The Last Horror Movie (2003)
Directed by Julian Richards, Screenplay by James Handel
First of all, just go out and watch this film. Track down a copy of it, put it in your queue or whatever it is you do and then come back here.
Did you do it? Don't lie to me. Go on, now, go watch this film. Come back here when you've seen it.
Did you see it? Come on now, don't be lazy.
And don't be scared.
There.
Didn't you actually start believing that the scene in the diner at the beginning was the movie you were going to be watching?
Wasn't it just a little jarring seeing that movie get hijacked by our narrator?
Now aren't you glad I made you do that?
You're a bit weirded out? Well, I understand that. It is, after all a bit of a serious intellectual exercise.
A seriously sick intellectual exercise.
On the other hand, it was kind of funny, too, right?
But it was the kind of funny that not only made you feel a bit dirty afterward but also called you out on your conflicted feelings about violence and voyeurism. Sure, you laughed a lot, but you were also tense for a lot of that time, right? And you wondered why the killer wasn't always a killer, why you had to see him having tea with his mother and being the cool uncle to his nephews. You thought to yourself that this has to be some kind of joke, this guy had to be either a monster or not but certainly not something in between. Movies aren't supposed to work that way.
You got especially pissed off when you thought about how this film violated so many of those "rules" of screenwriting and storytelling and you didn't know if you should be angry at the film or at those con-artists in the screenwriting workshops and their hack acolytes.
You're thinking again about that scene where he doesn't show you what he's doing off camera and then accuses you of wanting to see what he was doing. You wanted to see it, didn't you? And yet you deplore violence, don't you? But once it was there it was an awful tease for him not to show you what was so clearly audible.
You're a sick and twisted person. And so am I for making you watch it. And yet, because it makes you question yourself it was worth it, wasn't it? Saw will make you feel dirty for watching it, but never call you a sick fuck for having watched it--because they want you to watch the next installment. Not this film. It calls you a sick fuck for watching and wanting to watch the killer in action and wants to cloud your mind. Admit it. You were rooting for him somewhere along the line, there, weren't you?
I mean, not when you thought he was going to kill the kid that turned out to be his nephew. And not when you thought he was going to clock the old lady like the guy in Man Bites Dog does. But somewhere along the line he became your sympathetic protagonist, and yet that is so wrong. Isn't it?
It's rare when an intellectual exercise is so damned entertaining, but this one really is.
The Last Horror Movie is one of the three best films that critique the voyeurism of violence in our culture and in many ways Julian Richards goes even further in directly confronting the audience with their complicity than Mary Harron does in American Psycho (where we can, because of the ambiguity of the source material, pass off the whole thing as a daydream) or even Man Bites Dog, which this film pays homage to on multiple occasions. The conflict here is even more than we get when we watch Dexter, because he, at least as some sort of code that we can understand whereas Max is just killing people and the more tragic the result the better for him.
The thing that Julian Richards does here with Max (Kevin Howarth) is to give us a well-rounded character who is both awful and sympathetic and who is self-aware of the part we play in watching the violence he does. Are we not entertained by all of this? And what if this was actually a snuff film taped over a crappy horror movie? Would we keep watching it? Leave it to a small British film to make us ask the hard questions.
At any rate, this is a well written, excellently directed and performed little film that you should see. It'll make you think hard the next time you sit through a film like House of Wax cheering at people being murdered.
Special Features
1. Deleted Scenes
The Nazi Woman
Max hits a woman over the head with a skillet but is disappointed by how quick it all was so he puts her in a chair and goes into her bedroom where he finds a German military hat. "Isn't it funny what people are into?" He puts it on her head and takes some makeup and draws a little Hitler moustache on her. It's sick, but funny.
The Newsagent
Max goes to a corner store to look at the newspaper headlines for the last victim. Nice juxtaposition of his pride in killing with his slight embarrassment when the clerk asks him if he's reading the paper or if he's going to buy it.
The Art Student
The extended version of the scene with the art student that the assistant (Mark Stevenson) is unable to kill. The assistant first picks up a paint brush. "What are you going to do, paint her to death? Then he tries a plastic bag but it has a hole in the top. The student is terrified by the botched torturing. It's more disturbing in its own way than the slick violence of true torture porn, which gives you no cause to be as disturbed as this.
Grandma
This is an extended version of the scene with Grandma (the Beckettian Rita Davies) where she describes taking on a burglar and pouring a hot cup of tea down the burglar's trousers. She and Max share a laugh when he recalls that the doctors said that the burglar's testicles had been "parboiled."
2. The Last Horror Movie Featurette
A typical behind the scenes independent film look.
3. Cast Auditions
It's fun to see people auditioning for this film. It certainly shows us how good the writing was.
4. Commentary
The commentary makes clear that the nods to Man Bites Dog and other films were intentional and reveal an interesting thought process behind this film. It's not about revelling in the sick and twisted but calling our fascination with that into account.
5. Director's Friend's Short: The Shoe Collector
Directed by Justin Smith, Screenplay by Emyr Glasnant & Justin Smith
First of all, this is one of the best ideas for a special feature ever. Director's Friend's Short is up there with Director's Neighbor's Home Video of Cats Playing with Yarn.
That said, this is an excellent short film about another serial killer who has a collection of shoes. Like some of the best shorts it has a zinger of a twist and it has a gemlike quality of visual control. Most of the film (until the ending) is shot at ground level so it wins a Tarantino Award for consistent shots of people's feet and shoes.
6. Coming Soon
Corn
A horror film about defective genetically modified corn that makes sheep violent. Can Jena Malone defeat the evil corn?
Gypsy 83
Goth kids on a road trip going to New York for "Night of a Thousand Stevies" a Stevie Nicks contest at a Goth club. The very idea of a thousand Stevie Nickses running around a goth club in New York makes Priscilla Queen of the Desert feel like The Dirty Dozen by contrast. Sara Rue, Karen Black and Paulo Costanzo (Evan R. Lawson from Royal Pains) are all in this film, as is the great Andersen Gabrych.
Virgin
An interesting looking little film about a girl who claims to be having the Christ child. With Elisabeth Moss, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Robin Wright Penn and Peter Gerety.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Hostel-Lite
Turistas (2006)
Directed by John Stockwell, Screenplay by Michael Ross
Turistas is the film that people think Hostel is. It's a moral fable about sex and travel and xenophobia with a thin veneer of class warfare and medicine thrown in to cover the gore fest. (Actually it's not a fest so much as a sampler plate.) Turistas takes us to the exotic countryside of Brazil. If there's one thing that I think of when I think of Brazil it's sex--the kind of sex where you wake up the next morning smelling of coconuts and missing a kidney. And Turistas delivers that kind of Brazilian sex. Turistas is an old fashioned moral fable about why it's a bad idea to leave the well-trodden path. The lesson here is that searching for some sort of "authentic" experience off the beaten trail will get you the "authentic" experience of being killed and having your organs harvested. Next time you should just stick to the tourist spots and avoid the adventurism. Of course, this point is kind of lost in the beautiful cinematography of lush tropical vistas and lovely writhing locals, but I'm pretty sure there are better ways to see those vistas than running through them while trying to escape homicidal health care workers and their mercenaries.
The organ harvesting is the post-colonial veneer of the film where the crazy doctor Zamora (Miguel Lunardi) a low-rent Bond villain, rights the wrongs done by the rich and the American and the European and the health care industry by kidnapping tourists killing them and harvesting their organs. There are several problems with his plan besides the obvious moral dubiousness of murdering people for their organs. 1. He has idiots working for him who manage to kill people in ways that destroy all their organs. (Running someone down until they jump off a cliff makes them useless for organ harvesting.) 2. His victims have probably managed to drink themselves into cirrhosis already in whatever brief time they've been in Brazil. 3. Zamora himself is clearly unhinged. He is even more unhinged than is normal for a doctor who is secretly kidnapping tourists and taking their organs for the poor.
Needless to say (and yet, here we are saying it) the semi Marxist doctor and his mercenaries are no match for attractive Americans (and Brits) who are on vacation. In statistics somewhat reminscent of WWII two Brits die and two out of three Americans survive along with an Aussie. The survivors are a brother and sister (her best friend gets harvested) and the multilingual Aussie girl who may not be a plucky American but presumably is good enough to survive. (Although, in the original draft of the script she didn't survive.)
