Review Double Feature: Black Christmas (1974) and Black Christmas (2006)

Christmas is getting earlier and earlier every year. Might as well start now with my latest double feature: an original vs. a remake.

Black Christmas (1974)

Rated R

Score: 4 out of 5

In 1974, two independent horror movies together revolutionized the genre and helped kick off a trend that would dominate horror for almost thirty years. Down in Texas, Tobe Hooper revved up a chainsaw and carved a deep gash in the psyche of millions of viewers, introducing the world to a brutal and sweaty hack-and-slash that probably set the image of Hooper's home state back fifty years. Without a doubt the more famous of the two films, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has overshadowed the other major pioneer of the slasher genre, a Canadian effort called Black Christmas that stands as both the first sorority slasher and the first holiday slasher. A far chillier and more claustrophobic film than its American counterpart, Black Christmas is a bit too slow of a burn for its own good, but when it's on, it is remarkable in its effective use of both its killer, a mysterious force lurking in the shadows of its sorority house setting, and its remarkably well-developed and memorable cast of characters.

The plot is simple: it's almost Christmas, and a bunch of sorority sisters are being stalked and murdered by a maniac, known only as "Billy", who harasses them over the phone before coming to get them, one by one. On the surface, it looks like slasher movie boilerplate: you've got the heroine, the boozy party girl, the virgin, the house mother, the boyfriend, the cop, and the father of one of the girls, and you can probably guess the order that they are going to die in... and you'd be wrong. This was a film made before Halloween helped lay out and codify all of the cliches of the slasher genre, and as such, it didn't have any cliches to follow or deliberately subvert. The "good girl" Claire is killed off in the first fifteen minutes, with her disappearance setting the plot into motion. The final girl Jess' main arc concerns the fact that she wants to get an abortion, which her boyfriend Peter stridently objects to -- and the film generally takes her side, to the point of hinting that Peter might be the killer. Barb, who is introduced with a cigarette in one hand, a glass of liquor in the other, and the top buttons of her shirt undone, lives far longer than anybody of her description would realistically have any right to in a later slasher film, allowing a young Margot Kidder to steal the show as a foul-mouthed, often abrasive young woman who is nevertheless the most entertaining character in the film. While you can see many of the slasher movie character archetypes represented in the main cast, this film goes off in unique and interesting directions with each of them, never missing an opportunity to flesh them out in even the smaller interactions and bits of dialogue.

As for Billy himself, this film takes the idea of "nothing is scarier" and runs with it. He doesn't wear a mask, but we never see him in full, the camera usually either shrouding him in shadow, focusing on his eye (the only part of his body that we ever get a good look at), or taking his perspective as he stalks the sorority house. All we learn about him personally comes from the lewd and obscene comments he makes while calling the girls on the phone, the sort of thing that, sadly, the internet has made far too common in this day and age. (Seriously, read this article about the film and how eerily it anticipated "troll" culture with its portrayal of Billy.) He is a haunting presence who racks up a surprisingly high body count for an older movie, even if the effects are kept to a minimum, all while remaining a menace from the start of the film to its knockout ending. It's hard to believe that this film's director, Bob Clark, is in fact the same Bob Clark who went on to make A Christmas Story, as he demonstrates a remarkable grasp of suspense here. The film's Christmastime setting contrasts with its horror to great effect, even in more humorous scenes where the wholesome veneer of the holiday is effortlessly stripped away by its protagonists (a foul-mouthed Santa, Barb giving a young boy liquor), setting up the bloodbath to come.

The main flaw here is that this film isn't quite as lean and mean as it could be. The first half or so and the climax were great fun to watch, slowly building both suspense and the characters, but a good chunk of the second act is spent sitting around waiting as the police wiretap the phones inside the house. Billy's presence isn't felt here, and the characters don't get much to do except twiddle their thumbs. The film's midsection could've easily been trimmed down by a few minutes, taking out some filler scenes and replacing others with some additional interactions to flesh out the surviving cast. It wasn't a major flaw, but the pacing here definitely could've been tightened up.

The Bottom Line

An important progenitor to the slasher genre that still holds up today, with a creepy killer, a great cast, and a slow build that eventually snaps to great effect. Whether it's Halloween or Christmas, definitely give this one a whirl.

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And now, for the remake thirty-two years later.

Black Christmas (2006)

Rated R for strong horror violence and gore, sexuality, nudity and language (unrated version reviewed)

Score: 2 out of 5

Horror remakes from the first decade of the 21st century do not have the best reputation, at least not in my household. While the remake of Dawn of the Dead still holds up surprisingly well, and a solid case can be made that the American adaptation of The Ring is not only better than the original, but one of the greatest horror films of the last twenty years, the remakes of The Fog, Prom Night, A Nightmare on Elm Street, One Missed Call, Shutter, and Pulse were all hot garbage of a sort that helped to give horror remakes a bad name that lingers to this day. The remake of Black Christmas is often ranked in that same camp, yet for whatever reason, I couldn't bring myself to hate it the way I did those steaming piles. Yes, the characters are pale shadows of their 1974 counterparts, the original's chilling ending is replaced with an anticlimax, the kills are repetitive, it gives Billy an unnecessary, cliched backstory that destroys his mystique, and overall, it felt completely pointless. The protests from Christian groups over the decision to release the film on Christmas day are more interesting than anything that happens in the film itself. But on the most basic level, it's functionally competent, serving up the cheap frights and grisly gore effects that the original lacked. While it loses everything else that made the original so great, it at least does the job of providing basic slasher thrills.

