Originally I was going to review this in December as part of my Looking Back at the Films of 2019, but the more and more I kept thinking about the more and more I would've had to write which would have completely destroyed the short but sweet format I have for that series. So here we are and wow. This is a mess of a movie.
Black Christmas is a slasher movie and the second remake of the 1974 Canadian film of the same name after the 2006 remake. The movie was produced by Blumhouse Productions and Divide/Conquer and distributed by Universal Pictures. Black Christmas was written by Sophia Takal and April Wolfe and directed by Sophia Takal.
The story is almost everyone has left Hawthorne College to go spend the holiday season with their families, the only ones who stayed behind are Riley and her sorority sisters as they prepare for their seasonal party. But what they don't know is a mysterious figure is stalking them and he wants them dead.
My Thoughts
One of the issue with this movie is the horrible pacing. The movie is only 92 minutes long that means Black Christmas should've been a breeze to get by, but it's not. Somehow despite the short runtime when watching it it felt longer. How do you accomplish that? That takes a special set of skills to make a short story feel long.
What also made the 2019 version of Black Christmas a terrible movie was simply put it wasn't scary. You could quite literally see the jump scares coming a mile away. And something I found hilarious was this movie tried making text messages scary. Yes, text messages. Now yes it is more realistic that the characters didn't answer a phone call because the phone would tell them that the caller's id is unknown. But a phone call from a serial killer is always way scarier than a text message. It just is.
Now to discuss the four BIGGEST issues with this remake, one of those being it has no connecting to the original 1974 movie other than it's name. Which begs the question of how can they call this a remake to the original if it has nothing to do with the classic? It's like if someone was to make a remake to Friday The 13th but there's no Jason Voorhees or anything else that made the previous movies worth watching. It kind of makes me wonder if this movie was to go by another name but Blumhouse/Universal remembered that they own the rights to the Black Christmas name and thought if they put it on this movie it would get more butts in seats.
Another thing that made the film terrible was the characters. They awful. Riley is a victim of sexual assault but her assault is so rarely brought up that it might as well have not been in the movie at all. Other than that bit of her character there's nothing to Riley that makes her memorable. She's just a blank slate. Then we have Kris or as she should be called "The Woke". Yes we someone's Twitter/Tumblr account brought to life.....cause that's what people wanted in a slasher movie. Then we have Marty and Jesse, I can't remember a single thing about them. They're just there. That's all. And if the movie isn't spending time with them then we have the other characters who are boring. There wasn't one. single. person. to care for. Yes, slasher movies aren't known for character depth but a majority of them gave us something, Black Christmas (2019) gives us nothing with these characters.
Then we have a villains....oh boy are they comical. They're literally cliched and they're motivation is so stupid! Basically there's this statue that drips black goo, and this black goo makes the men in the movie super strong that way they can put women in their place and be the superior alpha males that they were born to be. I admit that was both me making a joke/a shortened less sophisticated version then what the writers wrote down but that's basically it. So our villains are bunch wimps. Sure Freddy Krueger has magical dream powers but the filmmakers showed he was dangerous before he got those. Like I said the motivation for the villains is eye roll hilarity.
Now to bring up the number one thing about this film. Yes, the rumors are true. The movie does have a political message but the thing is it's bad one. For many reasons, let's list them
1) Why a political message in slasher movie? I really don't understand this. I don't know anybody who goes to see a slasher movie and hopes that there's some sort of political stuff in there.
2) It's a poorly written message. If this was a good movie the message could've been interwoven into the script while at the same time give us an entertaining flick. But the writers way of going about it was make the most standard, boring, easy to debunk, and overally preachy message to the point where nobody wants to watch the movie. Which is actually a shame because sadly there are a lot of cases where women have been treated horrible at college campuses. But like I said the writers didn't go for smart they went for "All women are good, all men are evil. You don't believe us well guess what you're part of the problem, we'll have #Cancelled on Twitter, now give us your money".
So that's all I gotta say about Black Christmas (2019). I know I typically go into more details about what happened in the movie but honestly I just didn't feel like it this time. The movie sucked any enjoyment I could've had ripping it apart (😆). Honestly after watching this I think we should give the 2006 remake an apology.
My final rating is Destroy It!
That's going to do it for me. Come back on Saturday, Oct 10th for my review of the newest HBO Max movie Charm City Kings. Until then enjoy the rest of your day and please don't watch this. Just stick to the original.
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