So, is there anything worth seeing here? Well, there are some attractive people running around with little in the way of clothing including Olivia Wilde (13 from House!) and Josh Duhamel as the brother and sister Alex and Bea. (She's Bea and he's Alex.) Beau Garrett as Bea's friend Amy. (Beau Garrett did a guest spot on House a little while ago and she and Olivia Wilde are also both in Tron: Legacy.) And then there's Melissa George as Pru, the Aussie survivor. Plus there are the Brazilians Cristiani Aparecida and Lucy Ramos as Arolea. Arolea takes the less attractive of the two brits, Finn (Desmond Askew) over to a shack behind a bar on the beach and proceeds to have sex with him and then tell him the price for the aforementioned romp, which is really insult to injury given the fact that he's going to be dead soon anyway. At least the girls in Hostel gave their victims a freebie. Poor Finn gets his self-esteem destroyed, he's drugged along with the rest of the boys and girls not from Brazil and eventually murdered. There's a fantastic chase scene in underwater caves that is somewhat worth seeing on its own. And then there's poor Kiko (Agles Steib) the local who befriends the travelers, betrays them and then helps them, getting himself killed in the process. He's a goofy schmuck and along with the rockin' tunes of Marcelo D2 provides a lot of local flavor. Also providing local flavor is a bit of dancing to the tune of MC Tam's Vidro Fumê, an especially nasty tune from Brazil that would make Sir Mix-a-lot's dirty cousin Lord Nutsack blush.
The violence is, at its worst as gory as Hostel but not as sustained. The scene where Amy is cut open is probably the most disgusting set-piece here. All in all, the violence leaves me squeamish but without the interesting story and character that made the two Hostels tolerable. Some good performers here have to do a lot to make up the difference and they come close, but there's only so much they can do with what is essentially a jungle chase movie.
I think the best improvement would have been making Zamora less unhinged and more grey. Frankly, this film could have been worth the effort if if took the ethical quandary it began with and really forced us to confront some harsh decisions. As it stands, Turistas is tolerable but not really engaging, ultraviolent with a smidgen of thought and some nice visuals. Turistas may not leave you with a case of la turista, but it's not exactly appetizing either.
Special Features
1. The unrated version includes both the unrated version and the theatrical cut in case you like your torture films less filling.
2. The Bloody Truth: The Special Make-Up Effects of Turistas
Disgusting and fascinating at the same time. The kind of effort put into making the surgery scene at the end look so real is frightening.
3. Commentary with Director John Stockwell and Producer Kent Kubena
If you're interested in how to make a film in Brazil, then this is an interesting bit of commentary.
4. Deleted Scenes
I Have A Shit
Kiko: I have a shit that tells me what to do...but the shit is very old and very stupid.
He means to say "sheet" as in a sheet of phrases in English, but it is so much funnier to go on in this vein for a minute.
Bar Fight
It's more like Bar Altercation. Alex steps up to defend Amy from a guy who gets to grindy and then pulls a gun. It makes the whole bar scene a bit too dangerous too soon.
Morning After
A great scene where the cabana bar owner shows up in the morning and says they owe him a lot of money. Things are bad enough for them but to have the mundane problem of having to pay for a mess is almost funny compared to what else is in store for them.
Lost
They're lost in the jungle and Kiko climbs a tree to try to figure out where they are while the guys debate whether or not they can get back to where they started from if they have to kill Kiko. I think they should have just killed Kiko and set up their own little Gilligan's Island village in the jungle.
The Waterfall
An extended scene in the fabulous waterfall location. It raises the question of whether it's worth transplanting organs from someone hopped up on several different drugs.
Shower Trip
People high on E sitting under an outdoor shower.
Girl Talk
A tender scene with Amy freaking out while being comforted by Bea. This scene raises all kinds of unanswered questions about Bea and Amy's relationship.
Alex On Patrol
Alex walking around on nightwatch with a serious case of insomnia.
On The Prowl
At Zamora's "facility" a guard gets busy with the cook.
Kiko's Speech
Kiko delivers a long speech explaining his reasons for being involved with this group and defending his choices. And then he gets shot. Might have been even more fun if he had been eaten by one of those sharks from Deep Blue Sea.
Alternate Ending
In the Alternate Ending Alex smashes Zamora's head in with a rock in the cave.
5. Trailers
The Hills Have Eyes 2 (aka The Hills Still Have Eyes) This is a pretty good teaser. I don't want to see the film, but it's a good trailer.
Wrong Turn 2 (aka This Turn Is Still Wrong)
Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj (aka How Come You're Not Funny Anymore? 2: The Rise of Awful Comedy)
Path Finder (I was pretty sure Pathfinder was all one word, but hey it's Fox's movie...)
Directed by John Stockwell, Screenplay by Michael Ross
Turistas is the film that people think Hostel is. It's a moral fable about sex and travel and xenophobia with a thin veneer of class warfare and medicine thrown in to cover the gore fest. (Actually it's not a fest so much as a sampler plate.) Turistas takes us to the exotic countryside of Brazil. If there's one thing that I think of when I think of Brazil it's sex--the kind of sex where you wake up the next morning smelling of coconuts and missing a kidney. And Turistas delivers that kind of Brazilian sex. Turistas is an old fashioned moral fable about why it's a bad idea to leave the well-trodden path. The lesson here is that searching for some sort of "authentic" experience off the beaten trail will get you the "authentic" experience of being killed and having your organs harvested. Next time you should just stick to the tourist spots and avoid the adventurism. Of course, this point is kind of lost in the beautiful cinematography of lush tropical vistas and lovely writhing locals, but I'm pretty sure there are better ways to see those vistas than running through them while trying to escape homicidal health care workers and their mercenaries.
The organ harvesting is the post-colonial veneer of the film where the crazy doctor Zamora (Miguel Lunardi) a low-rent Bond villain, rights the wrongs done by the rich and the American and the European and the health care industry by kidnapping tourists killing them and harvesting their organs. There are several problems with his plan besides the obvious moral dubiousness of murdering people for their organs. 1. He has idiots working for him who manage to kill people in ways that destroy all their organs. (Running someone down until they jump off a cliff makes them useless for organ harvesting.) 2. His victims have probably managed to drink themselves into cirrhosis already in whatever brief time they've been in Brazil. 3. Zamora himself is clearly unhinged. He is even more unhinged than is normal for a doctor who is secretly kidnapping tourists and taking their organs for the poor.
Needless to say (and yet, here we are saying it) the semi Marxist doctor and his mercenaries are no match for attractive Americans (and Brits) who are on vacation. In statistics somewhat reminscent of WWII two Brits die and two out of three Americans survive along with an Aussie. The survivors are a brother and sister (her best friend gets harvested) and the multilingual Aussie girl who may not be a plucky American but presumably is good enough to survive. (Although, in the original draft of the script she didn't survive.)
So, is there anything worth seeing here? Well, there are some attractive people running around with little in the way of clothing including Olivia Wilde (13 from House!) and Josh Duhamel as the brother and sister Alex and Bea. (She's Bea and he's Alex.) Beau Garrett as Bea's friend Amy. (Beau Garrett did a guest spot on House a little while ago and she and Olivia Wilde are also both in Tron: Legacy.) And then there's Melissa George as Pru, the Aussie survivor. Plus there are the Brazilians Cristiani Aparecida and Lucy Ramos as Arolea. Arolea takes the less attractive of the two brits, Finn (Desmond Askew) over to a shack behind a bar on the beach and proceeds to have sex with him and then tell him the price for the aforementioned romp, which is really insult to injury given the fact that he's going to be dead soon anyway. At least the girls in Hostel gave their victims a freebie. Poor Finn gets his self-esteem destroyed, he's drugged along with the rest of the boys and girls not from Brazil and eventually murdered. There's a fantastic chase scene in underwater caves that is somewhat worth seeing on its own. And then there's poor Kiko (Agles Steib) the local who befriends the travelers, betrays them and then helps them, getting himself killed in the process. He's a goofy schmuck and along with the rockin' tunes of Marcelo D2 provides a lot of local flavor. Also providing local flavor is a bit of dancing to the tune of MC Tam's Vidro Fumê, an especially nasty tune from Brazil that would make Sir Mix-a-lot's dirty cousin Lord Nutsack blush.
