Black Christmas (2019)

(On Cable TV, November 2020) Perhaps the best thing a remake can do is to stray from the original, especially if the original has a number of issues. I don’t particularly like the 1974 original Black Christmas, but that has a lot to do with it being a slasher (possibly the first slasher—a dubious Canadian contribution to film history) and me not liking slashers. I haven’t seen the similar 2006 remake, but this 2019 version strikes out on its own, barely holding on to the idea of a sorority under attack from a maniac. This version, written and directed by April Wolf and Sophia Takal, lives and breathes the #MeToo era to an often-caricatural degree, as our heroines are engaged in destroying patriarchy everywhere, from dead men’s busts to the English literature canon. It squarely leads to a feature-film-length denunciation of toxic masculinity that at least takes back some of the misogyny inherent in slasher movies. But the promise of flipping the genre on its head very quickly runs out of steam… if it has any steam to begin with: While Imogen Poots has some innate likability as the lead and Aleyse Shannon looks great, the writing often makes their characters come across as blunt mouthpieces for obvious sentiments. Worse yet is the film’s nosedive into outright supernatural elements in the third act, as if the entire patriarchy wasn’t enough of a formidable antagonist in the first place. Misogynists are clearly the new Nazis, as the film ends with an act of mass murder by the heroines that should at least make anyone pause at the disproportionate retribution of it—but then again those who were killed were eventually going to be nominated as right-wing judges, so the script clearly thinks they deserved it. It’s those excesses and quirks that bother me far more than they should—I should be on the film’s side (and the singing sequence is a great deal of empowering fun), but this Black Christmas overplays its cards in such a way that I’m not left with a lot of sympathy for the characters or the results. How weird is that? On the other hand, well, since I was expecting a straight-up remake of the 1974 original, I was certainly surprised at the twists and turns of the result, even if I can’t quite bring myself to like it.