Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Black Christmas (2006) in Exactly 200 Words

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I have watched a lot of horror movies that have had no affection for, or even much interest in, their characters, but somehow it seemed especially flagrant in Glen Morgan's 2006 remake of the classic 1974 proto-slasher Black Christmas. Maybe it's the fact that Bob Clark's original film actually goes out of its way to give its endangered sorority girls some real personality (Barb Coard! Barb Coard!) that made these mill-grist ciphers seem especially vacant? Whatever the case, it just became a game of Let's See Which One Will Get Her Eyeballs Plucked Out Next, and not much more. At least I liked a few of these actresses - Ramona Flowers! Dawn Summers! Gretchen Weiners! - enough to keep watching. And I did appreciate its dedication to its own gruesomeness - especially on a night when I also attempted to watch the lifeless bloodless PG-13 remake of The Fog and had to shut it off halfway through lest my very soul shrivel into nothingness - but you wanna feel something, seeing a girl get her eyes yanked outta their sockets, ya know? Something's gone wrong when that can merely merit a momentary grimace that quickly lapses into an inattentive shrug.
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2 comments:

Jasper said...

It had skin cookies, so there's that.

Jason Adams said...

Thank you for bringing that up, Jasper! I should have mentioned that. In an odd turn of events I loved all of the flashbacks to the perv's backstory - the addition of backstory is what I usually find most annoying about these remakes. But the camp they injected therein (everything having to do with the killer's mother) was a hoot. Unfortunately that was at most 5-10 minutes of movie though.