The violence is, at its worst as gory as Hostel but not as sustained. The scene where Amy is cut open is probably the most disgusting set-piece here. All in all, the violence leaves me squeamish but without the interesting story and character that made the two Hostels tolerable. Some good performers here have to do a lot to make up the difference and they come close, but there's only so much they can do with what is essentially a jungle chase movie.
I think the best improvement would have been making Zamora less unhinged and more grey. Frankly, this film could have been worth the effort if if took the ethical quandary it began with and really forced us to confront some harsh decisions. As it stands, Turistas is tolerable but not really engaging, ultraviolent with a smidgen of thought and some nice visuals. Turistas may not leave you with a case of la turista, but it's not exactly appetizing either.
Special Features
1. The unrated version includes both the unrated version and the theatrical cut in case you like your torture films less filling.
2. The Bloody Truth: The Special Make-Up Effects of Turistas
Disgusting and fascinating at the same time. The kind of effort put into making the surgery scene at the end look so real is frightening.
3. Commentary with Director John Stockwell and Producer Kent Kubena
If you're interested in how to make a film in Brazil, then this is an interesting bit of commentary.
4. Deleted Scenes
I Have A Shit
Kiko: I have a shit that tells me what to do...but the shit is very old and very stupid.
He means to say "sheet" as in a sheet of phrases in English, but it is so much funnier to go on in this vein for a minute.
Bar Fight
It's more like Bar Altercation. Alex steps up to defend Amy from a guy who gets to grindy and then pulls a gun. It makes the whole bar scene a bit too dangerous too soon.
Morning After
A great scene where the cabana bar owner shows up in the morning and says they owe him a lot of money. Things are bad enough for them but to have the mundane problem of having to pay for a mess is almost funny compared to what else is in store for them.
Lost
They're lost in the jungle and Kiko climbs a tree to try to figure out where they are while the guys debate whether or not they can get back to where they started from if they have to kill Kiko. I think they should have just killed Kiko and set up their own little Gilligan's Island village in the jungle.
The Waterfall
An extended scene in the fabulous waterfall location. It raises the question of whether it's worth transplanting organs from someone hopped up on several different drugs.
Shower Trip
People high on E sitting under an outdoor shower.
Girl Talk
A tender scene with Amy freaking out while being comforted by Bea. This scene raises all kinds of unanswered questions about Bea and Amy's relationship.
Alex On Patrol
Alex walking around on nightwatch with a serious case of insomnia.
On The Prowl
At Zamora's "facility" a guard gets busy with the cook.
Kiko's Speech
Kiko delivers a long speech explaining his reasons for being involved with this group and defending his choices. And then he gets shot. Might have been even more fun if he had been eaten by one of those sharks from Deep Blue Sea.
Alternate Ending
In the Alternate Ending Alex smashes Zamora's head in with a rock in the cave.
5. Trailers
The Hills Have Eyes 2 (aka The Hills Still Have Eyes) This is a pretty good teaser. I don't want to see the film, but it's a good trailer.
Wrong Turn 2 (aka This Turn Is Still Wrong)
Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj (aka How Come You're Not Funny Anymore? 2: The Rise of Awful Comedy)
Path Finder (I was pretty sure Pathfinder was all one word, but hey it's Fox's movie...)
Monday, September 6, 2010
Return of the Son of Black Christmas
Black Christmas (Unrated) (2006)
Directed by Glen Morgan, Screenplay by Glen Morgan
It's like someone looked at the things that made Black Christmas unique and decided to ditch them and make the same movie that everyone else was making only with two killers, some incest and a lot of eating of eyeballs. In the original film the killer identifies himself as Billy and he calls out to someone he calls Agnes. This film starts with Billy escaping a mental institution around Christmas to go back to his home (which is now a sorority house) where he will have a reunion with his she-male sister Agnes.
Now, at no time is Agnes identified as being ambiguously gendered it's just that the adult Agnes is played by a man in drag whereas the flashbacks to younger Agnes she is a not particularly mannish girl. So, either she grew up real ugly or she had some sort of other issues along the way. (Other than having an eye punched out by her brother Billy because he was jealous of her.) Also, Billy has a medical condition that makes his skin yellow, but not nearly as yellow as Nick Stahl in Sin City so it's not even that interesting as a condition goes. As long as we're on the flashback backstory, Billy's mother and father hate each other, so Billy's mother and her lover kill Billy's father and bury him in the basement and then they lock Billy up in the attic so he can't tell anyone and so they don't have to see his yellow skin. Billy's mother tries to get pregnant with her lover, but the guy can't make it happen so she heads up into the attic and rapes her son, the aforementioned yellow-skinned Billy. Hence, Agnes. So you might say that Agnes, being a product of incest would obviously turn out to be screwed up, but it takes 8 years for Billy to bust out of the attic (seriously? 8 years?) and rip out Agnes's eye and kill his mother and her lover and then bake Christmas cookies with his mother's flesh. (Note to Billy: They're not really cookies, so much as cookie-shaped meat-treats.) So, the cops take Billy and imprison him in the mental asylum, which he escapes after killing a man in a Santa Claus outfit and escaping dressed as crazy Santa on Christmas Eve 2006.
Billy's old house is the Delta Alpha Kappa sorority house, or as we will call it from now on, the Sorority House of Atreus. The preceding description of the backstory is a good example of what happens when you decide to kill all the mystery and make the unknowable known. Granted, it does take a great number of flashbacks layered into the film to get the whole shabby tale of murder, adultery, incest and eye-eating, but did we need to know all of that? Did we need the whole of Greek tragedy layered into the backstory of a psycho killer in a sorority house? Wouldn't it be more interesting if Billy was just some guy who works at Whataburger who goes on a killing spree? Isn't it better to leave some damn thing to the imagination? Well, if you believe the answer to that last question is no, then Black X-mas is your film.
I'm not saying that this was a terrible film at all. It has its moments. But it is a disappointing film, especially when seen right after the original Black Christmas.
Black X-mas is horrifying and disgusting and suspenseful but it isn't really scary and it sure isn't bleak like the original film. Pretty much what you get here is double the killers and double the sorority girls getting killed. Now, while the former means you get a she-male and a slightly jaundiced nutwagon, the latter means you get an all-star cast whose actual acting talents are made better use of by an episode of House than in the 95 minutes of this film. (I'm looking at you, Michelle Trachtenberg.)
The sorority girls are killed off at a regular pace in rather unceremonious (if gruesome) ways. The first victim is poor Clair Crosby (Leela Savasta who would go on to be in BSG) who gets stabbed in the eye with a fountain pen. Next to die is Megan Helms (Jessica Harmon, who like Leela Savasta would go on to have a recurring role on BSG) who gets a bag on the head and her eyes (always with the eyes) pulled out. Now, Megan had a sex tape of herself and her ex-boyfriend Kyle (Oliver Hudson). Kyle's current girlfriend is Kelli. (Katie Cassidy). (The only way this could be better would be if Kyle and Kelli turned out to be brother and sister and that Kyle is actually a she-male.) Here's a spoiler for you: Kelli survives, presumably as a consolation for losing her boyfriend and her entire sorority in the worst Christmas ever. I should mention that one of the draws of this film is that this is a much better stocked sorority than the one in the original Black Christmas, which was kind of sparse. Here we have Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the aforementioned Michelle Trachtenberg, Lacey Chabert (who deserves so much better than being killed with a rake), and Crystal Lowe, who at least gets slightly further down the line than she did when she was prematurely killed by Lorenzo Lamas in Blood Angels. Lowe does the obligatory shower scene but is only killed later in her bed with a crystal unicorn. The sorority girls (who all die) are watched over by Ms. Mac who is played by Andrea Martin (back for another Black Christmas). Martin's Mac is a little more with-it than the Mac in the older film, but she is nonetheless just as dead. Clair's sister Leigh (Kristen Cloke) shows up and makes it all the way to the inevitable hospital scene but that's where Agnes shows up and snaps her neck. Kelli, though, manages to fry Agnes and then push Billy into falling and impaling himself on a Christmas tree.
