Black Christmas | Blogmas Day 15

Hey Guys x

It's Blogmas day 15!

It was my birthday on Thursday, so I decided to go to the cinema on Saturday to celebrate. Not only is this one of the newest films out, but it's also a horror film, which of course, I love. So this was my choice, and I really hoped it would be good. Even when there was no one else in the cinema, even when the person we bought the tickets from said that he didn't even know it was out, I still had high hopes.

Students are leaving Hawthorne College for the holidays. But the girls staying behind soon find themselves in danger when they start getting picked off one-by-one by a mysterious stalker.

I seriously think this film, for me, is a contender for 'worst film of the year'. And I say that knowing that I've seen some bad films this year! And I have to warn that there will be a few spoilers in this review, but hopefully by the time you read this you won't want to see it anyway - there will also be mentions of rape, as this is important to the plot of the film, so don't read on if that triggers you.

What sucks is that it had a great opening. I think I probably found it scarier because the cinema was empty and we went in the evening, but still, it was a really good opening, and gave the impression that the film would be a lot better than it was.

There is a really slow start, monumentally slow. It's the kind of film where nothing happens until everything happens, and even then, everything happens slowly. The worst part of this is that the film is way too short to take such a long time to get to the point.

All the men in the film aside from Landon (Caleb Eberhardt) look so alike that it was really hard making sense of who was who. And given that some of the boys were very important to the film, it would have made more sense to give them personalities outside of 'rapist', 'rapist's friend', 'love interest', 'guy who seems like a good guy but is also okay with the rapist's actions' and 'evil British professor'. Seriously, the guys in this film were treated and written really badly.
To be honest, this film does nothing for either the men or the women. Neither of them come off as great when all they're doing is making the other gender look bad.

This film tries to be important in terms of feminism, but it does nothing for feminism, and if more people were to see it, I actually feel like it would set the movement back. The thing is, you don't need to be a hardcore feminist to know that rape is wrong.
And on top of that, rape can be wrong without making the whole film about women hating men. In addition to that, it seemed like the writer/director wanted to make the divide between men and women even greater by making all the men (other than the love interest) think that the rape was either okay, or it never happened. And the one guy who says that 'not all men' feel that way is quickly dismissed. What is this film trying to say about men and women?

One of the things that I was interested in was the deaths, as this was clearly set up as a slasher movie. But the thing is, the death scenes happen too quickly, with no build-up and hardly any tension. Not only did some of them seem nonsensical, but just unnecessary and unrealistic.

I haven't mentioned yet that this is a remake of a remake. I haven't seen the 70s original, but I have seen the 2006 version and I actually thought it was okay. I assumed that this one would be better than 2006, and would also be more modern, which would make for a more interesting premise. However, they remade this film for the second time, just to make it worse. What was the point? Why bother remaking something if you're not making it better?

Overall, one of my notes while watching the film (which I could make due to the emptiness of the cinema) was 'Premise is stupid. Reveal is stupid. Stupid', and I feel like that completely sums up my thoughts about this film.

Because it's new, I'm giving it a proper rating as well as a Christmas rating.

2/10 Stars

3/10 - Originality
2/10 - Christmas Spirit (There was absolutely no reason for it to be set at Christmas time)
4/10 - Christmas Music (For the one song that wasn't even really about Christmas)

It's 10 days until Christmas!

Come back tomorrow for Blogmas Day 16!