Bob Clark's horror Christmas movie Black Christmas (1974) is undoubtedly one of the greatest horror movies of its kind. It has a tremendous cast, a foreboding atmosphere consumed by Christmas, one of the greatest underrated slasher villains, extraordinary camerawork, a spine-chilling score and sound design, fun vulgar humor to balance out the terror, intelligent and risqué commentary that flows naturally with the story, and ahead of its time with the use of slasher tropes. It's a horror film that I believe is an underrated masterpiece. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, since I already reviewed the original classic, I think this would be the perfect time to review the 2006 remake.
The film's director, Glen Morgan, who was a fan of the original, wanted to genuinely direct a remake that was different but still paid loving tribute. Morgan received Bob Clark's blessings to direct the film and hired him as one of the film's executive producers. Set to make a film with a more serious tone, the film's distributors had other ideas. To bank on the success of gory horror films like Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005), the executives of Dimension Films, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, demanded that the film be a splatter film, causing numerous changes to the script. To his displeasure, the gritty suspense slasher film that Morgan had initially envisioned had turned into an over-the-top exploitation flick.
But the Weinsteins' interference strangely didn't stop there. After production finished in Vancouver, the Weinstein shot scenes behind Morgan's back. Rather than shooting scenes that would be featured in the film, they were scenes designed for the trailer. Not a teaser trailer where footage specifically made for it is common practice, the film's theatrical trailers and TV spots were designed to make people think that what they're seeing are clips from the movie edited together to build hype and interest. Scenes such as the woman getting pulled into a thrasher with Christmas lights, the discovery of a frozen woman's face, and the reveal of the killer on top of a ceiling beneath his prey were all specifically made for the promos and mainly with actresses who are not even in the movie (including the studio's new star Jillian Murray).
The movie was released on Christmas Day; however, it wasn't because of the holiday. Considering how Weinstein Company horror films like Scream (1996) and Wolf Creek (2005) were financial successes around the holidays, the Weinstein's decided to do the same, only to have been met with more than just a decline at the box office as the weeks went by. The decision to release a holiday slasher film on Christmas stirred some controversy, with several Christian groups finding the idea of it "offensive, ill-founded and insensitive." Unhappy with the changes to the film made by the Weinsteins and the film failing critically and financially, it ultimately discouraged Glen Morgan from directing another movie again, who reportedly disowned the film. Though Morgan's film was butchered and has gained a negative reception amongst fans of the original, audiences, and critics, does this film deserve to be hidden in the attic with Billy's corpses?
Based on its premise, I'll give the remake credit for how familiar and different it is to the source material. The film is still about sorority women stalked and killed by a killer named Billy hiding in the attic of the house. But the film gives it a few new angles. Rather than having the story told through a few days, the events all happen in one night, allowing for a more claustrophobic setting with a strong sense of urgency now that the characters are most likely going to die quicker, and that the killer has more of the task to achieve it without raising suspicion. Given that most of the characters die on the final day of the original film, the change in time is all the more sensible.
While the film spends a good portion of the time at the sorority house, most scenes away from the property are flashbacks showing the origins of the film's killer. The mystery surrounding Billy made his character such a horrifying slasher villain in the original. He was always kept in the shadows, his motives for killing the women are unknown, the reasons for the various voices he mimics and things he says to himself are ambiguous, and his backstory is never explicit. The lack of knowledge and imagery of this shadowy killer made the situation all the more intense and eerie because of how unpredictable his actions and behaviors are. To have the remake show Billy's backstory would take away everything that made him a fearful enigma, but given how the film is still a remake and not a sequel, the idea to expand on the villain is a refreshingly new take. As a fan of the original, I appreciate the film taking a risk to show a different perspective that will not please most die-hard fans of the Bob Clark film but give it more of an identity of its own and a purpose for existing. As long as the concept is handled well, and Billy is still as frightening and efficient as a killer, this idea can work well in its own right.
The influence for Billy's backstory came from the real-life serial killer Ed Kemper, who was locked in the basement by his abusive mother, who later took revenge by murdering her. In the film, Billy is born with severe jaundice that causes his skin to turn yellow; he lives with an abusive mother who hates him and a father who loves him. As a child, the mother and another man she has an affair with kill the husband and lock Billy in the attic. The mom gaining a daughter she loves and still treating Billy like a caged animal causes him to snap and murder her and her boyfriend and maim the daughter. Though not needed, the concept of the backstory is still not bad. The story itself is heartbreaking, and many things that connect to Billy murdering people in the present make sense. We know why he mimics voices and the random names he blurts. Billy, in the original, who seemed like a person who escaped an asylum, actually does escape from one in this movie. And the house he goes to is not any house but the place he was born and raised in. Did the attic need to be his room, considering it is the perfect place to hide? No, but it doesn't ruin or take away anything compared to the rest of the problems shown in the backstory.
