Black Christmas: Critic Reviews

It's old-school stupid.

Glen Morgan's disastrous remake smothers terror beneath a blanket of unnecessary information, revealing too much and teasing too little.

One for real horror-buffs only.

The remake neither pays perceptive tribute to the original nor updates it in anything but hackneyed form.

Silly, obvious, clumsy, and just gruesome enough to keep jaded genre fans from angrily throwing popcorn at the screen.

Black Christmas lacks the timing and visual wit to make its splattery EC Comics gags either genuinely scary or funny.

Where the first film was a seminal forerunner of early stalker classics like Halloween, this version feels as stale as old gingerbread.

It also exchanges the police subplot that gave the earlier film its steady pace for a lot of pointless backstory about the mother-fixated stalker.

This movie serves up a bland, interchangeable mix of victims. Because the sitting ducks don't display any personality, it's hard to get worked up about their fate.

Even by the notoriously low standards of sadistic slasher pics, this remake is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, relying heavily on such gruesome spectacles as the baking (and consuming) of Christmas cookies made from chunks of human flesh.

Creativity is a stranger to this sick excuse for entertainment, which pounds a ridiculous back story into a butchered rehash that includes incest, cannibalism, eyeball gouging and impossibly dumb plot contrivances.

Lazy, perfunctory and free of tension, the new version will satisfy neither the admirers of the original nor anyone looking for a gory respite from seasonal good cheer.

As yuletide counterprogramming goes, here's one smelly lump of coal.

Like an ugly tie or a pair of slipper socks, Black Christmas is destined to be forgotten the instant it's unwrapped, gathering dust until the season rolls around again.

All setup and no payoff makes this a dull film.

Neither horror, nor comedy. It's barely even a movie...

Black Christmas works best as a campy deconstruction of the genre than it does as a horror film.

this reimagining showcases with encyclopaedic relish just about every slasher convention and variation that has evolved over the last thirty or so years since the original Black Christmas screened.

Shockingly awful in every way imaginable...