Around this time last year, I labelled Suspiria as the worst horror remake ever made. I didn’t intend that as some sort of challenge, but apparently that’s how the makers of Black Christmas interpreted it. This is the closest that I have ever come to walking out on a movie. Black Christmas is a terrible, incompetent, despicable, sexist, racist, vile piece of fucking garbage. This is an awful movie made by awful people for awful people. Fuck this movie.
The original Black Christmas (1974) is a classic and criminally-underseen horror movie. It is also the first real slasher film, as Halloween came along 4 years later and ripped-off many elements of Black Christmas. The first remake (from 2005) isn’t a terrible slasher movie, but it doesn’t live up to the original. I now take back every negative thing I ever said about the 2005 version. Aside from the fact that this is set on a college campus during Christmas break, it has nothing to do with Black Christmas. Instead of a deranged killer, we have an entire frat of evil men because men are evil. And make no mistake, this movie makes it very clear that all men are evil. And white men? Even more evil. If you are a white man, this movie hates you and spends 90 minutes telling you that it hates you. I am not even exaggerating. This is one of the most deranged and hateful movies I have ever seen.
The only way that I can explain this movie’s existence is that the script was written as a satire of extreme, militant, college-age liberalism and director Sophia Takal is too dumb to get the joke. Actually, I just checked and she co-wrote the script, so I have no explanation for this. The characters in this movie (every single one of them) are the absolute worst examples of SJW human garbage, to the point that it feels like a parody of these kinds of people rather than an attempt to portray actual characters. If Lisa Simpson and Brian Griffin had children together, locked the kids in a room for 18 years with nothing but vegan food, CNN and the Communist Manifesto to fill their time, then shipped them to college in California to major in Trans-Gender Cabinet Making, they still wouldn’t be as insufferably smug as the characters in this film. The characters in this movie (again, every single one of them) hate white men and they are not shy about it. The film is filled with lines like, and I am not paraphrasing for effect, “We’re not monsters, we’re just men!” The entire movie is dialogue like that. It is the most hackneyed, childish, bludgeoning horseshit that I have ever heard come from the mouths of real actors. One of the main subplots is that every character is trying to get a Classics professor fired because he had the nerve to teach books written by white men. Don’t worry, he eventually gets set on fire, so our heroes won’t have to go through the tyranny of reading Homer again. This is treated as a social justice victory. The one time that a male character accuses the girls of being sexist, he is screamed at and thrown out of the house. Fortunately, he later shows up and fucking apologizes.
I need to get into plot specifics here to truly convey just how insane this movie is. This is not just a slasher movie like its predecessors. In this, the students have successfully lobbied to remove the bust of the college’s founder from the student center because he is a white man and, therefore, represents everything that is wrong with society. Turns out, that bust is haunted by the ghost of the founder and he starts possessing all of the men on campus and having them kill the women because women have “strayed too far from the kitchen” and “need to take their rightful place behind men.” Again, there is not a bit of satire in any of this. In the end, the women kill all of the men and smile as they watch portraits of white men burn in a fire. Actually, not all of the men are completely evil. The one black male is able to break the founder’s curse and help the women because, since he is not white, he is not 100% evil.
Even if you remove all of that, this is an awful horror movie. This is a PG-13 remake of an R-rated movie, and it really should be PG. There is no blood, none, and I remind you that this is supposed to be a slasher movie. We don’t even care when the characters die and this is the first time that I actually applauded in a theater when a character was killed. This is nothing but cheap, obvious jump scares and that’s on the rare occasions that the movie remembers that its supposed to be a horror movie and not just propaganda. Also, horror fans generally agree that the best jump scare of all time is in The Exorcist III. I know it scared the hell out of me the first time I saw it. This movie has the fucking nerve to recreate that sequence from Exorcist III, but answers the question of what it would look like in the hands of shitty filmmakers. Not sure why this movie lowered itself to ripping off a sequence directed by a white man, but at least they did a bad job of it.
Couple of final thoughts. First, a request for militant feminist filmmakers: Can’t you just make your own shitty movies? Why do you need to keep taking great movies and making terrible versions of them? Second, I try to avoid social/political issues and I’m not prone to hyperbole, but this movie represents everything that is wrong with America today. I don’t mean that in terms of the messages it puts forth, but the way that it conveys those messages. It’s not a secret that I am right-leaning on most political issues, but that doesn’t mean that I hate people on the left. My girlfriend is a liberal and a feminist. I have close friends that are on the left. And you know what? We don’t hate each other. It’s possible to have reasonable discussions with people that you don’t agree with without resorting to screaming and name-calling. This movie disagrees with that. The people that made this movie have never met me, but they hate me. They hate me because I’m a man, because I’m white and because I don’t think the way that they do. And that’s fine, because I hate them too and I hate the collapse of civil discourse that they represent. This isn’t just a terrible, terrible movie, it is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with modern media.
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