Black Christmas 2019

I had a day to gather my thoughts and I think I need to watch this again. This movie is a hot mess. The script seems so bare bones, but with so many opportunities to be biased at the same time, combined with terrible actors.

The first death, Lindsey, is shown as the girl walking home alone at night, but when she is attacked she barely tries to escape, instead deciding to stick around instead of calling security or running away. Boom, dead.

Riley, an abuse victim, is studying at a university with a long history steeped in the appreciation of men. She was sexually assaulted 3 years prior by the former head of another frat house who drugged and raped her. Unfortunately she never sought therapy, and all her sorority sisters either don't acknowledge it or tell her in so many words to get over it, coercing her into joining their shit dance number as their 4th with the knowledge that her abuser is there.

Riley seems to have some history with her teacher who singles her out during class, blaming her for a petition to fire him. In reality it is her social justice warrior friend begging students to sign the petition. She is loud and proud, however, stomps all over riley throughout the movie. She's a terrible friend.

In the sorority house, there is evidence of strange happenings but no one except Riley acknowledges it. For almost the entire movie the cat is missing. Girls are bring attacked and going missing but no one takes it seriously. Riley goes to campus security and is almost comically shut down. The guard even tries to say, boys will be boys. We get it, the movie is feminist, but just stop shoving it down our throats.

The bodies of the deceased are hidden around the school but no one even finds them until the climax. The actual twist of the movie was pretty good. I really liked it, but the getting there was so terrible and garbage. Even the camera work is shit and I don't get whats going on with the sound and echoing.

There's one particular scene where the girl with the cat gets choked and when the bad guy pulls the christmas lights around her neck, the camera abruptly zooms in like it was done post production. The same effect youtubers use for comedy.

There's a bust of the school founder and when put in a specific frat house, it activates the spirit of the founder, who encourages men to behave like alphas. Their hazing ritual includes reciting a Latin inscription and smearing a black liquid on the pledge which possesses him with the spirit of the founder. Riley has an opportunity to destroy it but just chooses to do everything so slowly.

I feel like this movie is terrible but I'm not sure.

This one was the most cringeworthy, clichéd, boring and laughable waste of "film" that has ever been made. I'm talking about the PG-13 "remake" of Black Christmas. For those of you who have not seen the 1974 film, I highly recommend that movie. The Cinematography is fantastic, it has a very original plot, the characters all have personalities, and the suspense is top notch. Exactly the opposite of this horrendous 2019 “remake”. Usually, I do these spoiler free but since this isn't even a movie and the trailer did all the spoiling for you anyway, I'm giving you a spoiler warning because for the first time, I really don't care.

First of all, this movie isn't Black Christmas. I know it's CALLED Black Christmas, but it's NOT Black Christmas. I mean the main plot of the 1974 movie is about a series of obscene phone calls. It's wrapped in mystery and the plot relies heavily on tracing the call and finding the killer. This one is about…. how all men are rapists. Yeah, you heard me right. ALL men are rapists. I know you probably think I'm exaggerating, but get this. There is one guy who has been on their side the whole time (he's one of their boyfriends) and he brings up the point that "not all men are like that. please stop lumping me in with them," which is a fair assessment since he’s been helping them the entire time! But he can’t get a word out because one of the girls starts SCREAMING OVER HIM "YOU DID NOT JUST 'NOT ALL MEN?!' HER" over and over again so no one can hear his valid point, and then his girlfriend kicks him out of the house for literally no reason. They REFUSE to hear it. He comes back in like 5 minutes and then starts randomly screaming " I'M THE MAN, I WILL PROTECT YOU" and then gets killed………. so the one male in the movie who actually was on their side also becomes a dick for NO reason just to prove the point that ALL men are trash. The fact that it even dons the name "Black Christmas" is unbearably repugnant.

Okay, before I forge forward, I need to state that i am all for movies taking a political and social stance. Sometimes people need to get their aggression out by writing and I'm totally gung ho about that. I’m also a firm believer in egalitarianism and hold firm that every single person on this earth should be treated with just as much respect as the next regardless of race, religion, class or gender…This is not a one-sided opinion. When you spew hate at ALL of one of those things, you are being racist, sexist, prejudiced, classist, ageist or whichever one fits the bill. So when people try to plug hate into the “message” of your film, it can be and is HARMFUL to said group..and that's where a movie can go from being a film, to a trainwreck. And boy did this train wreck right out of the freakin gates here.

Okay, so what the hell is the plot here? Imogen Poots' character was sexually assaulted by a frat boy and NO MAN believes her. Okay, at this point they still could have saved themselves. I understand the subtle point of feeling like no one believes you or wants to listen to your opinion, so i can be on board with that. This could have been the emotional journey she takes to overcome such a horrible encounter and get her revenge against him. Ooh that movie sounds great! But unfortunately we do not get I Spit On Your Grave here…that’s an actual movie! So she writes a song about it to the tune of Up On the Housetop, the leftover sorority who didn't go on winter break sings it at the frat house during their Christmas party, and then the entire campus turns against the frathouse IMMEDIATELY (even though it was about ONE guy), which causes the fratboys to get pissed off and use BLACK MAGIC to turn all the men into misogynistic scumbags…. yeah. That got out of control pretty quickly…. Now you might be saying, OH, THEY'RE JUST UNDER A SPELL AND THEY WILL GO BACK TO BEING NORMAL ONCE THE SPELL IS BROKEN. Nope. Apparently, they were like this before and will be like this afterwards anyway. So there was really no point for this insane "plot twist" out of nowhere. And with such amazing writing, how can you go wrong? We get lines like "you're all evil!"-- "No, we're men"..... Or how about “Boys will be….well, you know.”(REALLY??) and my favorite... "bow down to us or we hurt you, you decide. Your body, your choice….". UGH CRINGE!!!!

