Black Christmas
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, R, 84 m, 2006
Directed by Glen Morgan. Stars Katie Cassidy, Michelle Trachtenberg, Kristen Cloke, et al. 

No, Black Christmas isn’t a remake of Michael Curtiz’s Yuletide classic with an all-African-American cast; it’s a pointless update of Bob Clark’s 1974 cult slasher flick of the same name. (The first Black Christmas predated John Carpenter’s Halloween by four years, so we should blame Clark for the endless string of bodycount pictures that followed.) Though this new Black Christmas is in even poorer taste than the original, it’s too incompetently made to bring on much of a hullabaloo with the minders of public decorum. (Controversy often translates into more moolah for Tinsel Town’s dream factories, and it would be a dirty rotten shame if this stink fest brought on enough of a public outcry to help garner the producing studio even one extra nickel.) Art that does inspire debate tends to be the kind that rubs our noses in our own feces, but Black Christmas is nothing but a futile exercise in hackneyed shriek show plotting. Mind, I understand how ill-chosen images like a plastic St. Nick being sprayed with gore might turn your stomach or even make you see red, but to give over such feelings to the bloody goings on in this asinine picture will only empower it—and if we want to disempower it, then we need to close our eyes to that bright, flashing marquee and get on with our Christmas present returns. Still, the function of this column is to give Hollywood’s makers and shakers a hard paddling when they step out of line, and though I’d rather be soul-kissing a dead moose than spending one more minute thinking about Black Christmas, you can count on your intrepid reviewer to roll up his shirt sleeves and do right by his commitment to his readership. Hey, it’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. And that somebody certainly isn’t Roger “Fahrenheit 9/11 is a compelling, persuasive film” Ebert. 

The often-perplexing action in Black Christmas takes place at an address with a history of unspeakable horrors. Circa 1970, the stork delivered the Lenz residence a baby boy named Billy. Though cute as a bug’s ear (as I guess most babies are), the poor thing was afflicted with a liver disease that gave his skin a golden tint reminiscent of Yellow Bastard in Sin City. (He would’ve fit right in with the Simpsons brood, though.) This didn’t keep Mr. Lenz (Peter Wilds) from loving the little dude, but his hard-drinking, chain-smoking, white trash wife (Karin Konoval) hated the boy for his deformity. On Billy’s first Christmas, his mother took an ornament from the Yule tree, crushed it, and sprinkled the shards on his tum-tum—much to the dismay of the father, who at that moment should’ve split with the boy, but stayed put for God knows what reason. As the years passed, the mother’s treatment of the boy became only crueler, especially around the silly season when one might expect a respite from such abuse. On Billy’s fifth Christmas, mom told him that the Russkies shot down Santa’s sleigh, so he shouldn’t expect to find anything other than dust mites in his stocking. Dad reassured him that his moms was full of reindeer shit, and that Santa had actually left a little something for him in his bedroom closet. There, hidden inside a hole in the wall, Billy found a big box wrapped in newspaper. It was a spaceship model kit. For the first time in his miserable life, Billy was of good cheer. But back downstairs, dad had reached the breaking point with his wife’s shabby treatment of their son. With steam shooting from his ears and a big, blue vein throbbing in his forehead, he dressed her down for being a hard-drinking, chain-smoking piece of white trash. So she responded (with some help from her new beau) by wrapping his head in cellophane and knocking his brains out with a hammer. When mom and her boyfriend noticed that sunny boy had caught the whole show, they locked him away in the attic for the rest of his tender years. (But it’s not clear why he stays up there; he knows the ins and outs of the house well enough to escape at any time.) 

Billy spent his days over the next several years in a squeaky rocking chair, staring out the attic window. His mother, who had grown even more repulsive during this time, wound up marrying the fellow that helped her do in her first husband. One night during some drunken coitus on the staircase, hubby part deux passed out, which really pissed mom off, seeing how she was trying for another baby and all. But when she heard the pitter-patter of her son’s little feetsies in the attic above, she hit upon an idea: She’d play hide the salami with him. (This scene marks a new low for the already disreputable horror sub-genre known as the slasher film; I shudder to think what other filmmakers have in mind to top it.) 

