No one was expecting a remake of Black Christmas, nor was anyone asking for it, so its announcement in June felt sudden. What kind of interest can there be in the cult proto-slasher of 1974? Especially after the notorious 2006 remake, which many still either recall as a nightmare or consider it an unintentional comedy because of its torture porn elements, plot holes, and ridiculous killers. However...
The rights to the concept were bought by Blumhouse with director Sophia Takal and screenwriter April Wolfe to helm the newest incarnation. Takal had previously shot some lazy indie thriller about mean-spirited female friendship and a full-length episode of the anthology series Into the Dark... also about mean-spirited female friendship. And with New Year's entourage. Perhaps, everything starts there. The two saw the opportunity to depict all of their modern ideas, only with some snow and toothless screamers.
Don't try to find any tributes to the original besides a gender-swapped sorority house cat (in 1974, we had Claude, now we have Claudette) and an attempt to strangle one of the villains with polyethylene. Instead, there's a group of stereotypical modern college girls, one of whom, Riley (Imogen Poots), suffers from emotional trauma after being raped by one of the frat bros (Ryan McIntire), who escaped the punishment and even dared to return to the college grounds. But the girls have worse problems: the most obnoxious student, Chris (Aleyse Shannon), demands the dismissal of one of the old-school professors for his boomer-ish way of teaching. While Professor Gelson (Cary Elwes) is trolling the Twitter suffragists by quoting Camille Paglia, female students begin to disappear. At first, nobody cares about the off-key acting blonde girl from literally every trailer and promo (Lucy Curry), but the further disappearances begin to slowly alarm. The campus police shrugs and isn't eager to do anything (another clumsy curtsy to the original), so Riley begins her own investigation.
With the subtlety of a jackhammer, Takal and Wolfe eagerly expose the cult of toxic masculinity, and every man is either evil or stupid. Armored with the tenets of Judith Butler, Gloria Steinem and many other founding mothers of women's studies, the duo weaponizes their liberal arts degrees but quickly finds itself cornered by their own ambition, unable to materialize timely messages, so they resort to supernatural gimmicks, where "toxicity" becomes literal. No Billy, no Agnes, no real freedom from male opinion. Somewhere in 1974, Jess Bradford sighs heavily while firmly announcing to her boyfriend the decision to have an abortion. Turns out that women's rights aren't about freedom of choice, but about driving away the "white men science" from universities.
Black Christmas doesn't want to be a horror movie. In fact, it doesn't want to be a film. But it wants to be an essay, wrapped in Christmas lights in a hypocritical attempt to capitalize on a familiar title. An essay, albeit with a budget of $5KK, is not capable of being exciting and thrilling. Even in others negative reviews, only Imogen Poots is rightfully praised, but she is underutilized by the writers, who didn't care to give her character a decent development. Cary Elves wasn't told this isn't another Saw movie, and something like "game over" is always about to burst from his perpetually menacing grin.
The film is mostly praised for showing certain socially disturbing topics familiar to many upper-middle class millenials. Campus abuse and rape culture were highlighted in The Hunting Ground, and the pointless gory gender violence was shown in epic Assassination Nation. What do we get in Black Christmas? The fear of walking down the street alone at night, the keys clutched in a shaking fist, and the annoyance with "not all men".
Black Christmas is a boring, bloodless, cheap-looking thriller that dramatically lacks appreciation for the genre, opting instead to radicalize the audience without a single care for the horror fans. Unlike the first two films, this one won't be fondly remembered in decades to come. A famous Russian actress Faina Ranevskaya is quoted as saying, "Making a bad movie is like spitting in the eternity." That's exactly what Takal and Wolfe did.
