Black Christmas (2006)

Glen Morgan's Black Christmas arrives in 2006 as a loose remake of the 1974 slasher, and it carries that lineage without much interest in honoring it. The film deposits a snowstorm, a sorority house, and a pair of killers: a man who escaped an asylum and his disfigured sister. Dimension released it on Christmas Day, which offended various religious groups and presumably delighted the marketing department. The Weinsteins meddled with the ending until it grew louder and bloodier. The result is a brisk, ugly exercise that made $21.5 million against a $9 million budget and holds a 13 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

A female-heavy cast suggests, at a glance, something like a statement. It is not one. The sorority sisters are largely white, with a couple of performers of color shuffled into supporting corners and no representative design behind it. The film gestures toward female friendship, then spends its running time stalking, stripping, and butchering the women, eye-gouging included. The exploitation is the point. Any reading of empowerment here requires an enthusiasm the text does not reward.

The killers arrive with a lurid backstory of incest and maternal cruelty, borrowed from the crimes of Edmund Kemper. Mental illness functions as shorthand for monstrosity, and the film never offers a counterweight. There is no engagement with race, no class anger, no environmental gesture beyond a convenient blizzard, no body politics, no addressee behind the carnage. The film is a straightforward gore exercise, competently assembled and culturally inert, a holiday curio that asks nothing of its audience beyond a tolerance for screams and the patience to sit through the credits waiting for a lesson that never comes, because the filmmakers never intended to teach anything at all. What remains is a body count and a sprig of tinsel, and the tinsel is doing most of the thematic work."

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