A breathtakingly-awful SJW-fest with some of the most fundamentally-flawed logic & third-wave feminist rants *ever* put to screen, cookie-cutter slasher sequences, & weak performances mired in dilettantism. What is happening to movies? 1/10.

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Plot Synopsis: Hawthorne College is quieting down for the holidays. One by one, sorority girls on campus are being killed by a stalker. But the killer is about to discover that this generation’s women aren’t willing to become hapless victims as they fight back.

*Possible Spoilers Ahead*

Review

Halloween 2019. Unfriended. Happy Death Day. Hush. The Purge. If there’s one thing Blumhouse makes.. it’s interesting horror movies. Flaws and all (some much more than others – ahem, Purge), that brand’s badge has grown to mean something in modern Horror: youthful, quick-cutted, energy-driven imagination moviemaking rife with entertainment value and clever stylization. After the homerun of bringing Michael Myers into the 21st Century as well as one could with the Everest-expectations against that film from nescience, I was delighted by the prospect of them tackling another legendary slasher film amongst the best slasher movies ever and first holiday themed one: Black Christmas. That is, until now. Blumhouse has their first bonafide stinker of slasher-isms – a blunder even worse and more inexplicable being a remake of the original cult Christmas-horror classic peddling a legacy as one of the first slasher films and proof-of-concepted premise – and it’s painful to watch. A breathtakingly-awful SJW-fest with some of the most dangerously-flawed logic & third-wave feminist rants ever put to screen, cookie cutter slasher sequences, & shaky performances mired in dilettantism and agendas-over-art. What’s happening to filmmaking?

The (only) positive takeaways from Black Christmas: the setting & slasher design. The university/Greek Life setting (filmed on-site at the University of Otago) is absolutely stunning – a thoroughly proof-of-concepted gold mine for horror from Happy Death Day to Scream 2 to Haunting On Fraternity Row to Pledge to the original Black Christmas to the best to ever do the concept: Scream Queens. That same brilliance shines through in this visually-opulent blue-stone Hawthorne University setting, given a Christmas Wintery Flair wherein cool colors create a visual tone that’s perfect for a dark yuletide film and apt setting that could not have been better in set design & location-scouting. The slasher is well-designed too with a black-masked, robed grim reaper appearance that plays on the cultish calling cards of Greek Life and pays homage to genre greats before it – most notably & instantly: Scream’s Ghostface. The cinematography at whole is actually quite good bringing the canvas of exterior shots to life, but these are few paltry glimmers of hope in this desolate landscape of ludicrously-irresponsible SJW-pandering.

The slasher sequences arestrikingly awful. This came as a devastating surprise in Blumhouse’s otherwise strong horror reservoir. Halloween 2019, Happy Death Day, Unfriended, Hush.. heck, even the Purge movies had fine slasher sequences that at least brought imaginatism and gave you what you paid the price of admission for as a scary movie. Here, the scenes are tremendously lazy, trope-riddled, & downright-devoid of life or free-thinking. The shining example of this – and what dooms the entire film from the opening scene – is the Snowman yard one. Of course, the killer’s texting the victim; someone’s walking fast right behind the victim only to turn last-second; (most illogically) it happens in someone’s front yard of a neighborhood somehow none of the neighbors mere feet away were able to hear the frantic shrieks of a college-girl.. and the killer somehow able to constantly escape sight from single-digit inches away before teleporting into a house the owners (I guess?) were not home despite having all their lights and Christmas decorations on – that’s going to skyrocket your electric bill. A simulacrum of the most basic, stereotypical conventions in the genre all on display like a yard ornament cycling through factory-set light sequences. The slashers also wield unfair weaponry like bows and arrows that take away the human aspect and we’re deprived of even a meaningful, shocking reveal as the most important aspect in the genre due to its SJW-narrative. The only passable slasher sequence in the entire film is the Christmas Lights continuous long take in what’s otherwise perhaps the most uninspired slasher movie of All-Time.

The performances in Black Christmas feel like they were picked out of a casting list only first-timers were even allowed to audition for. The acting is absolutely awful – from Imogen Poots’ final girl Riley perhaps the most bland & lifeless final girl in genre history to Aleyse Shannon’s stereotypical angry-feminist Kris personifying *everything* the general public vexes about crass/insolent third-wave feminism to Cary Elwes’ obviously-complicit professor to Caleb Eberhart & Simon Mead’s bumbling, submissive husks of obedience the cast & crew obviously views as the only acceptable way for men to act in this day and age – laughably hypocritical reversal of what they’re so inflamed about. There is not one interesting character to boot, and writing prowess nonexistent by unconscionably-cringey, cheeseball lines like “we’re ants” & the Oscar-worthy, powerful line to end all lines: “suck a fat fart.” Boom. It feels like the script and film itself were the products of a high school-film project that – through nepotism or some other back channel – were able to get millions and convince executives to greenlight this on the big screen. The only remnant of character development in the entire film is Riley’s conversion to the cult of man-hating feminists she “should’ve been fighting with all along” with after she goes through a final arc that might be the most ludicrously-laughable in filmic history.

