BLACK CHRISTMAS (2019) MOVIE NEWS & REVIEW

BLACK CHRISTMAS (2019) movie

Genre           |   Horror Thriller

Classification   |   MA 15+

Running time   |   98 minutes

Released         |   12 December 2019

cast

Cary Elwes ... Professor Gelson
Imogen Poots ... Riley Stone
Brittany O'Grady ... Jesse
Aleyse Shannon ... Kris
Lily Donoghue ... Marty

director

Sophia Takal

writer

Sophia Takal
April Wolfe ... (written by)

cinematographer

Mark Schwartzbard ​

music

Brooke Blair
​Will Blair

film editor

​​Jeff Betancourt

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box office result

Worldwide             $​TBA

Australia                 $​TBA

North America       $TBA

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movie minutiae

​This will be the second remake of the Bob Clark 1974 film.

Production began in New Zealand on June 23, 2019. Principal photography occurred around Dunedin and Oamaru, with the University of Otago providing the setting. Filming concluded on July 31, 2019.

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related movies

BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)

BLACK CHRISTMAS (2019) MOVIE IMAGES

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Posters

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Posters

BLACK CHRISTMAS (2019) STORY SYNOPSIS

​Hawthorne College is quieting down for the holidays. But as Riley Stone (Imogen Poots, Green Room) and her Mu Kappa Epsilon sisters—athlete Marty (Lily Donoghue, The CW’s Jane the Virgin), rebel Kris (Aleyse Shannon, The CW’s Charmed), and foodie Jesse (Brittany O’Grady, Fox’s Star)—prepare to deck the halls with a series of seasonal parties, a black-masked stalker begins killing sorority women one by one. 

As the body count rises, Riley and her squad start to question whether they can trust any man, including Marty’s beta-male boyfriend, Nate (Simon Mead, Same But Different: A True New Zealand Love Story), Riley’s new crush Landon (Caleb Eberhardt, Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle) or even esteemed classics instructor Professor Gelson (Cary Elwes). 

Whoever the killer is, he’s about to discover that this generation’s young women aren’t about to be anybody’s victims.

BLACK CHRISTMAS (2019) MOVIE REVIEW

Reviewed by Mark Geraghty   |   Review date 12 December 2019

​​Pop Movee Rating

(For the purpose of concentrating on comparisons between the 1974 film and the 2019 version, this review will not reference the 2006 gorefest version written & directed by THE X FILES alumni Glen Morgan.)

It’s difficult to recollect a film in recent memory that has tried as hard as BLACK CHRISTMAS to use gender politics as a thematic framework to underpin its cinematic aspirations. Unfortunately, the film’s theme is so on-the-nose that the “Horror” falls flat amid the story’s never-ending attempts to force feed the audience a simplistic, undergraduate fascination pour la politique de genre.

BLACK CHRISTMAS is, supposedly, a remake of the 1974 Bob Clark film. Unfortunately, this 2019 version has none of that film’s innovation in terms of what that film did to change the way moviegoers watched Horror films.

While John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN (1978) is regarded as the first “Slasher” Horror film to achieve mainstream recognition, emphasising the killer’s point-of-view, Bob Clark’s 1974 film used the “Killer” perspective framing device well before Carpenter, making the 1974 version of BLACK CHRISTMAS memorable for creating a lasting impact on the Horror genre.

Unlike the original, the 2019 version is memorable for reasons other than being a Horror film.

The story starts well enough, but the longer the film goes, the sillier things become. 

BLACK CHRISTMAS opens with an extended prologue, introducing a group of characters that, quite bizarrely, have nothing to do with the story until almost the end of the film. A group of female sorority students are celebrating their Christmas break-up, but one of the girls decides to head off on her own, instead of catching up for drinks. A concerned “sister” calls to make sure she’s okay. She’s reassured when the other girl picks up, but, soon after the call, the young girl who’s opted to skip the party seems as though she’s being stalked by a male stranger. She begins receiving strange text messages on her phone. Noticing that the man behind her is texting on his phone, she turns to confront him.

But, right at that moment, the would-be assailant veers across the road and heads in a different direction. 

Believing she’s averted danger, she turns and comes face-to-face with a hooded figure.

At this point in the film it becomes clear that just about every male seen in BLACK CHRISTMAS is representative of just about everything that’s wrong with twenty-first century, western society.

In a sequence that is reminiscent of the now-famous Drew Barrymore opening sequence from Wes Craven’s SCREAM (1996), the young girl is chased up and down the street by the masked figure. While it’s never made clear, the unknown figure is so large and physically malevolent that it could only be a male underneath the mask and hood.

Leaning on the obvious genre trope of the defenseless, unwitting female, everyone in the audience knows, it’s only a matter of time before she’s brutally murdered. In this instance, the murderer takes a conveniently located stalactite and plunges it repeatedly into the victim.