So, what to make of this? Well, if you can survive two psychos then you're still living in a more hopeful world than in the original Black Christmas. I really don't want to pile on Glen Morgan because I was a big fan of his short-lived show Space: Above and Beyond, but I have to wonder what the point of this sorority slaughter with the overly determined backstory really is. I'm not saying that this is a poorly made horror film, because it's actually pretty slickly put together with good acting, decent suspense and obscenely grotesque special effects violence. I know I probably wouldn't have appreciated a shot for shot remake of the original Black Christmas, so what's the problem with slapping a more conventional ending to this film? I think it once again says a lot about a perceived unwillingness of our present day culture to deal with the harsh possibilities out there. A film like Black X-Mas is an exercise in optimism--whatever mysteries are lurking in the sorority house of the world, we can learn them and know them--and whatever psycho killer is out there with his she-male inbred sister/daughter stalking us and threatening to eat our eyes out we can survive it if we are strong enough and keep our wits about us and if we have enough friends to provide cannon fodder for the slashers. So maybe this remake is a perfect bookend for anyone who was genuinely freaked out by the dark ending of the original. The price you pay for the comfort of knowing that even Billy and Agnes can be survived is a bunch of gruesome special effects and there's something about that which while disconcerting and disgusting is never quite that disturbing once you've been behind the scenes to see how it's done.
At any rate, this film does retain some degree of thoughtfulness compared to other films in the subgenre and it does delve into the idea of families and relationships and it has a really great ensemble. The parts that are least interesting are the places that veer into the classic slasher pattern which leaves one survivor as our protagonist.
Special Features
1. What Have You Done?
Bob Clark is shown on the set of the remake.
"What was said to us is that you either make horror films or porno films..." Bob Clark
You may not have noticed the leg lamp from A Christmas Story in the sorority house before but it's shown here.
Glen Morgan noted the Midnight Q&A of the original film and how he was surprised that Bob Clark didn't have the backstory of Billy and Agnes thought out. Clark, though, says that he did have a backstory, but that he has no intention of revealing it.
For a promotional video this is pretty revealing and as with other horror films I have to say that getting to see the behind-the-scenes footage is always reassuring.
2. May All Your Christmases Be Black: A Filmmaker's Journey
Glen Morgan's insight into slasher films, horror and filmmaking in general. Worth seeing this, especially since everyone involved has some cynical things to say about audiences and Hollywood films, and I have to say that I came out of this respecting Glen Morgan and the folks making this film. And at least we get the reason why Agnes is played by a guy.
3. Deleted Scenes
1. Someone In The Attic
I must admit that this scene on its own makes for a pretty creepy little short film.
2. Christmas Ringtones
"Doesn't your phone do anything?"
"It validates me."
Alright, I kind of wish this scene had been in the film. It gives the girls some more character. I would have traded this bit in exchange for the subsequent change of pacing.
3. Gift Exchange
Lacey Chabert's secret Santa gave her a giant dildo that is about 1/3 the size of her body. Now that's the Christmas spirit!
4. The Girls Discuss Kyle and Eve
This bit might have been nice in terms of clarifying suspicions. I swear, some filmmakers are so convinced that pacing is king that they forget that a fast paced story that doesn't tell a story isn't much of a story at all.
5. Extended Version--Phone Call From Dana
Another bit that helps explain what's going on. I have to say, if you're going to make a film that is so bent on explaining everything every step of the way I don't see why you would cut any of this stuff out.
6. International Version--Melissa Killed In the Hallway
You'd think the "unrated" version of any film would be the most disgusting one, but in this case I'll have to give the points to this scene. Melissa (Michelle Trachtenberg) is caught by Agnes, who throws a plastic bag on her head, hurls her to the ground and then pops out her eyeball through the bag and eats it and then drags her out of the scene using her empty eye sockets as finger-holes. While the scene in the film itself is more visibly violent, this one is much more gruesome and vicious and the fact that this is what the International audience got is at least somewhat reassuring as to how screwed up Americans are in relation to the rest of the world.
7. Alternate Version--Lauren's Death
This is a slower stalking scene compared to the shock scene in the film. It's another scene that would do well as a short film.
4. Alternate Endings
Alternate endings bug the crap out of me because while it does imply a certain fluidity of storytelling possibilities it also indicates the notion that you don't really have a coherent story and are holding out options in case a room full of slackers and old people tell you they didn't like how your story ended and a conference table populated by cowards in suits is afraid that the people who saw your movie for free won't pay to see it again. "Hamlet has been through so much. Can't he find an antidote to the poison and survive?" The average test audience should be shown Cocoon: The Return and given a candy bar and then walked into an open pit and shot.
Alternate Ending #1
By far the creepiest ending, since it leaves Leigh and Kelli alive but getting a phone call from Kyle's cellphone which was last seen in the attic where Kyle died.
Sure, it's a continuing threat, but at least it's not immediate--which makes it almost as unsettling as the end of the original.
Alternate Ending #2
Agnes kills Leigh in Kelli's bed. Kelli kills Agnes with the defibrillator and her parents take her home. End of story. No return of the burned Billy to get impaled on the Christmas tree. A solid ending, though why not include a Billy resolution while you're at it.
Alternate Ending #3
Kelli is wheeled in to see Billy flatlining. Reassured, she and her family leave the hospital. The guy from the morgue shows up to take Billy's body away but it's already gone. We see his eye peeking from behind a vent in the wall.
For some reason these endings that leave Billy alive at the end, while continuing the threat actually seem less fitting for this story than the one that made the final cut. It seems to me that if you're going to include such an elaborate and backstory for Billy and Agnes then making them nigh invulnerable to fire and other forms of death is just a supernatural cheat for a story that is certainly not supernatural either here or in its original version.
5. Previews
1. The Truth An anti-tobacco ad with a bunch of people lying down on a street outside an office building as a visual indictment of the fact that "Tobacco Kills 1200 people a day." The problem with this is that it kills people who smoke. At this point, I can't blame corporations anymore for making a deadly product that everyone knows is a deadly product but that they love to use. If crystal meth was made by corporations and marketed with a cartoon camel I think at this point I would feel the same way. Sure, the corporations are evil for wanting to get people hooked so they can make a fast buck, but people are weak for getting hooked on something that does that kind of damage. The truth is that all corporations are designed to hustle money from people for as little as they can give back. (New iPhone 37.5 will be coming out shortly.)
2. Grindhouse
At least now I can remember why I was excited to see Grindhouse.
3. Vince Vaughan's Wild West Comedy Show
"This spring Vince Vaughan is coming to your town." God, I hope not.
4. Hannibal Rising
Is there nothing left that hasn't had a prequel made? Hannibal Rising, Hannibal Falling, Hannibal Hears a Hoo, Hannibal can suck it.
5. Pulse
Kristen Bell sees dead people in her computer and I just don't care.
6. Feast
A creature feature with Henry Rollins. It looks disgustingly hilarious.
Directed by Glen Morgan, Screenplay by Glen Morgan
It's like someone looked at the things that made Black Christmas unique and decided to ditch them and make the same movie that everyone else was making only with two killers, some incest and a lot of eating of eyeballs. In the original film the killer identifies himself as Billy and he calls out to someone he calls Agnes. This film starts with Billy escaping a mental institution around Christmas to go back to his home (which is now a sorority house) where he will have a reunion with his she-male sister Agnes.
Now, at no time is Agnes identified as being ambiguously gendered it's just that the adult Agnes is played by a man in drag whereas the flashbacks to younger Agnes she is a not particularly mannish girl. So, either she grew up real ugly or she had some sort of other issues along the way. (Other than having an eye punched out by her brother Billy because he was jealous of her.) Also, Billy has a medical condition that makes his skin yellow, but not nearly as yellow as Nick Stahl in Sin City so it's not even that interesting as a condition goes. As long as we're on the flashback backstory, Billy's mother and father hate each other, so Billy's mother and her lover kill Billy's father and bury him in the basement and then they lock Billy up in the attic so he can't tell anyone and so they don't have to see his yellow skin. Billy's mother tries to get pregnant with her lover, but the guy can't make it happen so she heads up into the attic and rapes her son, the aforementioned yellow-skinned Billy. Hence, Agnes. So you might say that Agnes, being a product of incest would obviously turn out to be screwed up, but it takes 8 years for Billy to bust out of the attic (seriously? 8 years?) and rip out Agnes's eye and kill his mother and her lover and then bake Christmas cookies with his mother's flesh. (Note to Billy: They're not really cookies, so much as cookie-shaped meat-treats.) So, the cops take Billy and imprison him in the mental asylum, which he escapes after killing a man in a Santa Claus outfit and escaping dressed as crazy Santa on Christmas Eve 2006.