The plot, such as it is, is essentially a streamlined and heavily simplified version of that from the original film, at least in the most important respects. Sorority girls are getting harassed and eventually killed by a psycho named Billy. The difference here comes from the fact that each of the girls this time is wholly interchangeable. Save for Crystal Lowe's character, whose defining traits are her alcoholism, the fact that she gets naked, and her inability to cover up her Canadian accent (talk aboot the most round-aboot homage to the Canadian-made original -- yes, it is that noticeable), every one of the young ladies in the house was a variant on the same vapid sorority sister archetype. Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character is supposed to be from the South, yet the only evidence we get of this is a scene where the house mother Mrs. MacHenry complains about the "Southern princess" who doesn't know how to clean ice off of a car's windshield. Katie Cassidy, Lacey Chabert, and Michelle Trachtenberg's characters all had identical personalities, such that the only way I could tell that Cassidy was the designated final girl was the amount of focus given to her over the course of the film. (And why didn't they cast Chabert as the "Southern princess", given that she's actually from Louisiana while Winstead was raised in Utah and completely lacks any sort of accent?) Whereas opening victim Claire's father in the original film had a reason to be there, as he was picking her up to bring her home for the holidays, here the arrival of Claire's half-sister Leigh comes completely unannounced and with little explanation. The new version of Mrs. MacHenry gets more screen time yet less character development. Whereas Peter, Jess' boyfriend in the original, was a controlling sleazeball who aroused the audience's suspicion, Kelli's boyfriend Kyle here is a one-note slab of beefcake. In the original, you could tell right away who the party girl Barb, the morally conflicted Jess, and the virginal Claire were from the moment they were introduced, something that is a lot more difficult with this film's cast of victims.

But hey, they did give Billy a backstory, even if it completely missed the point of what made him so terrifying in the original. "Billy" may not have even been the character's real name in the 1974 film, with Barb jokingly calling him "the moaner" early on; he was a random nobody who struck out of nowhere and for seemingly no reason. He worked for the same reason that Michael Myers worked in the original Halloween: he was less a man and more a force of nature. This film, however, makes the same mistake that the Halloween sequels made, piling on a backstory that amounts to a mess of Hollywood serial killer cliches. Now, Billy Lenz (the killer now having a last name) is a man who suffers from jaundice and was raised by an abusive mother who killed her husband with the help of the man she was cheating on him with (and soon married), and who also raped him and conceived a daughter named Agnes. One day, Billy finally snapped and killed his mother and stepfather, and tried to murder Agnes; Billy was thrown in an insane asylum, while Agnes survived with a missing eye, never to be seen again. No spoilers for saying that Agnes turns out to be alive and not-so-well, though the film does throw a cheap fake-out in the form of a sorority sister named Eve Agnew, who turns out to be just another body for the pile after being introduced just to be creepy. The time devoted to Billy's backstory not only takes up a large chunk of an already-short movie (82 minutes, not counting the nine minutes of credits), it ruins whatever mystique he might have in favor of turning him into a killer who could not be more generic. I found myself groaning every time the flashbacks to Billy's childhood brought the movie to a halt. Apparently, production saw many rewrites and battles between writer/director Glen Morgan and the film's producers, the infamous Bob and Harvey Weinstein, two men notorious for getting in the way of filmmakers even before Harvey's sexual escapades became public knowledge, and I can absolutely believe it given how slapdash so much of the characterization feels.

At least the actual bloodshed was decent to watch. Glen Morgan previously wrote two of the Final Destination movies, and it shows in the amount of violence on display here. I was admittedly watching the unrated version, but the killer's trademark move, ripping out his victims' eyes by hand and then eating them (related to the trauma of his childhood), is painful and disgusting to watch. While the film does rely on this a bit too much, it does occasionally shake things up well enough with various ridiculous set pieces, most notably one involving an icicle that reminded me of Morgan's past Final Destination films. He doesn't forget the film's Christmas setting, either, even if his use of it tends more towards the campy than in the original, with Billy stealing a Santa suit after breaking out of the asylum, Christmas carols playing all over the place, and more. The cast, composed of a who's who of young 2000s TV stars and scream queens, was fun to watch as well. While none of the actresses excelled, none of them were truly terrible either, with all of them delivering good, decent performances that were about as much as I could hope for. Overall, on a purely technical level, this film attains something slightly better than basic competence at the task of delivering a modestly scary (if more gross than anything) slasher, even if the writing constantly lets it down.

The Bottom Line

A fairly pointless remake that's not even that interesting to write about, the direction was really all that salvaged it. Only really worth watching for fans of the actresses involved, as everybody else is better served with the original.