Besides the parallel with SCREAM, the opening does little to suggest BLACK CHRISTMAS is going to be anything more than a by-the-numbers Horror flick. The opening’s most distinguishing feature is the complete absence of humans available to help a young woman in distress in what would appear to be an otherwise engaged community.

Another trope that prompts more questions about the story’s logic...

Why are there so many Christmas lights and decorations on display if there’s nobody out and about having a look at them? 

Why is there an abundance of people on the same street the next morning, wondering what happened to their Christmas lights and decorations the night before?

Why do Horror films like this always treat their audience with contempt by falling back on tropes that are as predictable as they are illogical?

These were just a few of the questions that came to mind throughout the opening sequence, but, for other reasons, quickly became irrelevant once the film proper commences…

For the next eighty minutes the Horror is pushed to the edge of the frame as the audience is subjected to Gender Politics 101.

Gender politics is not the everyday fare of movie reviewers and, far be it that this review to disparage the study of the topic through genre cinema, but, for the sake of good Horror, as far as BLACK CHRISTMAS is concerned, there was no need to lay it on so thick and heavy.

Sophia Takal, who also directed the film, and April Wolfe wrote the screenplay for this version of BLACK WIDOW and it’s like they’ve absorbed all the rage against the treatment of women in forty-five years of Slasher films, between Bob Clark’s work and theirs, and decided that they would draw one almighty line in the sand in an attempt to reverse engineer the film’s expected outcome.

With great certainty, two things you will never hear in the same sentence are “BLACK CHRISTMAS” and “subtlety”. In Takal and Wolfe’s screenplay, everything is written in flashing, neon pink.

The story’s central character is Riley Stone, played by Imogen Poots, a student at Hawthorne College; an institution steeped in all the wrong kinds of academic traditions. Riley is a wounded soul, having endured a sexual assault the year before at the hands of Phil (Ben Black), who, not surprisingly, is a massive douchebag. Riley was drugged, raped and then publicly shamed for daring to suggest that Phil could be capable of such a crime.

Riley emerges from her crippling fear when she is forced to stand in for one her sorority sisters in a musical number designed to humiliate Phil and his friends. The musical number is a hit with the girls, but the boys aren’t quite as enthusiastic about being publicly called out for their misogynistic, sexist, illegal behaviour.

If Takal has used Riley’s reemergence into society as the starting point for a genuine mystery thriller with a “Slasher” killer, then BLACK CHRISTMAS might have had half a chance at being a reasonably sound “Whodunnit”; modernising the 1974 film with a story that highlights the challenge of violence against women in a way that shows an assaulted person doesn’t need to remain a victim their whole life.

Instead, Takal and Wolfe turn BLACK WINDOW into a political melodrama more concerned with the character’s personal causes (mostly to do with men holding all kinds of power positions) in preference to satisfying the audience (who have probably chosen to see BLACK CHRISTMAS because it’s meant to be a Horror film).

Takal’s limited directing experience also presents some challenges for the staging of the film’s multiple murders. She and Editor Jeff Betancourt struggle to build tension within their kill sequences. Unlike the 1974 film, the murders are not shown from the killer’s point-of-view, opting instead for a camera-eye view, tracking behind or to the side of the victim and, at the last moment, attempting to get an audience reaction with an all-too-obvious jump scare of the masked killer.

What’s surprising about BLACK CHRISTMAS is this latest version has been produced by Blumhouse Productions. Jason Blum is a shrewd Producer and his company has learned how to put together decent, low-budget Horror films that keep the audience engaged and, most of the time, on the edge of their seat. This time around, the filmmaker’s desire to indulge their politics detracts from the viewing experience. It’s unusual to see this happen in a film produced under the Blum banner..

In addition to the film’s thematic overreach, the screenplay itself is mediocre. As mentioned, the story starts off okay, but the second half degenerates into a mess that is unnecessarily complex and convoluted by the reintroduction of tertiary characters who add no value to the story. It’s a strange approach and seems to have been used as a means to ramp-up the “Girl Power” action for the film’s preposterous finale.

Horror fans will be frustrated by BLACK CHRISTMAS.

Lurking between the gender politics and indifferent staging is a decent story with potential to do more. In the hands of a filmmaker who had a better understanding of the Horror genre, this new version of BLACK CHRISTMAS could have been a very solid reboot. The 1974 film brought something to the genre that has become part of its tropes. Unfortunately, the 2019 version is mired in anything but the tropes.

There’s enough fear associated with all types of politics already, including the gender kind. Unfortunately, in the case of BLACK CHRISTMAS, the political fear-mongering gets in the way of a good scare!

BLACK CHRISTMAS MOVIE (2019) USEFUL LINKS

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Black Christmas (2019 film) - Wikipedia
Black Christmas (2019) - IMDb
Black Christmas (2019) - Rotten Tomatoes
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