Billy's old house is the Delta Alpha Kappa sorority house, or as we will call it from now on, the Sorority House of Atreus. The preceding description of the backstory is a good example of what happens when you decide to kill all the mystery and make the unknowable known. Granted, it does take a great number of flashbacks layered into the film to get the whole shabby tale of murder, adultery, incest and eye-eating, but did we need to know all of that? Did we need the whole of Greek tragedy layered into the backstory of a psycho killer in a sorority house? Wouldn't it be more interesting if Billy was just some guy who works at Whataburger who goes on a killing spree? Isn't it better to leave some damn thing to the imagination? Well, if you believe the answer to that last question is no, then Black X-mas is your film.
I'm not saying that this was a terrible film at all. It has its moments. But it is a disappointing film, especially when seen right after the original Black Christmas.
Black X-mas is horrifying and disgusting and suspenseful but it isn't really scary and it sure isn't bleak like the original film. Pretty much what you get here is double the killers and double the sorority girls getting killed. Now, while the former means you get a she-male and a slightly jaundiced nutwagon, the latter means you get an all-star cast whose actual acting talents are made better use of by an episode of House than in the 95 minutes of this film. (I'm looking at you, Michelle Trachtenberg.)
The sorority girls are killed off at a regular pace in rather unceremonious (if gruesome) ways. The first victim is poor Clair Crosby (Leela Savasta who would go on to be in BSG) who gets stabbed in the eye with a fountain pen. Next to die is Megan Helms (Jessica Harmon, who like Leela Savasta would go on to have a recurring role on BSG) who gets a bag on the head and her eyes (always with the eyes) pulled out. Now, Megan had a sex tape of herself and her ex-boyfriend Kyle (Oliver Hudson). Kyle's current girlfriend is Kelli. (Katie Cassidy). (The only way this could be better would be if Kyle and Kelli turned out to be brother and sister and that Kyle is actually a she-male.) Here's a spoiler for you: Kelli survives, presumably as a consolation for losing her boyfriend and her entire sorority in the worst Christmas ever. I should mention that one of the draws of this film is that this is a much better stocked sorority than the one in the original Black Christmas, which was kind of sparse. Here we have Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the aforementioned Michelle Trachtenberg, Lacey Chabert (who deserves so much better than being killed with a rake), and Crystal Lowe, who at least gets slightly further down the line than she did when she was prematurely killed by Lorenzo Lamas in Blood Angels. Lowe does the obligatory shower scene but is only killed later in her bed with a crystal unicorn. The sorority girls (who all die) are watched over by Ms. Mac who is played by Andrea Martin (back for another Black Christmas). Martin's Mac is a little more with-it than the Mac in the older film, but she is nonetheless just as dead. Clair's sister Leigh (Kristen Cloke) shows up and makes it all the way to the inevitable hospital scene but that's where Agnes shows up and snaps her neck. Kelli, though, manages to fry Agnes and then push Billy into falling and impaling himself on a Christmas tree.
So, what to make of this? Well, if you can survive two psychos then you're still living in a more hopeful world than in the original Black Christmas. I really don't want to pile on Glen Morgan because I was a big fan of his short-lived show Space: Above and Beyond, but I have to wonder what the point of this sorority slaughter with the overly determined backstory really is. I'm not saying that this is a poorly made horror film, because it's actually pretty slickly put together with good acting, decent suspense and obscenely grotesque special effects violence. I know I probably wouldn't have appreciated a shot for shot remake of the original Black Christmas, so what's the problem with slapping a more conventional ending to this film? I think it once again says a lot about a perceived unwillingness of our present day culture to deal with the harsh possibilities out there. A film like Black X-Mas is an exercise in optimism--whatever mysteries are lurking in the sorority house of the world, we can learn them and know them--and whatever psycho killer is out there with his she-male inbred sister/daughter stalking us and threatening to eat our eyes out we can survive it if we are strong enough and keep our wits about us and if we have enough friends to provide cannon fodder for the slashers. So maybe this remake is a perfect bookend for anyone who was genuinely freaked out by the dark ending of the original. The price you pay for the comfort of knowing that even Billy and Agnes can be survived is a bunch of gruesome special effects and there's something about that which while disconcerting and disgusting is never quite that disturbing once you've been behind the scenes to see how it's done.
At any rate, this film does retain some degree of thoughtfulness compared to other films in the subgenre and it does delve into the idea of families and relationships and it has a really great ensemble. The parts that are least interesting are the places that veer into the classic slasher pattern which leaves one survivor as our protagonist.
Special Features
1. What Have You Done?
Bob Clark is shown on the set of the remake.
"What was said to us is that you either make horror films or porno films..." Bob Clark
You may not have noticed the leg lamp from A Christmas Story in the sorority house before but it's shown here.
Glen Morgan noted the Midnight Q&A of the original film and how he was surprised that Bob Clark didn't have the backstory of Billy and Agnes thought out. Clark, though, says that he did have a backstory, but that he has no intention of revealing it.
For a promotional video this is pretty revealing and as with other horror films I have to say that getting to see the behind-the-scenes footage is always reassuring.
2. May All Your Christmases Be Black: A Filmmaker's Journey
Glen Morgan's insight into slasher films, horror and filmmaking in general. Worth seeing this, especially since everyone involved has some cynical things to say about audiences and Hollywood films, and I have to say that I came out of this respecting Glen Morgan and the folks making this film. And at least we get the reason why Agnes is played by a guy.
3. Deleted Scenes
1. Someone In The Attic
I must admit that this scene on its own makes for a pretty creepy little short film.
2. Christmas Ringtones
"Doesn't your phone do anything?"
"It validates me."
Alright, I kind of wish this scene had been in the film. It gives the girls some more character. I would have traded this bit in exchange for the subsequent change of pacing.
3. Gift Exchange
Lacey Chabert's secret Santa gave her a giant dildo that is about 1/3 the size of her body. Now that's the Christmas spirit!
4. The Girls Discuss Kyle and Eve
This bit might have been nice in terms of clarifying suspicions. I swear, some filmmakers are so convinced that pacing is king that they forget that a fast paced story that doesn't tell a story isn't much of a story at all.
5. Extended Version--Phone Call From Dana
Another bit that helps explain what's going on. I have to say, if you're going to make a film that is so bent on explaining everything every step of the way I don't see why you would cut any of this stuff out.
6. International Version--Melissa Killed In the Hallway
You'd think the "unrated" version of any film would be the most disgusting one, but in this case I'll have to give the points to this scene. Melissa (Michelle Trachtenberg) is caught by Agnes, who throws a plastic bag on her head, hurls her to the ground and then pops out her eyeball through the bag and eats it and then drags her out of the scene using her empty eye sockets as finger-holes. While the scene in the film itself is more visibly violent, this one is much more gruesome and vicious and the fact that this is what the International audience got is at least somewhat reassuring as to how screwed up Americans are in relation to the rest of the world.
7. Alternate Version--Lauren's Death
This is a slower stalking scene compared to the shock scene in the film. It's another scene that would do well as a short film.
4. Alternate Endings
Alternate endings bug the crap out of me because while it does imply a certain fluidity of storytelling possibilities it also indicates the notion that you don't really have a coherent story and are holding out options in case a room full of slackers and old people tell you they didn't like how your story ended and a conference table populated by cowards in suits is afraid that the people who saw your movie for free won't pay to see it again. "Hamlet has been through so much. Can't he find an antidote to the poison and survive?" The average test audience should be shown Cocoon: The Return and given a candy bar and then walked into an open pit and shot.
Alternate Ending #1
By far the creepiest ending, since it leaves Leigh and Kelli alive but getting a phone call from Kyle's cellphone which was last seen in the attic where Kyle died.
Sure, it's a continuing threat, but at least it's not immediate--which makes it almost as unsettling as the end of the original.
Alternate Ending #2
Agnes kills Leigh in Kelli's bed. Kelli kills Agnes with the defibrillator and her parents take her home. End of story. No return of the burned Billy to get impaled on the Christmas tree. A solid ending, though why not include a Billy resolution while you're at it.
Alternate Ending #3
Kelli is wheeled in to see Billy flatlining. Reassured, she and her family leave the hospital. The guy from the morgue shows up to take Billy's body away but it's already gone. We see his eye peeking from behind a vent in the wall.
