Black Christmas (2019) Review!!!

Synopsis – A group of female students are stalked by a stranger during their Christmas break. That is until the young sorority pledges discover that the killer is part of an underground college conspiracy.

My Take – Released back in 1974, director Bob Clark’s titular film, which arguably started the slasher sub-genre, had a relatively simple premise. A group of sorority sisters became the targets of a masked killer, and get killed off one by one, leaving the fight down to the final girl to make it alive. While its 2006 remake added some insane plot elements to spice up the proceedings, in the end it pretty much went down in the same vein.

However, for its second remake, Blumhouse hired writer/director Sophia Takal to add her own necessary set of ingredients to make the resulting film stand out in the currently changing horror landscape. Fiercely set in our post Me-Too era, her film sets out to use the slasher framing and updates it with themes of rape culture, misogyny and trauma.

Unfortunately, while watching the film, I witnessed how none of these pieces came together as clearly intended. Its biggest offender is that considering its namesake, it doesn’t even seem to attempt to try and retain any of the key components that makes the original film such a classic. But instead this second remake moves even further from that original than bonkers 2006 film did.

While I agree that a remake should find its own voice rather than merely recapture and reset what came before, however here, director Sophia Takal and co-writer April Wolfe take the film in such a nonsensical direction that it absolutely does not work. While the film does succeed in its dramatic elements of girls taking on male egos, but for its slasher elements, the actual point of the film, it takes such a half-witted wild swing for the fence that it ends up failing in all degrees.

The story follows Riley (Imogen Poots), a senior student of Hawthorne College, who following a sexual assault that occurred when she was a freshman, at the DKO frat house during a Christmas party, has mostly withdrawn from any social activity outside of her sorority. But when her MKE sorority sisters Kris (Aleyse Shannon), Marty (Lily Donohue), Jesse (Brittany O’Grady), and Helena (Madeleine Adams), who are set to perform at DKO’s Christmas talent show, need a pinch-hitter, Riley steps in and turns their “sexy Santa” song into one about her rape by the former DKO president, and about campus sexual assault as a whole.

However, their happiness is short-lived, though, as a missing sorority sister and ominous text messages suggest someone has grim plans for the evening. And soon, a cadre of masked killers descends on the sorority house, beginning a night of bloodshed and terror.

For starters, the film is incredibly flat. Produced on similar lines of acclaimed Blumhouse films like Get Out and The Purge, this film aims to be another entry in the social horror sub-genre, but here the mix falls flat, as the director Takal as the messaging is far too didactic, forgoing any layered complexity to make any sort of impact.

What makes all of this so damn frustrating is that the film’s first half succeeds in setting up the friendships and characters at its core. Riley is an engaging character still finding her strength, and her bond with her friends is clear with each revealing their characters well through conversations and observations. In maybe the film’s best scene, our leads perform a sultry holiday number, at a frat house that instead calls out the frat for their wrongdoings in a moment that’s both highly satisfying and fairly effective. It’s this scene that makes the overall film that much more disappointing as the scene showcases the true potential for what the film is going for.

But after utilizing a genre framework to engage with weighty current events for the first hour or so, everything goes so over the top that it’s hard to take the last act seriously, and the film loses its grip. Not to mention that these developments even suggest that assaults conducting by such guys aren’t entirely responsible for their own actions, which could hardly have been the idea director Takal wanted to convey.

That third-act reveal comes out of nowhere without narrative, in-film logic, or explanation to support it. The supernatural element added here was plain silly and unneeded. The film could have worked well as a slasher alone and didn’t need to have such elements added to it and the outcome of this being added, made the film more of a disaster.

They built the film up for such a big ending, that it ends with disappointment and anger. The film even manages to fail as horror film, lacking in any mood and suspense almost entirely, and substituting with way too many cheap jump scares. Director Takal’s film is filled with loud, Blumhouse-approved stingers meant to enhance jump scares, but the actual kills are bloodless, empty, and mostly off screen. The tense build ups for the jump scares are so obvious that you don’t jump and expect it and they conclude stupid happenings, for example when one of the sisters try’s to find working Christmas lights and the outcome is an expected jump-scare.

Again and again we get a brief cat and mouse game, the masked killer appears, and just as he approaches a victim the film cuts away leaving little variety aside from an attempted homage to one of the greatest scares in horror history that’s fumbled in its brevity and execution.

Performance wise, while Imogen Poots brings an emotional depth to her character, she is let down by the script. Even Aleyse Shannon and Brittany O’Grady bring in memorable supporting turns as close friends caught up in the madness. While Cary Elwes, Ben Black, Caleb Eberhardt and Lily Donoghue are alright. On the whole, ‘Black Christmas’ is unfortunate missed opportunity of a horror film, which poorly mixes worthy themes and messages in a bland slasher.