Friday, December 21, 2012

Mini movie review: Black Christmas (1974)

Before Halloween, before Friday the Thirteenth, before there were hardly any slashers at all - there was Black Christmas.  This 1974 gem is a horror classic: a group of sorority girls, getting ready to go home for the holiday break, are terrorized by an unseen, unknown assailant.  SPOILERS AHEAD.  The first to go is meek Clare, suffocated and put in a rocking chair in the attic; next is the bawdy house mother.  Hot mess Barb, played joyously by a gorgeous Margot Kidder, spends most of her time drunk and then gets stabbed to death, in her bed, by a CRYSTAL EFFING UNICORN.  (That one is done rather artfully, actually.)  In the end, it isn't even clear if Final Girl Jess is going to make it out alive.  None of the kills are done on-screen but the tension is ratcheted up by a series of creepy, menacing phone calls the sorority house keeps getting, plus you never learn who the killer is or why he's doing it.  Only that he's there, lurking in the house, killing pretty girls.  If you are a fan of the slasher genre, you owe it to yourself to see Black Christmas - the original one.  I hear the 2006 remake is appalling.

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