For some reason these endings that leave Billy alive at the end, while continuing the threat actually seem less fitting for this story than the one that made the final cut. It seems to me that if you're going to include such an elaborate and backstory for Billy and Agnes then making them nigh invulnerable to fire and other forms of death is just a supernatural cheat for a story that is certainly not supernatural either here or in its original version.
5. Previews
1. The Truth An anti-tobacco ad with a bunch of people lying down on a street outside an office building as a visual indictment of the fact that "Tobacco Kills 1200 people a day." The problem with this is that it kills people who smoke. At this point, I can't blame corporations anymore for making a deadly product that everyone knows is a deadly product but that they love to use. If crystal meth was made by corporations and marketed with a cartoon camel I think at this point I would feel the same way. Sure, the corporations are evil for wanting to get people hooked so they can make a fast buck, but people are weak for getting hooked on something that does that kind of damage. The truth is that all corporations are designed to hustle money from people for as little as they can give back. (New iPhone 37.5 will be coming out shortly.)
2. Grindhouse
At least now I can remember why I was excited to see Grindhouse.
3. Vince Vaughan's Wild West Comedy Show
"This spring Vince Vaughan is coming to your town." God, I hope not.
4. Hannibal Rising
Is there nothing left that hasn't had a prequel made? Hannibal Rising, Hannibal Falling, Hannibal Hears a Hoo, Hannibal can suck it.
5. Pulse
Kristen Bell sees dead people in her computer and I just don't care.
6. Feast
A creature feature with Henry Rollins. It looks disgustingly hilarious.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Bleak Christmas
Black Christmas (1974)
Directed by Bob Clark, Screenplay by Roy Moore
Black Christmas is one of the bleakest films ever. It's bleak even for a horror movie. It's bleaker than Bleak House by a long shot. There's something appropriately unsettling about a horror film where all you see is a pair of hands from the killer's perspective and not only is there no comeuppance for the murderer but there's not even the satisfaction of learning anything about the killer. Isn't that what really scares people? The closest glimpse we get of the killer is a quick shot of him in a closet as he's strangling one of his victims and his voice in the multiple obscene phone calls he makes to the sorority house he is stalking. This is the only sure indication of the killer's gender. At some point in the calls he says his name is Billy and later he speaks as if he's talking to someone named Agnes. The phone calls are barely intelligible. An analogously bleak movie would be if you took Jaws and shot most of it from the perspective of the shark and let the shark get away without showing the audience so much as a fin. That's how bleak Black Christmas is.
Of course, it's a movie from the '70s, so there's almost an expectation that it will be a bleaker film than anything we can get today. A contemporary horror film will be more graphic, more disgusting, more visually violent than something like Black Christmas, but for the most part they can't compare with the genuine unsettling nature of the unseen and the unknown and yet (because this film does not have anything supernatural in it) not unbelievable or impossible.
So what's the big deal about Black Christmas? Why did anyone feel the need to remake it? Look at the date on it. It precedes Halloween, Friday the 13th and all the other slasher classics and it came out the same year as Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It is the bleak maternal grandfather of the sorority house massacre sub genre (though there were other sorority house massacre films that preceded Black Christmas). If you've grown tired of the old cliche of the phone calls that are traced to someone calling from inside the house of the victim then you should know that Black Christmas is the film that first used that old gag. In fact, the scenes in the telephone exchange provide an interesting historical record of telecommunications systems and their physical operation.
The thing that is unsettling about a film like Black Christmas is that it doesn't really give you the chance to shake off the horror at the end. Even in films that pop back with the shocker ending you are allowed some degree of understanding of the reasons (albeit usually crazy) for the killings. You're given some psychic solace of knowledge about the perpetrator of the preceding violence. But in this film we don't really get much of anything and what's more, the killer is still on the loose in the house at the end of the film while the police are standing guard outside. The symbolism is obvious: the danger is within and the system only knows how to guard from danger from without, even when the spate of killings was obviously perpetrated from within the house and the police haven't made a thorough enough search to notice the dead girl in the attic sitting right in front of the window. I personally found that to be the most unsettling thing of all: that the authorities are still searching for the first victim when her body is sitting wrapped in a plastic curtain right in front of the attic window visible to the street below if you just look hard enough. It's as if the real horror you take away from this film is that the world is full of un-thorough and incompetent guardians who are of no use when a psycho decides to go on a rampage. All of this makes this film a purer type of horror film than the ones that allow you to come away from the experience refreshed and having enjoyed the ride. It's up to you to decide which is the more disturbing thing in the long run. I can say that I haven't watched this film a second time--and I think that's a testament to how unsettling it can be. For a student of horror films, this is a must see. For anyone delving into the history of the slasher subgenre Black Christmas is essential viewing. For folks just looking for a film...well, as difficult as this film is it does have a lot going for it. To whit, I will give you the 5 Days of Black Christmas.
On the first day of Black Christmas my true love gave to me....a film with a hundred different titles.
Black Christmas has not always been called Black Christmas. This is one of the reasons that it has been slightly more obscure than Halloween or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or any of the other films in its category. Distributors in the US were concerned that the title would lead people to mistake it for a blaxploitation film and either avoid it because they weren't fans of Melvin van Peebles or were fans of Melvin van Peebles and would be disappointed by a Canadian slasher movie. Frankly, I think it's a good bet the same audience that saw The Omen also saw Shaft. If they hadn't there never would have been a film called Blacula.
At any rate, the film was released under such titles as Silent Night, Evil Night, Stranger in the House, We Wish You a Deadly Christmas, and The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove. NBC showed this film exactly one time on television before deciding it was too scary for TV.
On the second day of Christmas Bob Clark gave to me a Canada goose.
Did I mention that this film was a Canadian affair? There's nothing like winter in Canada in the early 1970s to give you a bleak film. In fact, Canada was also the origin of Halloween and My Bloody Valentine--which could lead you to suspect that there's a Canadian plot to keep Americans paranoid and up all night.
On the third day of Christmas Santa gave to me...a Red Ryder carbine-action air rifle.
Director Bob Clark would go on to direct such classics as Porky's and Porky's II as well as A Christmas Story. How about that for a festive Christmas film festival? Seriously, this sorority house could have used a kid with an air-rifle patrolling the place and maybe putting out someone's eyes.
On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me a dark old Canadian sorority house.
It's difficult to watch any movie from the 1970s and not chuckle at the terrible hair and fashion. Maybe the slasher is just disgusted by what people are wearing. I'm not saying that the girls are unattractive. Margot Kidder, Olivia Hussey and Lynne Griffin are quite attractive and I could see how if it was 1974 and after a couple of Molson's Andrea Martin would be nice too. Heck, a six pack of Molson's and a cold night and maybe even the old drunk house mother would start looking good as a means of warming up. Still, the sorority house is populated by an unlikely crew of victims. There's the relatively decent girl Clare (Lynne Griffin, who looks at times like a proto-Saffron Burrows) who gets strangled and suffocated with a plastic sheet/curtain, wrapped up in that same plastic wrapping and put into a rocking chair by the window of the attic. So much for letting the nice girl survive.
The next nicest girl Jess (Olivia Hussey) is also the one with the biggest problems. She's pregnant and wants an abortion. Her boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea) is an angry pianist who wants her to keep the baby (before she got pregnant and desiring an abortion he was presumably a slightly less moody pianist) and is prepared to quit school so they can start that awkward little family. Peter is so angry that Jess ends up killing him with a fireplace poker when she's convinced he was the killer. (He wasn't. But he was angry enough to wreck a piano.) That's quite a bit of social commentary wrapped up in this relationship. For those who are convinced that slasher films have to follow certain rules it's hard to imagine one of them being that the one who survives the killing spree is pregnant and wants an abortion and ends up being left alone in the house with the killer at the end of the film. Not only does that violate the so-called "rules" of the subgenre, but it also violates a dozen "rules" of screenwriting. For that alone Black Christmas is a nice stick in the eye of the rules-hounds and screenwriting seminarians.
Now look at Peter and Jess again. Recognize them? At some point you've probably seen her as Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. Also she played the Virgin Mary in Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth. And Keir Dullea? Well, you might have seen him being stalked by a computer in Kubrick's 2001. That's right, Peter is better known as Dave. You'd think he'd be better at finding a killer and unplugging him, but no he's just good at smashing pianos angrily.