Nine months after boinking her first born, mommy gave birth to a baby girl, whom she named Agnes. Being a child of inbreeding, Agnes was not the prettiest thing on the block, but she had a gentle demeanor—a promise of incorruptibility in her eyes. This still didn’t make mom happy; she continued to drink like there was no tomorrow. Well, one Christmas Eve in 1992, junior had his fill of all this Deliverance shit, and decided to whack his family. After ripping out and then eating one of his sister’s (or his daughter’s) eyeballs, he thrust a pointy ornament through his stepfather’s noggin. But the pièce de résistance was the murder of dear ol’ mum: Billy bludgeoned her to death with a rolling pin, and then took a cookie cutter to her back, pulling up angel-shaped chunks of her flesh, which he then baked at 450 degrees Fahrenheit for ten minutes until the tops and sides were golden brown. Forgoing the addition of icing or sprinkles, he wolfed down the meaty treats with a glass of ice-cold Roberts vitamin D milk. Needless to say, Billy was given a scholarship to the local laughing academy, where he was happy to spend the rest of his days rocking to and fro and staring out the barred window of his poorly lit cell... Except on Xmas Eve. That’s when he would attempt to escape back home. (Whatever for? To reconnect to all that pain and suffering?) And this year, after years and years of failed attempts, he finally succeeded—with the help of a candy cane that he sucked into a shank. 

Billy’s boyhood home is now sanctuary to a bevy of hot but bitchy sorority sisters and their put-upon surrogate mom, Mrs. Mac (Andrea Martin, her comic genius squandered). As the girls are readying things for the holiday, Mrs. Mac reminds them to observe the local tradition of leaving a present for Billy under the tree. Legend has it that this act of generosity will keep the little creep from strangling you with garland or piercing your guts with a fireplace poker. Well, all is not looking too calm or bright when the girls discover a package under the tree not to Billy but from Billy. (Omigod, nooo!) In next to no time, one of the girls goes missing, so the other girls conduct a half-assed search for her around the premises, and this gives the killer (who obviously knows the layout of the house like the back of his bloody hand) many opportunities to send the little snots to the morgue. And on it goes. One of the problems with Black Christmas (and they are legion) is that the girls look and act so much alike that you lose track of who’s slutting around or who’s being stalked or who’s getting their head whacked off. There’s a lot of craziness going on all through the house: The phone rings, and a heavy-breather on the other end says cryptic things like, “It’s my family now!” and “Get out of my house!” There’s also a bespectacled weirdo named Eve (Kathleen Kole) living in the house, and she’s fond of telling her pseudo-siblings that she, like, thinks of them as her family. Black Christmas is full of dumb red herrings like that. 

So who’s committing all these heinous crimes? Is it Billy? Agnes? The Fed Ex guy? Does anyone with more than two brain cells give a hoot? The film is such an unholy mess that you’ll give up trying to make any sense out of it by the second reel. Glen Morgan directs without any regard for logic or suspense, and his handling of parallel planes of action is so inept that you can’t figure out what the hell is going on half of the time. Morgan’s lack of ability here is surprising; his freshman effort was a solid remake of Willard. (Why it didn’t resurrect the career of the peerlessly wacky Crispin Glover is anybody’s guess.) So what inspired Morgan to trail that success with a listless stab at a sacrilegious property like Black Christmas? Didn’t he consider that some Christians might be offended at the sight of their most wonderful time of the year being defiled for the sake of a cheap thrill? I can’t help but wonder how Jews or Muslims would react to seeing one of their holidays used as the backdrop for such blasphemous tripe. Morgan and company try to distance themselves from the movie’s heretical undertones by having one of the know-it-all sorority cunts point out that most of our beloved Christmas symbols have pagan roots. Well, there may be some truth to that, but it conveniently ignores that most Christians still hold such iconography as sacred. I can’t decide if it’s more offensive to watch the filmmakers dishonor the day my Lord was born or listen to them try to excuse it. 

But what I found truly offensive in this new Black Christmas was hearing excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker (which features some of the most beautiful music ever dreamed up) played under scenes of wanton sadism. (“The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” should conjure up images of two-stepping sprites—not the dismemberment of sorority house hotties!) I was probably just as upset by the soundtrack’s use of Frank Sinatra’s snazzy rendition of James Lord Pierpont’s “Jingle Bells.” Tchaikovsky’s music is in the public domain, so nobody could’ve (legally) prevented the filmmakers from raping it for this silly splatter pic, but whoever whored out Old Blue Eyes deserves no better next Christmas than a lump of coal in their stocking.

January 1, 2007

Ó Copyright 2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.