We also have a side plot in which one of the girls is protesting to have a professor FIRED because the curriculum for his class consists of all white writers. She doesn't discuss it with him or start a petition to change the curriculum, NO, she wants to take away his job. It's not about change or making things better. It's a pathetic woman who has no clue how to function in the real world. In fact, at first, I thought she was going to be a bad guy, who ended up learning her lesson, but instead the main character apologized FOR NOT LISTENING TO HER!!!! The writers thought they were acting "woke" but in reality they were putting a very dangerous message out there that literally ALL MEN are terrible people who will do terrible things to all women. Way to instill fear into humanity, people!

But it's not just the horrendous plot or the harmful ideals this movie is putting out into the world. It's everything. The acting, INCLUDING CARY ELWES (WHO I LOVE), vomits one of the hammiest villain performances I've ever seen! HE LITERALLY SAYS THE WORDS "we discovered there was magic in it" as a line of exposition and reveals their evil plot with the most over the top "acting" I've heard in a long time. The girls have ZERO PERSONALITY except the main character, who also delivers the stupidest exposition ever in the lamest "a-ha" moment put to film and the psycho friend who is just yet another cliche in this film as the crazy feminist who will stop at nothing to destroy every straight, white male, even if they have done nothing wrong. If I didn't know any better, I'd say this was written and directed by the far right as a means to troll liberals by parodying the slasher genre with this over the top take...but It's not! THIS IS MEANT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY!!! Never have I been so ashamed to be a fucking liberal until this garbage was released onto the earth as if this is who we are. Well, let me tell you, this is NOT how most of us are. MOST of us DO NOT want to police your language, tear you apart because of your gender, race, class or religion. That’s a job for the EXTREMISTS on both sides...I’m sick of people lumping me in with these psychopaths just because I am a liberal.. It is so goddamned disgusting!!! I am proud to be INCLUSIVE and EQUAL as we should be. I can't STAND that i have to say this and make any sort of political statement on social media. IN A MOVIE REVIEW NO LESS. So I will move on...

I find it impossible to talk about the bland Cinematography, the boring score and the fact that THIS ISN'T A HORROR MOVIE. Not even slightly - if anything it’s like a supernatural teen drama. At least if it was a decent slasher film, you could say SOMETHING good about it, but no… instead, It's a melodramatic after school special for women who think the world would be better without men. If any of the women in this film had a son, they would throw it off a cliff or throw it in a dumpster. Look… There are some terrible men out there. And I mean some REALLY terrible men. THEY are a disgrace… BUT there are also some terrible women. I mean, we live in a world where Ann Coulter exists. 'nuff said. I've met racists, homophobes, misogynists and classists and they are not just of one gender. In trying to make their point they come off as uneducated and sexist, the thing they were trying to actually warn people about. I'm serious. If you couldn’t tell, I hated this movie and I'm glad it's making no money at the box office. There were 3 people in my theatre in opening weekend and that couldn’t make me any happier. It doesn't qualify as a film. You want more reasons not to go? The movie would have been exactly the same had the rest of the women in this film (besides the main 2 characters) not been there. No one else contributes to the plot, except the girl who disappears early on and tries to convince the other two girls that "women belong in their rightful place, subservient to men…" wow…. just wow… good job movie. You get an A+ for subtelty.

I have nothing good to say about this… i mean i DID laugh at this movie. Act III is so hilariously stupid when they start introducing magic into the story and you find out that the killer is the entire male gender. And then the stupidly uninspired final battle is something out of a parody… this whole MOVIE is something out of a parody. The women rise up and fight. And that’s great if it was a better film that actually took a legitimate stance. Look, if this movie went against all BAD people then I’d be all for it. Inglourious Basterds was a revenge movie against the nazis. So when they annihilate all the nazis, we are happy! Django Unchained was a revenge movie against white slave owners, so when Django gets his revenge, we CHEER HIM ON! But THIS movie is a stance against ALL men. Not just the evil ones. They specifically made a point to say that even the good men are bad with the scene I talked about earlier.

As for the PG-13 of it all, you can tell that lines of dialogue were chopped off this like they were trying to put an R rated movie on television. All of the violence cuts away out of nowhere. You can tell that it was edited this way in post AFTER an R-rated version was supposed to release. It’s quite obvious, especially when a woman says “Suck...my…..” and then the scene cuts away as if they wanted to sell this movie to the youngest audience possible. But it’s not just the cuts...the filmmakers in question seem to have no clue how to work with audio. We cut away from scenes of ths women talking, to somewhere else where they should be inaudible, yet we still hear them talking clear as day as if the scene never changed. The sound mixer seems to have quit 10 minutes into the movie! The snow is fake as fake can be. It’s a CHRISTMAS movie and they used obvious fake snow. I mean...COME ON! Everything about this movie is wrong. At least films like The Room and Fateful Findings are hysterical because they are poorly made, but this one is just purposefully made with hate. Hatred towards a gender that isn't theirs. I normally wouldn't care about a movie like this, but it was using the name and claiming to be a remake of a classic horror film, just to brainwash young girls into thinking that every man they will ever meet will hurt them. Every. Single. One. I have no interest in backing that sexist message. See this movie for free if you want to scream at the screen or laugh your ass off at a writer/director who have no film knowledge. Do not give your money to support these morons.