Black Christmas (2019)
Rated PG-13 for violence, terror, thematic content involving sexual assault, language, sexual material and drinking
Score: 3 out of 5
The second remake of the 1974 slasher classic Black Christmas is a deeply flawed film. It was extremely heavy-handed in its messages, at times to the point of dragging the film to a crawl. It felt like it had the Black Christmas title and holiday setting tacked on just for the sake of name recognition, having little in common with the original otherwise. It felt as though the studio had taken a cleaver to many scenes in order to get the rating down to a PG-13; I don't buy for a second that they were deliberately going for a lower rating. The trailers spoiled 90% of the movie. But I'm willing to put all that aside and forgive this movie's sins for two reasons: first, even all the editing couldn't hide the fact that this film was well-made on a technical level, and second, for as blunt and inelegant as it could get, I never got the sense that this movie was being disingenuous with its message. Director and co-writer Sophia Takal felt like she was genuinely, righteously pissed off when she wrote this, and decided to let that rage flow through her keyboard and her camera before compressing it all into a 92-minute feature film. The result is a messy gem that got overlooked at a crowded box office and probably turned away viewers with its lousy ads, but is still a better film than the 2006 version, where most of the enjoyment I did get out of it came from the gore effects. I predict that, much like Jennifer's Body, this film is going to develop a cult fandom on home video and streaming, especially if they decide to release the unrated cut that I'm sure exists out there. As it stands now, Revenge is still the far-and-away queen of modern feminist horror movies, but this does have its charms, provided you're willing to sit through a film that doesn't quite stick the landing.
Set at Hawthorne College at the start of winter break, this film drops the Billy character entirely, as well as his trademark phone calls outside of one scene that serves as an homage. In his place, we get a group of killers stalking the campus murdering young women, all while clad in black robes and masks while sending their victims threatening text messages through an app. It soon becomes apparent to the sisters of Mu Kappa Epsilon that they may be connected to the Alpha Kappa Omicron fraternity, where, during their winter talent show, they put on a Mean Girls-homaging performance that doubles as a pointed middle finger towards Brian Huntley, the former AKO president who raped MKE sister Riley Stone and never faced any repercussions. Because, before the performance, Riley stumbled upon a weird ritual that the AKO brothers were holding involving some kind of black goo and a bust of the university's founder, a big red flag when people are suddenly going missing.
Takal herself said that, when she wrote this film, she cared more about the message than the plot, and I believe her. This film ain't subtle; it lets you know right up front exactly what it stands for and against, and it never lets you forget that. The killers here are representative of everything that Takal sees as wrong with fraternity culture specifically and toxic masculinity in general, portraying it as a force that turns ordinary men into man-children whose obsession with dominance and hatred of all things "feminine" leaves them emotionally stunted. Here, it is a literal corruption in the supernatural sense, one that sucks out men's personalities and leaves emotionless husks who violently abuse women. If you suspect that Cary Elwes' character, a Jordan Peterson-esque professor whose misogyny goes beyond the casual and into the vocal even before we learn what he's really up to, is gonna turn out to be evil, you've called a reveal so obvious that it can scarcely be called a plot twist. And if you think that accommodating all of this, collaborating with it, and not being "one of those women" will save you, then you've got another thing coming, as one character learns the hard way. References to everything from "not all men" to Brett Kavanaugh's "I like beer" quote are dropped in casually along the way. In the hands of a different filmmaker, I would have seen all of this as pandering, especially given the heat that Jason Blum had taken in the past over not hiring more female directors (Blumhouse Productions made this). Instead, however, I see much the same spirit that animated The Purge, especially its superior sequels: Blum gives a filmmaker $5 million to make whatever she damn well pleases, with little meddling, and she proceeds to say "forget playing nice" and write a film that's as direct and to-the-point about its message as a shotgun blast. To be sure, much like The Purge, its bluntness often leads it into pitfalls where the message can be taken in a way that the director didn't intend, but on the whole, I got exactly what this film was going for. This is a message movie dressed up as a teen slasher flick, the message is delivered effectively if with all the subtlety and grace of a 16-ton ACME anvil, and whether or not you are on board with the message will be the determining factor in whether or not you enjoy it. I mostly was, and so I found myself happily cheering the surviving protagonists on during the climax.
And the reason why I liked it as I did is because it had more going for it than just that. To be sure, when it comes to its merits as a slasher movie, it's clear that this is not Takal's final cut. While one kill cutting away made sense due to the twist it set up later on, with other kills it was pretty obvious that they filmed something far more graphic originally, most notably an ax to the face that looked like it should've been pretty grisly. And yet, it still worked as an old-school chiller, with Takal employing a lot of retro '70s touches to her direction that aren't often seen in slashers like this, most notably some zooms on a few particular moments. It speaks to the quality of Takal's direction that, even though the film kept cutting away from the most graphic moments, it was still routinely able to build effective scenes of tension and dread before then. Takal's writing, on the other hand, was not nearly as strong. It speaks to the quality of the cast, led by Imogen Poots as the heroine Riley, that the heavy-handed manner in which the film delivered its morals didn't get insufferable, because even though I regularly found myself to be on the film's side, I often still waited for it to get to the point. The blunt, capital-M Message should've been saved for the villain's big motive speech during the climax, where it proved the most effective and made what followed more cathartic; beyond that, I only would've kept the Mean Girls homage in the first act and allowed the film's message to exist mainly as subtext throughout the rest of it. Playing a bit more coy would have allowed the twist regarding what the villains are really after to play more as a twist, because as it stands, I was able to call even the plot elements that the trailers hadn't yet spoiled. This is where Get Out, a film that shares a fair bit of DNA with this in terms of being both a Blumhouse-produced horror movie and a message movie, succeeded: while that film was just as polemical, it wrapped its message in old-school horror tropes and conventions that meant that its message about racism and its slow-burn plot ultimately served and enhanced each other. At times, this film comes close to achieving that, but by putting its message front-and-center the way it did, it telegraphs the entire plot and reduces the impact of what should've been big twists.