Billy's yellow skin starts to serve as the reason why his mom hates him so much, and the color stands out when we see him as a baby. But afterward, Billy's unusual appearance becomes less of a visual identity for him. In a film where Christmas lights are shown to be shining bright, the film does not make Billy appear as colorful as he is typically in the shadows (and I also mean before he becomes a killer), where his yellow skin looks like natural lights are reflecting on him. Due to this choice in lighting and seeing less of him as the film progresses, it becomes forgettable that Billy has a strange condition in the first place. In the few scenes where the color becomes noticeable, he looks like a dull, normal version of Roark Junior from Sin City (2005). There's little attention and payoff given to Billy's visual identity, which comes across as more of an afterthought.
The same can be said about Billy getting raped by his mom. Oh yeah, the film goes there, with little reason. In fact, it was one of the scenes that the Weinstein's forcefully threw in, and it comes across that way, even without knowing it. The reason for the mom's horrific act is that her boyfriend is impotent, and Billy is the only other person in the house, which is so vaguely established that it's easy to miss. There's barely a clear mention of her motive, and the scene itself, as she's having sex with the boyfriend, goes by so fast that she sounds more annoyed that he's falling asleep rather than she can't have a kid with him, which makes her actions to rape her kid all the more random. Like his yellow skin, Billy, being the father of the child, his mom gave birth to, does not add anything. She could have had another child with the boyfriend she was happy with, and nothing would ever change, making this idea tastelessly pointless.
As I'm seeing young Billy getting traumatized, the performances ruin any emotional investment. The acting is either incredibly dull or feels phoned in when it has to go bigger. The most significant offenses lean towards the kid playing Billy, where it seems, he was directed to have one expression, and that's to look serious. When receiving a present, there's no joy; when witnessing a murder, he looks unphased; and when climbing up to the attic to escape his murderous mom, he appears casual. The only times he seems genuinely scared is the shot of his eye when he sees the burial of his father and when he reaches the attic, but they're overall tiny moments.
When Billy becomes a killer, nothing stands out, just like the concept of giving him yellow skin. When Billy called the women on the phone in the original, he sounded more than an unhinged maniac for his blabbering and threats; he would sound inhuman with the sounds and voices he mimics, sometimes all at once. Those scenes are seriously some of the scariest phone call scenes ever to be placed on screen for how unnatural they are. In the remake, Billy sounds like some jerk who saw Scream and is trying to mimic it to prank a friend in the most pretentious way possible. And it doesn't help that his dialogue is the typical cliched threats you'd hear in most horror films of that kind. Oh, and remember how I said the incest subplot has little relevance to the story? Well, it is revealed that Billy is a cannibal during the flashback. I could never picture Billy ever being a cannibal, and neither does the film, because after he eats his mom Hannibal Lecter style, he never bites any of his victims or attempts to cook them, making the idea pointless. And in case you haven't guessed, yes, that was another pointless addition made by the Weinsteins to make it shocking.
Out of all the problems with how the film depicts Billy, none of them could measure up to the film's biggest let down. For all the time the film gives to Billy's origins, showing him escape from the asylum, and people talking about him as a legend, it turns out that most of the kills are not from him! Remember when I mentioned his daughter that he maimed, she's the one who kills most of the sorority women in the movie. How does a film spend so much time giving depth to a frightening ambiguous slasher villain and not even use him as the main killer? In hindsight, it makes all this depth feel like a cheap red herring, and it's even worse that little detail is brought to the film's main killer Agnes. The decision of having Agnes as a killer may sound like this was another liberty from the Weinsteins to taint Morgan's vision, but in actuality, Agnes was going to be the main killer in the original script. The reveal of Agnes would be in a twist like in this film, except that Billy would have been dead long before the events in the movie. I know I sound like I've been defending Morgan's original vision throughout the review, but this is one of Morgan's original decisions that is as much of a letdown as the final product. It was the Weinsteins that demanded Billy still be alive, and have two killers, where even that idea is as pointless as their other choices given how very few of the people he kills in the house after his escape.
With Billy's physical appearance coming off as cheap gimmick that is boringly unfrightening, Agnes appearance is ridiculously silly and is still as dull looking like her father. She looks like a rejected henchman with long hair from a late 80s to early 90s action film, except without looking handsome or threatening, and has the face of one of the Wayan's brothers from White Chicks (2004). Not once do I ever buy that the person I'm looking at is the little girl I saw in the flashback all grown-up, for how goofy her make-up, hair, and personality is, and how masculine she looks and sounds. A significant factor to why Agnes is the way she appears, and sounds is because Morgan cast the camera operator Dean Friss who had no acting experience in a feature film, which certainly shows in the finished film. I'm sure Friss is good at his job, but this was awful casting as he doesn't resemble the character in anyway, nor can act it in a plausible way that is remotely scary.