The final act of Black Christmas might be the most laughably-absurd, nauseatingly-pretentious, breathtakingly-flawed final act in moviemaking history – and absolutely obliterates any shred of realism, storytelling, or passability of the rest of the film. Chalking up the entire film’s slasher-isms and build-up to a magic – yes, magic – spell, feeling like a C-film knockoff of Harry Potter whose mention alone of ‘Fraternitus Fraterum’ sent waves of laughter throughout the audience – is the most imbecilic plot decision I’ve ever heard. The finale is riddled with illogic and plot holes – 1) the pledges are given ‘super strength and combat ability’ by the black magic enough to break someone’s neck with their bare hands, yet can’t fight off a couple of teenage girls with shovels?, (2) why they would kill a mole volunteering to help them carry out their ludicrous plan (don’t even get me started on that), just for a show of power to someone they’re going to take out anyway before she can even tell anyone?, 3) Riley is somehow able to pick up and smash a solid marble bust of the founder literally heavier than she is with her bare hands, 4) if the head was busted and magic hold it had over the frat members commanding their actions undone, why lock them in the room to trap them as they’re burned alive? That’s murder of innocent people more sadistic and casualty-heavy than anything the slasher did, carried out by the presented-‘heroes’ of the movie – but who cares about logic or basic plot and writing conventions? GIRL POWER!

I can’t even find the words to describe how problematic & dangerously-wrong the film’s narrative & SJW-isms are. In case Hollywood hasn’t been paying attention: radicalized feminist & ultra-political SJW films are bombing at the Box Office at rates never before seen in moviemaking history: This year ALONE saw Terminator: Dark Fate, Charlie’s Angels 2019, What Men Want, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, & many others lose *Billions* and get mercilessly ripped to shreds by audiences and moviegoers. So, why keep making them? The entire point of cinema is to provide an escapist haven people from all walks of life can bring their burdens and life problems to turning the world off for 2 hours. Even for the films that do tackle world problems, they do so subtlety – with some metaphor, symbolism, & intellectual-subtext you actually have to analyze and look closer at to find it’s true meaning. Here, your face is shoved with so brash & controversial a topic from the very beginning lectures, it’s perhaps the most abrasive and instant turn-off I’ve ever witnessed in film – but I powered through for you guys to write this review. The film presents its subjects’ sexually-assaultive problems and misogynist agendas as if it is a pervasive defect all men of all walks of life by the billions are duplicitously-complicit in – when in reality, it’s maybe 0.0001% of them doing this kind of stuff. Fraternities are not exactly what I would call the safest, most exemplar place to find outstanding, intellectually-provocative, mild-mannered male specimens of the species – so that begs to question – especially for feminists and the film’s subjects so terrified of the unmentionable demon-kin of frat bro’s – why go there? It’s a basic developmental awareness metric: avoid dangerous places. Especially don’t walk in there (self-objectifyingly) dressed in scanty cleavage-heavy Santa lingerie, have daily sex, and drink to blackout levels every night – the same awareness level to not take nighttime strolls through back alleys you’ve been told there are muggers in.. dressed in thousands-worth of bling and carrying a wad of hundreds.

The film’s assertion that these problems are wildly-pervasive and generalization that are only two types of women: bra-burning feminists hating men enough to ‘fight’ every single aspect of the ‘patriarchy’ (hundreds of years ago, absolutely there were inequities no question. But what rights do men have that women don’t *today?*) or submissive ghosts like there isn’t a Grand Canyon of room in the middle – and the same could be said flipped the other way for a stalemate on those grounds – is laughable. The film presents only two acceptable men not duplicitously plotting the systematic genocide of BILLIONS of women behind the scenes – I know; don’t even have the time to explain all the things wrong & offensive about this – in this new world order: the abused boyfriend who follows his girlfriend around like an obedient puppy (and is systemically-taken out the second he talks back – rightfully – calling out the double-standard of how the girls can walk into a frat and accuse them all of being rapiests, but god forbid they get mad or question it instead of just taking it like good boys) Nate and bumbling, awkward personality-less man of color only spared because of his color (as a man of color too writing this, this was tokenism at its finest) Landon. The message this sends is a laughably-hypocritical reversal so-called feminists honestly must believe is some warped form of equality – and is more like converting normal guys into emasculated husks of obedience that will be the only ones spared in this new order as twisted as AKO.

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Conclusion

The SJW’s are coming, and they’re here to ruin your holiday season! Black Christmas feels like a HS-film project peddling plucky girl (oh, I’m sorry: WOMAN)-power narratives unphased by its sexist logical fallacies and problematic narratives/portrayals. A breathtakingly-awful SJW-fest with some of the most dangerously-flawed logic & third-wave feminist rants ever put to screen, cookie cutter slasher sequences, & shaky performances mired in dilettantism and agendas-over-art, it is without question one of – if not THE worst film of 2019 and of recent memory. You can’t even go see a movie anymore without being sold a political agenda by a virtue-signaling multinational corporation who couldn’t care less about the cause and just want to come across ‘woke’ to sell more tickets, but does so in baboon-subtlety shoving topics and politics down audiences’ throats who have time and again sent the deafening message they do not want to see it. Since when did it become a crime to have an escapist film that focused on storytelling over vexing audiences with intensely-controversial politics and hate language towards half the population under the guise of progressivism? What’s happening to filmmaking?

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