Set at Hawthorne College at the start of winter break, this film drops the Billy character entirely, as well as his trademark phone calls outside of one scene that serves as an homage. In his place, we get a group of killers stalking the campus murdering young women, all while clad in black robes and masks while sending their victims threatening text messages through an app. It soon becomes apparent to the sisters of Mu Kappa Epsilon that they may be connected to the Alpha Kappa Omicron fraternity, where, during their winter talent show, they put on a Mean Girls-homaging performance that doubles as a pointed middle finger towards Brian Huntley, the former AKO president who raped MKE sister Riley Stone and never faced any repercussions. Because, before the performance, Riley stumbled upon a weird ritual that the AKO brothers were holding involving some kind of black goo and a bust of the university's founder, a big red flag when people are suddenly going missing.
Takal herself said that, when she wrote this film, she cared more about the message than the plot, and I believe her. This film ain't subtle; it lets you know right up front exactly what it stands for and against, and it never lets you forget that. The killers here are representative of everything that Takal sees as wrong with fraternity culture specifically and toxic masculinity in general, portraying it as a force that turns ordinary men into man-children whose obsession with dominance and hatred of all things "feminine" leaves them emotionally stunted. Here, it is a literal corruption in the supernatural sense, one that sucks out men's personalities and leaves emotionless husks who violently abuse women. If you suspect that Cary Elwes' character, a Jordan Peterson-esque professor whose misogyny goes beyond the casual and into the vocal even before we learn what he's really up to, is gonna turn out to be evil, you've called a reveal so obvious that it can scarcely be called a plot twist. And if you think that accommodating all of this, collaborating with it, and not being "one of those women" will save you, then you've got another thing coming, as one character learns the hard way. References to everything from "not all men" to Brett Kavanaugh's "I like beer" quote are dropped in casually along the way. In the hands of a different filmmaker, I would have seen all of this as pandering, especially given the heat that Jason Blum had taken in the past over not hiring more female directors (Blumhouse Productions made this). Instead, however, I see much the same spirit that animated The Purge, especially its superior sequels: Blum gives a filmmaker $5 million to make whatever she damn well pleases, with little meddling, and she proceeds to say "forget playing nice" and write a film that's as direct and to-the-point about its message as a shotgun blast. To be sure, much like The Purge, its bluntness often leads it into pitfalls where the message can be taken in a way that the director didn't intend, but on the whole, I got exactly what this film was going for. This is a message movie dressed up as a teen slasher flick, the message is delivered effectively if with all the subtlety and grace of a 16-ton ACME anvil, and whether or not you are on board with the message will be the determining factor in whether or not you enjoy it. I mostly was, and so I found myself happily cheering the surviving protagonists on during the climax.
And the reason why I liked it as I did is because it had more going for it than just that. To be sure, when it comes to its merits as a slasher movie, it's clear that this is not Takal's final cut. While one kill cutting away made sense due to the twist it set up later on, with other kills it was pretty obvious that they filmed something far more graphic originally, most notably an ax to the face that looked like it should've been pretty grisly. And yet, it still worked as an old-school chiller, with Takal employing a lot of retro '70s touches to her direction that aren't often seen in slashers like this, most notably some zooms on a few particular moments. It speaks to the quality of Takal's direction that, even though the film kept cutting away from the most graphic moments, it was still routinely able to build effective scenes of tension and dread before then. Takal's writing, on the other hand, was not nearly as strong. It speaks to the quality of the cast, led by Imogen Poots as the heroine Riley, that the heavy-handed manner in which the film delivered its morals didn't get insufferable, because even though I regularly found myself to be on the film's side, I often still waited for it to get to the point. The blunt, capital-M Message should've been saved for the villain's big motive speech during the climax, where it proved the most effective and made what followed more cathartic; beyond that, I only would've kept the Mean Girls homage in the first act and allowed the film's message to exist mainly as subtext throughout the rest of it. Playing a bit more coy would have allowed the twist regarding what the villains are really after to play more as a twist, because as it stands, I was able to call even the plot elements that the trailers hadn't yet spoiled. This is where Get Out, a film that shares a fair bit of DNA with this in terms of being both a Blumhouse-produced horror movie and a message movie, succeeded: while that film was just as polemical, it wrapped its message in old-school horror tropes and conventions that meant that its message about racism and its slow-burn plot ultimately served and enhanced each other. At times, this film comes close to achieving that, but by putting its message front-and-center the way it did, it telegraphs the entire plot and reduces the impact of what should've been big twists.
The Bottom Line
The manner in which the 2019 Black Christmas remake puts it all out there turns out to be a double-edged sword. On one hand, it sapped the effectiveness of the plot, but on the other, its righteous fury, combined with Takal's gifts as a filmmaker, was a quality all its own. I'd wait for this one to hit streaming, but for both horror junkies and those of us (especially young women) who are pissed off at the state of the world, this will likely wind up a hidden gem.
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