involved and a lot of back-and-forth with the attempts to catch the killer and some red herrings about who the killer is (because, remember, we get no actual information about the killer, only a name that might not even be his). The remake all takes place in a single evening, no police get involved, and we're shown IMMEDIATELY who the killer is (both killers) and we're given multiple doses of his backstory (as well as the backstory of his daughter/sister). The original had a subplot involving one girl's boyfriend going a bit mad after she reveals she's pregnant and wants an abortion, while he wants to settle down and start a family. The remake has a subplot with a boyfriend, but the entire subplot can be summed up as "boyfriend filmed them having sex and it ended up on the internet, she yells at him and then later he dies" which is lazier and dumber and doesn't amount to anything. And really- isn't that a description of this entire movie?
I first saw this movie at the drive-in with my wife after we'd been dating for about a year, and even then when I had barely seen any horror films, I knew this one was a stinker. And now, looking back with several hundred movies' worth of experience, I can confirm that yes, this one IS a stinker. A big stinker. This is one of those movies that makes me angry that it exists.
This movie is bad, but might be fun to have on while you have people over and you want something to laugh at. (Not with, AT.) But otherwise, you should seriously just watch the fantastic original instead.
Overall Rating: 2/10 Unrelated Icicle Deaths
Marketing Failure: Apparently this movie had some seriously mismatched marketing, with the trailer being full of shots that would never end up in the film (like a scene where a girl drowns in a frozen lake) and a kill that was in the UK version but was re-shot for the American release. But it was even worse in other countries- in fact, the Japanese release of this movie was marketed as a Final Destination movie!
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