Movie Review: Oh, Oh No, "Black Christmas"

Christmas is cancelled.

The scariest, most dread-inducing part of watching Black Christmas is the dawning realisation that, no, it isn’t going to get any better, and will in fact continue to get exponentially worse as it goes on.

After it ticks all the traditional boxes of cinematic badness—shoddy filmmaking, clunky editing, mangled storytelling, jokes so dead they arrive with tags on their toes—it finds a few new ones. It’s particularly a pioneer in the way it reduces the #MeToo movement to a series of dulled punchlines, all in service of a reductive and sub-standard horror flick. The official synopsis ("this generation's young women aren't willing to become helpless victims") even borks its good intentions by suggesting previous female victims, uh, deserved it? Has anyone told Jamie Lee Curtis?

Set on an American college campus over the holidays, it centers on the leftover sorority sisters who decide to stick around their deathly silent residence. That includes den-mother Riley, played by Imogen Poots, and her pals Kris (Aleyse Shannon), Marty (Lily Donoghue) and Jess (Brittany O’Grady). Eventually, a hooded figure starts stalking girls on campus and slaying them one by one. Unfortunately, at no point does the figure burst through the screen and extend the same courtesy to everyone silently suffering in the theatre.

It’s a remake of the Canadian cult classic, shot in 1974 and first remade in 2006, also in Canada. This new one was shot in New Zealand, and comes from director Sophia Takal. Written by Takal and podcaster April Wolfe, this Black Christmas misses an opportunity to modernise and subvert old tropes, and instead just settles for long arguments about toxic masculinity, correct feminism and everything else that you can find on Twitter 24/7. It’s not that these ideas shouldn’t be explored. In fact, the themes of abuse, gaslighting and the patriarchy have all been delved into more successfully in the genre flicks Halloween, Ready or Not, Suspiria, Midsommar, Happy Death Day, The Love Witch, Raw, Unsane, Cam and The Perfection... and that's just in the last few years. The problem with Black Christmas is that it becomes solely preoccupied with hackneyed point-scoring, achieved with the subtlety of an inflated mallet. When the killer finally breaks into the dorm, it’s at the culmination of a screaming match about the "not all men" hashtag. I’m surprised the killer didn’t slowly back away from the door and offer to come back later.

It’s got a baked-in genius premise, given that college campuses in the US are their own kind of nightmare grounds for women. In the opening sequence, during the familiar walk-and-stalk of a female student, Takal doesn’t obscure the face of the man trailing her. She instead uses her lens to remind viewers that, for women on campus, any man can be a threat. The girl even puts her keys between her fingers, in case she needs to swipe in self-defence. It rang true with specificity.

But Black Christmas declines speedily from there, only recovering, briefly, with a nod to one of horror cinema’s best ever kills (from The Exorcist III; if you’ve seen it, I don’t need to explain which one). The cast is appealing, and Imogen Poots is ever reliable (and far above this material, to be honest), yet the script gives them some howlers, especially in the big finale. Even the gore disappoints, with blood replaced by… black goop? (Just wait until they attempt to explain the supernatural truth behind the murders, which is both exactly what you guessed from minute one and simultaneously baffling.)

Basically, if ever a film review could be replaced with the GIF of Tyra Banks screaming in frenzied disappointment, "We were all rooting for you," it’s this one.

1.5/5

Black Christmas is rated M for horror themes, violence and coarse language. In Australian cinemas now.