And then there are the other two sorority sisters, Phyl and Barb. Phyl is played by SCTV's Andrea Martin and Barb is played by Margot "Lois Lane" Kidder. Barb gets most of the best lines in this film. She has a long painful anecdote about seeing turtles doing it at the zoo and she tells the cops that the phone number at the sorority house is Fellatio 20880. The appropriately named Barb also comes out with the zinger "Darling, you can't rape a townie." Wow, that's pretty cold there, Barb. Barb is stabbed to death with a glass unicorn while a group of Christmas caroling children sing at the door, but it's a good bet Barb was too drunk to notice she was dead. Phyllis, on the other hand is quite sober when she goes upstairs to check on Barb and gets killed. It might have been better to also put her chubby boyfriend and his ridiculous jewfro out of everyone's misery.
The house mother of this crew is an old drunk nicknamed Mrs. Mac who used to be quite the floozie and now just hides whiskey in various locations all around the house. As you can imagine, she has to die in a particularly ingenious way with a crane hook.
As for Jess, she has the worst time of it as she is in the house alone with the killer and doesn't even know it. When she finally gets the word that the killer has been calling from inside the house the whole time it's still pretty terrifying even though we already know that to be the case.
On the fifth day of Christmas Herman Melville gave to me...a very serious Ahab character.
The white knight of the film is Lt. Kenneth Fuller played by the great John Saxon who would go on to play another police Lieutenant in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Saxon brings a sense of earnestness and reassurance to the story. He's not so much an Ahab as an Ishmael. Once he's on the case you think maybe the girls have a chance. But then, they don't but it's not really Fuller's fault.
If you're looking for a genuine fright fest and don't want to deal with blood and gore, then Black Christmas is a good bet. Sure, there are a lot of funny aspects to something this old, but on the other hand the film is still revolutionary compared to the relatively conservative attitudes (both aesthetic and social) that are enshrined in more contemporary fare. At any rate, the juxtaposition of a happy holiday with brutal horror is another thing that we really owe to Black Christmas which paved the way not only for so many Christmas themed horror films but also a slew of other holiday slasher films like My Bloody Valentine, April Fool's Day, Prom Night, Slay-bor Day, etc.
Special Edition Bonus Material
1. 12 Days of Black Christmas (2006)
Written and Directed by Dan Duffin
John Saxon narrates this short history about the process of making Black Christmas and its place in horror film history. The script was based on a series of killings in Montreal. Clark did the film as an exercise in formal experimentation. Could you make film where you never see the killer and which lacks the typical kind of resolution you get elsewhere? Could it work? The live interviews included here are the edited versions of the interviews with Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder and Art Hindle that are included separately along with interviews with John Saxon, Lynne Griffin, Doug McGrath (who played Sgt. Nash), art director Karen Bromley. Also making an appearance is cameraman Bert Dunk, who was responsible for much of the POV shooting that made this such an innovative film. Carl Zittrer notes how Bob Clark asked for less scoring and the overall effect is that's it a quieter film that doesn't give away too much or overdetermine the direction of the film.
2. "Uncovered" Sound Scenes
A. Trellis Climb -- In this sound mix you can hear the conversations inside the house more clearly while the killer climbs the trellis.
B. Final pan
Billy (the killer) can be clearly heard giggling in the final series of shots that pan about the house where Jess is sleeping off the stress of the terror ride. It's pretty damn creepy.
I don't know if these scenes add much.
3. Midnight Q&A
Taped after a midnight screening of Black Christmas at the Nuart in Santa Monica, California in December 2004 this series of audience questions features composer Carl Zittrer, John Saxon and Bob Clark. Clark and his son were killed in a head on collision with a drunk driver in April 2007.
Clark mentions that the remake is in the works that will go deeper into the question of the background of the killer, Billy and his sister Agnes who he mentions in his ramblings.
Saxon's part originally went to Edmond O'Brien because Saxon had a scheduling conflict but O'Brien was suffering from Alzheimer's disease and had to be let go and luckily Saxon was available again.
4. Interviews
Olivia Hussey
Black Christmas I took because I had just given birth to my first child and I'd never done a scary film...
These interviews are a bit rough--the interviewer isn't the smoothest one I've ever heard--but I think the relative unpolished aspect of them gives them a genuineness that is missing from the more packaged making of things that are usually attached as special features. It's nice getting a retrospective look at a film from people who haven't completely disowned it. Hussey has some good points about how the mystery of not knowing is scarier than films that show and tell everything.
Margot Kidder
"When you did horror movies you sort of thought nobody would see them..."
Margot Kidder sitting poolside and recounting the days of being young and Canadian and struggling as an actor.
"As young people we were a lot looser than you guys are."
True enough. I like the things Kidder has to say about career advice. It's all surprisingly lucid.
Art Hindle
Hindle, who played Clare's boyfriend has some of the best memories of the film. He apparently used his own coat in the film and still has it. The interviewers, though, seem like barely competent and overeager fanboys.
Directed by Bob Clark, Screenplay by Roy Moore
Black Christmas is one of the bleakest films ever. It's bleak even for a horror movie. It's bleaker than Bleak House by a long shot. There's something appropriately unsettling about a horror film where all you see is a pair of hands from the killer's perspective and not only is there no comeuppance for the murderer but there's not even the satisfaction of learning anything about the killer. Isn't that what really scares people? The closest glimpse we get of the killer is a quick shot of him in a closet as he's strangling one of his victims and his voice in the multiple obscene phone calls he makes to the sorority house he is stalking. This is the only sure indication of the killer's gender. At some point in the calls he says his name is Billy and later he speaks as if he's talking to someone named Agnes. The phone calls are barely intelligible. An analogously bleak movie would be if you took Jaws and shot most of it from the perspective of the shark and let the shark get away without showing the audience so much as a fin. That's how bleak Black Christmas is.
Of course, it's a movie from the '70s, so there's almost an expectation that it will be a bleaker film than anything we can get today. A contemporary horror film will be more graphic, more disgusting, more visually violent than something like Black Christmas, but for the most part they can't compare with the genuine unsettling nature of the unseen and the unknown and yet (because this film does not have anything supernatural in it) not unbelievable or impossible.
So what's the big deal about Black Christmas? Why did anyone feel the need to remake it? Look at the date on it. It precedes Halloween, Friday the 13th and all the other slasher classics and it came out the same year as Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It is the bleak maternal grandfather of the sorority house massacre sub genre (though there were other sorority house massacre films that preceded Black Christmas). If you've grown tired of the old cliche of the phone calls that are traced to someone calling from inside the house of the victim then you should know that Black Christmas is the film that first used that old gag. In fact, the scenes in the telephone exchange provide an interesting historical record of telecommunications systems and their physical operation.
The thing that is unsettling about a film like Black Christmas is that it doesn't really give you the chance to shake off the horror at the end. Even in films that pop back with the shocker ending you are allowed some degree of understanding of the reasons (albeit usually crazy) for the killings. You're given some psychic solace of knowledge about the perpetrator of the preceding violence. But in this film we don't really get much of anything and what's more, the killer is still on the loose in the house at the end of the film while the police are standing guard outside. The symbolism is obvious: the danger is within and the system only knows how to guard from danger from without, even when the spate of killings was obviously perpetrated from within the house and the police haven't made a thorough enough search to notice the dead girl in the attic sitting right in front of the window. I personally found that to be the most unsettling thing of all: that the authorities are still searching for the first victim when her body is sitting wrapped in a plastic curtain right in front of the attic window visible to the street below if you just look hard enough. It's as if the real horror you take away from this film is that the world is full of un-thorough and incompetent guardians who are of no use when a psycho decides to go on a rampage. All of this makes this film a purer type of horror film than the ones that allow you to come away from the experience refreshed and having enjoyed the ride. It's up to you to decide which is the more disturbing thing in the long run. I can say that I haven't watched this film a second time--and I think that's a testament to how unsettling it can be. For a student of horror films, this is a must see. For anyone delving into the history of the slasher subgenre Black Christmas is essential viewing. For folks just looking for a film...well, as difficult as this film is it does have a lot going for it. To whit, I will give you the 5 Days of Black Christmas.
On the first day of Black Christmas my true love gave to me....a film with a hundred different titles.
