Released: December 2019
Director: Sophia Takal
Run Time: 92 Minutes
Rated PG-13
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Genre: Horror
Cast:
Imogen Poots: Riley
Aleyse Shannon: Kris
Lily Donoghue: Marty
Brittany O’Grady: Jesse
Caleb Eberhardt: Landon
Cary Elwes: Professor Gelson
There is no shortage of holiday-themed horror movies. Obviously, Halloween is the BIG holiday for the genre, but we’ve seen stuff for Easter, although the quality of these movies is…highly questionable. Most of them tend to be micro-budget garbage that you would find on YouTube. Christmas has a few good ones, but again, most of them are not very good, especially when it comes to slasher movies. Most of them involve some demented version of Santa Claus terrifying people. I would think that the idea of Jolly Old Saint Nick constantly staring at kids in bed determining them to be naughty or nice is creepy enough. Good Christmas-themed slasher movies are incredibly hard to come by. One of them is an old 1974 film called Black Christmas, starring Margot Kidder and John Saxon. It’s a pretty intense little thriller that doesn’t have a lot of gore, but it’s unsettling and darkly funny at times. In 2006, Black Christmas got a remake which added more gore and a bizarre backstory involving the film’s killer. Well, in 2019, a NEW remake hit the big screen…and…it’s a thing, I guess.
The basic premise of Black Christmas is that a group of sorority girls are celebrating Christmas when they are attacked by a mysterious assailant. That’s pretty much it. The 2006 film added in a twisted backstory for “Billy,” the film’s villain, but it still ended up with a bunch of college girls being stalked and murdered by a psycho. Very original. Look, when it comes to slasher movies, you really don’t need to be super complex with the narrative. But you also don’t want to end up thinking you’re smarter than the audience, and that’s where my problem with the 2019 film lies. The film stars Imogen Poots as Riley, a sorority girl who had been sexually assaulted by a frat boy in the past. Her claims had been dismissed by the police and the college as attention-seeking, so her friend, Kris started a petition to get a certain Professor Gilson fired from the college. Soon, some of Riley’s friends start going missing. I’m okay with horror movies having social commentary. In fact, most them are nothing but social commentaries, but most have the decency to subtly weave that message in to the film’s narrative. Somebody needs to have a talk with Sophia Takal about subtlety in horror. Granted, slasher movies are anything besides subtle, but Black Christmas 2019 takes the blunt nature of the subgenre to a whole new level. I get it, targeting toxic masculinity is a noble goal, but you have to be careful NOT to paint every man with the same goddamn brush. This new Black Christmas is so on the nose about its messaging that any sense of fun that the audience might have is sucked out of the room. The main plot also involves this underground conspiracy against women. The movie spells it out for you. That’s how blunt the movie’s message is. It’s bad. Also, did I mention this movie treats audiences like they’re morons? I just thought I should bring that up again.
The writing in this film is legendarily awful. Ignoring the main plot of the film, the characters are terrible. The only character that you can actually sympathize with is Riley. She’s been through a traumatic experience. However, the way these characters interact with each other is incredibly irritating. Everybody’s an asshole to each other, and the dialogue, my god. Welcome to Exposition City, where EVERYTHING is explained to the audience so that in no uncertain terms were anything could be misunderstood. Even the film’s main villain has this epic dialogue sequence where he explains his master plan. Sophia Takal says she say the original Black Christmas and is a fan of it. I don’t believe her, not for one bit. She clearly missed the entire point of that film. That film was intense and it didn’t hit the audience over the head with its writing. Not only was the writing bad, the actual film-making involved here, which includes the cinematography and editing, is among the sloppiest I’ve ever seen in a major studio release. It doesn’t feel like anything was planned here. This whole damn movie feels rushed. Let’s talk about the “horror” in this film. What horror? The only real tension that I found was waiting for somebody to finish their exposition dump. It’s a bloodless movie that cuts away from some shots that could’ve been appropriately shocking and bloody. This is a PG-13 slasher movie. I’ve seen PG-13 movies that were far more violent. Not only that, the “jump” scares are telegraphed a mile away.
I would like to say that the acting is the best part of the movie, but the characters are just so underserved by the writing, it doesn’t really matter. Black Christmas is what happens when you let the message get in the way of the movie. If you try to separate the film from the message, you’re going to fail, because you can’t. The movie IS the message. This movie preaches about the dangers of toxic masculinity? Well, this is the kind of movie that men of a certain type will look at and see it as a justification for their misogyny. That’s really the only effect that this movie is going to have. You cannot be super obvious with your message if you want your movie to be successful. This movie was uncomfortable to watch because half the time, I felt like I was being attacked. It’s so anti-men it’s not even funny. It doesn’t even hide it. I avoided watching this movie since it came out, because it didn’t look great, but I ended up watching the original Bob Clark movie from 1974, which is a much better movie. So, I checked it out. Anybody who has read this blog knows that I’m a sucker for bad movies. I LOVE THEM! But Black Christmas 2019 is bad on a whole different level.