As the residents of sorority house Pi Kappa Sigma prepare for the festive season, a stranger begins a series of obscene phone calls with dubious intentions...
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Reviews
Gimly
5
By Gimly
Obviously doesn't hold a candle to the original, and some of the acting is pretty genuinely bad, but it knows what it wants and it goes for it. What it wants, here being: To be hamstrung to keeping in step with its predecessor but also being wildly different enough to piss anyone off who was expecting an actual "remake".
_Final rating:★★½ - Had a lot that appealed to me, didn’t quite work as a whole._
Wuchak
7
By Wuchak
_**More entertaining than the original, but marred by a ridiculous tacked-on ending**_
During Christmas Eve at a sorority house in New Hampshire, the students & housemother are harassed by a killer who likes to gouge out eyes. For some strange reason the mad slasher knows all the inner rooms and crawlspaces of the house (attic, basement, etc.).
“Black Christmas” (2006) is the first of two remakes of the original film from 1974 (the other being released in 2019 and is a remake-in-name-only). This version is more colorful and entertaining than the original, but also more twisted, highlighted by a superior cast of women, including Michelle Trachtenberg (Melissa), Lacey Chabert (Dana), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Heather), Jessica Harmon (Megan), Leela Savasta (Clair) and Katie Cassidy (Kelli).
Written & directed by Glen Morgan, the film is inventive with its backstory and the way the killer haunts the innards of the house, spying & preying on the girls. This is genuinely compelling stuff. Unfortunately, the film's tone and ending were marred by the interference of studio exec Bob Weinstein, who wanted a more over-the-top horror flick with cartoonish embellishments. The preposterous ending in particular seems tacked-on and (almost) ruins the movie. Thankfully some versions of the film are closer to Morgan’s original vision, at least as far as the climax goes.
The movie runs about 1 hour, 30 minutes, with a couple other versions longer or shorter by 4-5 minutes (depending on which ending was used). The film was shot in Vancouver, British Columbia, with the hospital scenes done at Riverview Hospital in nearby Coquitlam.
GRADE: B
