Black Christmas

The original Black Christmas and the remake are like the first two Legend of Zelda games. Hear me out. The first Zelda game and the 1974 Black Christmas movie are both foundational in their genres; by being so early, they avoided many of the tropes that the genre would spawn, and created many others in the process. Due to being so old, they're also paced differently, at a more deliberate pace than the constant flow of action and narrative that would be seen in descendants. The second Zelda and the remake of BC use the original as a skeleton on which to hang a lot of experimental and unusual new ideas. Some work, some don't. Oddly, because it strays too far from the original, it has a bad reputation, even though if it had hewn too close, it would've been seen as derivative, The similarities end here, though. BC2019 and Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past have nothing in common. Black Christmas 2006 is an odd duck. It uses the template of "crazed murder stalks girls in a sorority house and makes creepy phone calls to them" as the basis on which to build out a LOT more stuff. The original had a low body count, incorporated a missing-person search element, used the whole college campus, had some feminist/pro-choice messaging mixed in, and gave NO backstory to its killer, Billy. You knew his name because he said it on the phone; bar that, his backstory, his identity, his appearance, all of it was left to the imagination. BC06 takes the sorority house and killer part of it and makes a hard left. This is a bottle movie (except for the last 5-10 minutes). Billy has an EXTENSIVE backstory, and it is crazy af; born with a disease that made his skin yellow, locked in an attic by a mom who hated him, mom murdered dad, mom seduces him and there's a baby from it ... it's a LOT, man. It's a lot. The body count is amped up a lot. There's nothing remotely resembling a social/political message. The original had a who-dun-it angle, whereas this, you know, but it still tries to swerve you on occasion. The original was a rough sketch of a slasher; this one is all-in on that element. And these changes work about as well as the original, which is to say, average at best. The original had an almost glacial pace; this one is far more white-knuckle, but it's undone by some meandering and bad editing that messes with your sense of where people are in the house. The "all killer no filler" style gets you to the horror faster and keeps it more consistent, but the movie has no substance beyond that, and is oddly afraid to use the R rating its earned (several people are off-screened to death, and rarely do you see the fatal moment of impact). In exchange for a ham-handed but poignant message on female empowerment but having a weak supporting cast, you get an ensemble cast that is mostly comprised of "catty bitch". And instead of the mysterious unknowns around the original Billy, you get so much outlandish backstory; it's like one of those improv games where you have to keep saying "and" to pile on more conditions. The exchanges keep this movie just as off-balance as the first one. I was more engrossed in this, but only because it was teetering between bonkers and bloodthirsty. What you gain in adrenaline, you lose in suspense. What you gain in overt horror, you lose in mystery and atmosphere. And the two girls who feel most like a Final Girl are killed off, leaving you with a Final Girl that feels out-of-place, and a poor analog for the original's Olivia Hussey. Pretty much, if you wanted the original to be modernized and updated to be more of an actual slasher than a proto-slasher, this'll do it, but it'll come at a cost.