Christmas,
that most joyous holiday of giving and good will toward all, and horror should
be like oil and water, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy a bloody good scare
during this “most wonderful time of the
year.” Since the dawn of slasher flicks
in the early 1970’s, films like ‘Silent Night, Bloody Night’ (1972) and ‘Black
Christmas’ (1974 original) have shown that Christmas is as good a time as any
to get a slay ride, I mean, die in gruesome fashion.
So
when the second remake/reboot of the sorority house slasher ‘Black Christmas’ was
released last weekend (the first was in 2006) appropriately on Friday the 13th, I thought “why not?” BC2019 - like the first remake - stays true
to the setting of the original, in which a close-knit group of sorority sisters at a fictitious
college campus (Hawthorne College in this case, as if it matters) is terrorized and murdered one-by-one. However, director Sophia
Takal’s ambitions are much higher than simply making another disposable and
mindless slasher movie, oh no.
So she also made it the latest “I am woman, hear me roar” declaration of female
empowerment in our “Me Too” era. Unfortunately, it doesn't work and seems out of place in a genre viewers never took seriously.
While
I found the movie’s misandrist tone and political/social agenda off-putting, BC2019
also had little merit as a popcorn slasher movie relying on cheap thrills. It’s neither scary nor offered any fresh
twist to the two films before it, I was able to deduce the movie’s main villain roughly
30 minutes into the film, and the protagonists are so unrelatable,
unsympathetic and unlikeable that it’s difficult for me to root for their survival. Does that make me a bad person?
Grade: D
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