“This Christmas, He’ll Treat Them Like Family…” Synopsis: An escaped maniac returns to his childhood home on Christmas Eve, which is now a sorority house, and begins to murder the sorority sisters one by one.

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Calamity Brains:

Despite several WTF moments, the remake of Black Christmas is just a generic slasher. Christmas has very little to do with it, outside of some mildly interesting lighting choices. It’s also important to take “generic” here to mean “boring.” Really. Even with Michelle Trachtenberg and some cheerfully fucked up plot points, this movie is just dull.

I normally like to write out a thoughtful review for you guys. I take notes during the movie, writing down some favorite quotes and moments and a little commentary to remind myself of things later. In the case of Black Christmas, I think this sampling from my notes says it much better than a nicely-worded review ever could:

• I disbelieve all of this movie
• even for a slasher this movie is idiotic
• Rube Goldberg murder scene
• scream, you dumb bitch
• so many plot holes, so little time

The whole “a murderer used to live here and now he’s come back” trope is overdone, but I usually give it a pass precisely because it’s popular. But Black Christmas goes through the trouble of setting up a convoluted (and sick) backstory for its murderer… and then gives absolutely no reason for his return home. Why would he come back to a place he was abused? What possible sentimental value would this house hold for him?

On top of that, the flick also falls prey to a regular plot hole in slasher flicks: why is the killer doing this? Let’s be fair, here – most slashers have lazy backstories at best. There’s usually some inciting incident that causes the first round of murders, then someone gets caught or killed or whatever, and then suddenly they’re back for round two. There usually isn’t a good reason to murder additional people. But this plot hole is especially obnoxious in Black Christmas because they explicitly call Billy a spree killer, not a serial killer. He had reason to murder his first victims… and none at all to come back and hack up a house full of sorority girls. Maybe I’m expecting a little too much logic from my horror movies here, but come on, guys.

All in all, Black Christmas is a snoozefest. Outside of one or two nice touches (a Christmas tableau involving body parts is particularly fun), there’s not much to recommend it. For a slasher movie that takes place in a sorority house, there’s very little nudity or sexploitation. The plot makes less than no sense, everybody makes the usual poor life choices, and most of the murders are phoned in. Even if you’re trying to get into the spirit of things with a Christmas-themed horror flick, I can’t really recommend you waste your time on this one.

Calamity Brains’ Rating: D
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