One of the ingredients that made the original such a compelling horror film was its atmosphere. Although the original movie has a body count, there was more emphasis on the build-up to the scares with its festive yet quiet forbidding Christmas aesthetic, imaginative eerie score, and mystery, as opposed to gore and jump scares. As many horror remakes at the time were trying too hard to look dark and gritty to the point where there was hardly anything visually engaging, this film surprisingly does not fall under that trap. When it came to Christmas visuals in the original, it was constant but subtle; this film does the opposite by exploiting it every chance it gets. For the many shadows the film has, the Christmas lights bright up the screen, decorations are everywhere, the soundtrack is booming with Christmas music (particularly from The Nutcracker Suite), the sorority girls have a Christmas party as they open presents by the yule log, Christmas carolers sing in a hospital, and a guy dressed as Santa wanders around a criminally insane asylum (which somehow has a children's ward in the same building), with a patient thinking he's Jesus in one of the cells. The film wants to do everything possible to make itself clear that it is a Christmas movie, which certainly comes through and makes the film visually pleasing with its numerous colors, decorations, and activities.
The film looks a lot like Christmas, but is it scary? Despite its use of dark shadows juxtaposed with the bright colors, some neat Dutch angles, sweeping shots, and P.O.V.s, it looks and feels very overdone. As if the unsubtle Christmas imagery wasn't already a clue, this film is overdramatic in its directing. Everything is shot, framed, and lit to look intense in one of the most bombastic ways possible, where subtly is hardly ever a thing. Even when nothing terrible is happening, the film remains intense for no reason, therefore not allowing the interactions with the characters to feel like down-to-earth moments to provide a sense of absence. I was even more disappointed to discover that the music was composed by Shirley Walker (who helped make Batman: The Animated Series feel like a series of cinematic movies with her music) and that this was her last film project before her passing. Ordinarily, she's a fantastic composer, but in this film, it feels like she was instructed to make loud, scary noises with a hint of her classical talents, which is what it sounds like. And nothing about it sounds innovatively noisy, coming across as generic and obnoxious. When the film does find a way to build on a subtle creepy environment, the music usually gets in the way. In one scene, a snow globe in the attic is playing the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, which starts as chilling, until Walker's loud dramatic plays over it, sucking all the quietly intense anticipation felt.
If the film, with its visuals and sounds, comes across as trying too hard to scare, the murders committed are absurd. For those underwhelmed by the lack of gore in the original film, the remake loves to squeeze out as much of it as possible, and in some of the most bizarre ways you can think of. Eyes balls are gouged out; ice skates cause brains to splatter; there's strangulation with Christmas lights; a Candy Cane is used as a murder weapon; body parts decorate a Christmas tree; and Christmas cookies are made out of human flesh. The terror is replaced with disgust executed in the most outlandish ways possible, feeling less like a Black Christmas movie and more like an unrated Christmas Friday the 13th. That's not completely a bad thing, as some of these kills are inventive with some neat gore effects, if not scary. But the kills do get a bit repetitive, with the number of eyeballs lost and the killer using a bag only to pointlessly use a murder weapon (this confused method of killing is part of Billy's trauma that honestly didn't need an explanation).
If there was one thing about my review of the original film that has changed over time, it is my complaint that half of the supporting characters come across as forgettable. Okay, not many of them are precisely complex, but their colorful yet grounded personalities are more entertaining than I remember. In this film, the victims are as amusing as dirty slush. The sorority girls have no personality whatsoever, for how lifeless they're acting is, and any sign of character traits they have is underwritten. Each of them acts no differently from the other, making their roles interchangeable. Their chemistry is dry, and they have no real sense of emotion. The only sorority girl who stands out is the one with the glasses for how suspiciously weird she appears and yet has little screen time compared to the others. Morgan hired a famous comedian and one of the original actresses from the film, Andrea Martin, as the housemother, who would be perfect as this eccentric character, and even she is as empty of personality as the rest of the cast, as she too is given little to do. These characters are nothing more than livestock, and the film is anxiously willing to kill them off for the sake of carnage. The only thing to appreciate about the performances is that they allegedly did their own stunts.
I wish I could blame the failures of this remake on the Weinsteins, but the truth is the film would have failed just as much if Morgan hadn't had them interfering with his work. Morgan knows how to make the film look visually distinct, but fewer people would remember its existence given the soulless acting, irritating exaggerated dark tone, and disappointing twist. The Weinsteins undoubtedly made the film less scary because of how childishly extreme it is with its zany kills and needless scenes of disgust, which don't at all match with the serious tone Morgan is still trying to achieve. But as bad of a remake as the film is, I can't pretend that some of these outlandish decisions from the Weinsteins don't make the movie a little entertaining and memorable for how intriguingly gruesome they are. In terms of scares, tone, story, and character, as it tries to exceed past a classic, it's as dreadful of a remake as a fan of the original can imagine. Still, the film does have some neat new ideas (even though they fail in practice), is visually intriguing compared to most horror remakes that came out in the mid to late 2000s, and contains some impactful wild deaths and gory imagery, which all make the film stand-out if not necessarily saving it. If you're looking for a mindless slasher film that will constantly fill the screen with Christmas and gore, you'll find it amusing. And knowing about the creative clash between Morgan and the Weinsteins makes the film a more fascinating sleigh-crash.