Black Christmas has not always been called Black Christmas. This is one of the reasons that it has been slightly more obscure than Halloween or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or any of the other films in its category. Distributors in the US were concerned that the title would lead people to mistake it for a blaxploitation film and either avoid it because they weren't fans of Melvin van Peebles or were fans of Melvin van Peebles and would be disappointed by a Canadian slasher movie. Frankly, I think it's a good bet the same audience that saw The Omen also saw Shaft. If they hadn't there never would have been a film called Blacula.
At any rate, the film was released under such titles as Silent Night, Evil Night, Stranger in the House, We Wish You a Deadly Christmas, and The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove. NBC showed this film exactly one time on television before deciding it was too scary for TV.
On the second day of Christmas Bob Clark gave to me a Canada goose.
Did I mention that this film was a Canadian affair? There's nothing like winter in Canada in the early 1970s to give you a bleak film. In fact, Canada was also the origin of Halloween and My Bloody Valentine--which could lead you to suspect that there's a Canadian plot to keep Americans paranoid and up all night.
On the third day of Christmas Santa gave to me...a Red Ryder carbine-action air rifle.
Director Bob Clark would go on to direct such classics as Porky's and Porky's II as well as A Christmas Story. How about that for a festive Christmas film festival? Seriously, this sorority house could have used a kid with an air-rifle patrolling the place and maybe putting out someone's eyes.
On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me a dark old Canadian sorority house.
It's difficult to watch any movie from the 1970s and not chuckle at the terrible hair and fashion. Maybe the slasher is just disgusted by what people are wearing. I'm not saying that the girls are unattractive. Margot Kidder, Olivia Hussey and Lynne Griffin are quite attractive and I could see how if it was 1974 and after a couple of Molson's Andrea Martin would be nice too. Heck, a six pack of Molson's and a cold night and maybe even the old drunk house mother would start looking good as a means of warming up. Still, the sorority house is populated by an unlikely crew of victims. There's the relatively decent girl Clare (Lynne Griffin, who looks at times like a proto-Saffron Burrows) who gets strangled and suffocated with a plastic sheet/curtain, wrapped up in that same plastic wrapping and put into a rocking chair by the window of the attic. So much for letting the nice girl survive.
The next nicest girl Jess (Olivia Hussey) is also the one with the biggest problems. She's pregnant and wants an abortion. Her boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea) is an angry pianist who wants her to keep the baby (before she got pregnant and desiring an abortion he was presumably a slightly less moody pianist) and is prepared to quit school so they can start that awkward little family. Peter is so angry that Jess ends up killing him with a fireplace poker when she's convinced he was the killer. (He wasn't. But he was angry enough to wreck a piano.) That's quite a bit of social commentary wrapped up in this relationship. For those who are convinced that slasher films have to follow certain rules it's hard to imagine one of them being that the one who survives the killing spree is pregnant and wants an abortion and ends up being left alone in the house with the killer at the end of the film. Not only does that violate the so-called "rules" of the subgenre, but it also violates a dozen "rules" of screenwriting. For that alone Black Christmas is a nice stick in the eye of the rules-hounds and screenwriting seminarians.
Now look at Peter and Jess again. Recognize them? At some point you've probably seen her as Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. Also she played the Virgin Mary in Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth. And Keir Dullea? Well, you might have seen him being stalked by a computer in Kubrick's 2001. That's right, Peter is better known as Dave. You'd think he'd be better at finding a killer and unplugging him, but no he's just good at smashing pianos angrily.
And then there are the other two sorority sisters, Phyl and Barb. Phyl is played by SCTV's Andrea Martin and Barb is played by Margot "Lois Lane" Kidder. Barb gets most of the best lines in this film. She has a long painful anecdote about seeing turtles doing it at the zoo and she tells the cops that the phone number at the sorority house is Fellatio 20880. The appropriately named Barb also comes out with the zinger "Darling, you can't rape a townie." Wow, that's pretty cold there, Barb. Barb is stabbed to death with a glass unicorn while a group of Christmas caroling children sing at the door, but it's a good bet Barb was too drunk to notice she was dead. Phyllis, on the other hand is quite sober when she goes upstairs to check on Barb and gets killed. It might have been better to also put her chubby boyfriend and his ridiculous jewfro out of everyone's misery.
The house mother of this crew is an old drunk nicknamed Mrs. Mac who used to be quite the floozie and now just hides whiskey in various locations all around the house. As you can imagine, she has to die in a particularly ingenious way with a crane hook.
As for Jess, she has the worst time of it as she is in the house alone with the killer and doesn't even know it. When she finally gets the word that the killer has been calling from inside the house the whole time it's still pretty terrifying even though we already know that to be the case.
On the fifth day of Christmas Herman Melville gave to me...a very serious Ahab character.
The white knight of the film is Lt. Kenneth Fuller played by the great John Saxon who would go on to play another police Lieutenant in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Saxon brings a sense of earnestness and reassurance to the story. He's not so much an Ahab as an Ishmael. Once he's on the case you think maybe the girls have a chance. But then, they don't but it's not really Fuller's fault.
If you're looking for a genuine fright fest and don't want to deal with blood and gore, then Black Christmas is a good bet. Sure, there are a lot of funny aspects to something this old, but on the other hand the film is still revolutionary compared to the relatively conservative attitudes (both aesthetic and social) that are enshrined in more contemporary fare. At any rate, the juxtaposition of a happy holiday with brutal horror is another thing that we really owe to Black Christmas which paved the way not only for so many Christmas themed horror films but also a slew of other holiday slasher films like My Bloody Valentine, April Fool's Day, Prom Night, Slay-bor Day, etc.
Special Edition Bonus Material
1. 12 Days of Black Christmas (2006)
Written and Directed by Dan Duffin
John Saxon narrates this short history about the process of making Black Christmas and its place in horror film history. The script was based on a series of killings in Montreal. Clark did the film as an exercise in formal experimentation. Could you make film where you never see the killer and which lacks the typical kind of resolution you get elsewhere? Could it work? The live interviews included here are the edited versions of the interviews with Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder and Art Hindle that are included separately along with interviews with John Saxon, Lynne Griffin, Doug McGrath (who played Sgt. Nash), art director Karen Bromley. Also making an appearance is cameraman Bert Dunk, who was responsible for much of the POV shooting that made this such an innovative film. Carl Zittrer notes how Bob Clark asked for less scoring and the overall effect is that's it a quieter film that doesn't give away too much or overdetermine the direction of the film.
2. "Uncovered" Sound Scenes
A. Trellis Climb -- In this sound mix you can hear the conversations inside the house more clearly while the killer climbs the trellis.
B. Final pan
Billy (the killer) can be clearly heard giggling in the final series of shots that pan about the house where Jess is sleeping off the stress of the terror ride. It's pretty damn creepy.
I don't know if these scenes add much.
3. Midnight Q&A
Taped after a midnight screening of Black Christmas at the Nuart in Santa Monica, California in December 2004 this series of audience questions features composer Carl Zittrer, John Saxon and Bob Clark. Clark and his son were killed in a head on collision with a drunk driver in April 2007.
Clark mentions that the remake is in the works that will go deeper into the question of the background of the killer, Billy and his sister Agnes who he mentions in his ramblings.
Saxon's part originally went to Edmond O'Brien because Saxon had a scheduling conflict but O'Brien was suffering from Alzheimer's disease and had to be let go and luckily Saxon was available again.
4. Interviews
Olivia Hussey
Black Christmas I took because I had just given birth to my first child and I'd never done a scary film...
These interviews are a bit rough--the interviewer isn't the smoothest one I've ever heard--but I think the relative unpolished aspect of them gives them a genuineness that is missing from the more packaged making of things that are usually attached as special features. It's nice getting a retrospective look at a film from people who haven't completely disowned it. Hussey has some good points about how the mystery of not knowing is scarier than films that show and tell everything.
Margot Kidder
"When you did horror movies you sort of thought nobody would see them..."
Margot Kidder sitting poolside and recounting the days of being young and Canadian and struggling as an actor.
"As young people we were a lot looser than you guys are."
True enough. I like the things Kidder has to say about career advice. It's all surprisingly lucid.
Art Hindle
Hindle, who played Clare's boyfriend has some of the best memories of the film. He apparently used his own coat in the film and still has it. The interviewers, though, seem like barely competent and overeager fanboys.
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