Review #359: Black Christmas (2019)

Twelve More Slays of Christmas #1 - Black Christmas (2019)

[It does not appear that this movie is streaming for free anywhere; however, it can be found with a subscription on Hulu and... Disney+? Is that right?]

Last year I watched both the original Black Christmas, as well as the 2006 remake- and if you recall (you can go back and read those reviews right now, I'll wait) I liked the original but the remake seemed to misunderstand everything that made the original good. So, only 13 years later, they decided to remake it again, so how does it stand up? Let's find out.

(Fair warning, I'm going to be spoiling this movie. That usually means I don't think you should watch it.)

Black Christmas (2019) follows a group of sorority girls staying on-campus over Christmas break, who get beset upon by one or more murderers. While that sounds similar to the other two, that's literally where the similarities end- instead of being a grounded (or even larger-than-life) story about some hapless victims defending themselves from a serial killer, this "remake" instead features a secret cabal of magically-empowered misogynists who use supernatural power to subjugate and kill the women on campus for being inferior. Or... something. They eventually use girl power to fight against the patriarchy and destroy the magic statue that produces the mind-controlling sludge that the cultists use to create super soldiers and then the movie ends as they burn down the frat house that serves as their evil lair.

(None of that was a joke. That is actually what happens in the movie.)

So, first things first, this is not a remake of Black Christmas. I get that supposedly there are some people who were involved with one or more of the other films, but this isn't a remake. The plot and themes and just the whole vibe has nothing whatsoever to do with the others, except that this one also takes place on a college campus around Christmastime. There is no serial killer named Billy (or Agnes). There isn't even a den mother in this film. Nobody gets suffocated and hidden in the attic. (One person gets suffocated but it's one of the many supernatural killers.) Oh yeah, and that's a big one- THIS IS A STORY ABOUT MAGIC POWERS. I gave the 2006 remake a lot of guff about trying too hard to mimic the original without understanding what made it good, so I guess in a way I appreciate how this one literally didn't even try to do any of the same stuff as the original. This is an entirely new story that only vaguely resembles the others. But then I have to ask, why call this Black Christmas if it's a completely different movie?

There's another big thing that needs to be discussed: I mean this as the understatement of the century, but I get the feeling that this movie has... a bit of an agenda. For basically the entire film, from minute one to minute 92, EVERY line of dialogue and EVERY scene and EVERY bit of plot and exposition is full-throatedly declaring that men are bad, the patriarchy is bad, date rape is bad, and normalized misogyny is bad. Now don't get me wrong, I'm fine with that message. I'm fine with movies being written as a soapbox for a message first, and a movie second. There is nothing inherently bad about that, as long as- and here's the important part- as long as the movie is still good. As long as the message is carefully interwoven into the narrative. I don't care what message you're pushing, if every single line is just a restatement of the thesis of the film, I'm going to get the impression you didn't actually have anything to say. This literally could have been a silent film with the title "Down With the Patriarchy" and not much would have been lost from the viewing experience.

Speaking of which, can I complain about a missed opportunity here? Obviously from the first scene onward the viewer is going to be assuming that the evil frat house is behind the murders, and that the misogynist professor is in on it too. Nothing about that was a surprise even for a second (and I didn't watch the trailer- apparently the trailer literally spoils ALL of that). Which makes it so perplexing how, in the one and only class scene, there's a bit where the protagonist assumes the anti-feminist quote being discussed was written by a man, and the professor smugly reveals that it was written by a woman instead. I actually began to think that maybe- just maybe- this was meant as a clever bit of foreshadowing, and the cabal of evil frat bros would turn out to secretly be headed by a woman. It would have also been a terrible ending, but at least it would have been a little clever, right? (There's possibly a tiny bit of this in the scene of the reveal, where one of the sorority sisters does turn out to have been working with the frat bros, but it amounts to nothing and would have been a pretty weak payoff if that's what it was intended to be.) But that would go against the ever-present thesis for the film, so obviously that did not turn out to be the case.

I've heard a lot of people say this movie was worse than the 2006 remake, but I wholeheartedly disagree. They are both terrible films, but this one edges out the other for at least trying something of its own.

Overall Rating: 3/10 Pink and Yellow Christmas Lights

Of Course She Is: Claudette the cat in this film is a gender-swapped version of Claude, Ms. MacHenry's cat, from the original Black Christmas (1974).