BLACK CHRISTMAS

 

 

Black Christmas is a 2006 remake of a 1974 horror film. I haven't yet watched the original so I can't rightly comment on it, but the remake offers up practically every horror "slasher" cliche in the book: a silent serial killer who's difficult to kill who killed his family escapes from the insane asylum where he was sent to and he terrorizes a houseful of young people (in this case, a sorority house where said serial killer once lived with his family he killed), the serial killer has a horrific (pardon the pun!) backstory (like, for instance, the killer's cruel mother kept him in the attic after offing his father and had him impregnate her so he could give birth to his inbred sister), the killer manages to kill off everyone save for one person--usually a girl--who manages to kill him, stop me if you've heard all this before. Still, in spite of the flick's "slasher" plot familiarity, Black Christmas isn't terribly bad as far as "slasher" flicks go. The killer in the flick is named Billy who was born with a rare liver condition that makes his skin look yellow. As a result, Billy's mother abuses him and ends up murdering his father while he watches. So she locks Billy up in the attic and marries the guy who helped her off Billy's father. Wanting desperately to have another child that she can actually "approve" of, and seeing as how her new husband is unable to give her one, she goes up in the attic where Billy is one night and . . . well, I think I'll let you use your perverted imagination at this point, all right? In any case, she gives birth to Billy's "sister" named Agnes whom Billy's mother treats like a princess who likewise gets sent to an asylum after Billy kills his mother and stepfather and he gouges her eye out one Christmas. In one of the movie's gorier moments, Billy carves out his mother's flesh with a cookie-cutter after he strangles her with a strand of Christmas lights and beats her with a rolling pin--nice!--and bakes her flesh in the oven in the shape of Christmas cookies of which the police find him eating when they enter the house. Yum! (By the way, the film shows all of this in a series of flashbacks.) Several years later on one snowy Christmas eve, Billy manages to escape the looney bin by stabbing the security guard with a candy cane he sharpened and kills another man wearing a Santa outfit. While dressed in the Santa outfit, he heads off to his former home that now is a sorority house. You know what's coming next, don't you? There is a kind of twist in the flick in that it turns out--spoiler alert!--there's two killers, one of them being, of course, Billy and the other one being his nutso "sister" Agnes whom everyone believed disappeared after she was released from the asylum. And, like I pointed out before, everyone gets offed save for one lone blonde girl who manages to kill both "sister" Agnes while she's in the hospital by--second spoiler alert!--burning her to death with a defibrillator and then kills "brother" Billy by pushing him down the stairs and impaling him on a Christmas tree. Merry Christmas! Like I said, Black Christmas isn't too terrible of a "slasher" flick even though it's definitely not the first said "slasher" flick that's mined the Santa-Claus-serial-killer angle before--the earlier-reviewed Silent Night (which is, of course, a remake of another "slasher" flick) is an example (and is, I feel, a better "slasher" film)--and could most definitely be a "holiday" film for those who are sick to death (again, pardon the pun!) of seeing 24-hour-a-day reruns of A Christmas Story and/or It's a Wonderful friggin Life. And what BETTER way to celebrate the holidays by watching a flick of a serial killer and his inbred sister brutally killing a houseful of hot chicks? Ho, ho, hell, indeed! A sidenote: Black Christmas did manage to scare up (there again, pardon the pun!) some controversy when it was released on Christmas day back in 2006 and some "religious" groups, one of them calling itself--and, no, I'm NOT making this up!--Operation Just Say Merry Christmas, groused how such a brutal film could dare be released on such a "sacred" holiday. Apparently these "religious" yahoos have never heard of Saturnalia and/or Krampus, have they? (Google it, OK?)