"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Black Christmas

You probaly know director Bob Clark as the guy who did PORKY’S and A CHRISTMAS STORY. More recently he did the two BABY GENIUSES movies and something called KARATE DOG which, judging by the cover, is not a metaphorical title. But back in the day he was a pretty good director of horror movies. One of the ones he did was DEATHDREAM, a really eerie movie about a guy coming back undead from Vietnam and everybody is sort of in denial that he’s different. I liked that one a hell of alot better than HOMECOMING, Joe Dante’s sort of similar anti-war zombie thing from the Masters of Horror show.

But right after DEATHDREAM Clark did his most famous horror movie, BLACK CHRISTMAS, and it’s a pretty good one.

There are no killer Santas, not even maniac elves or savage, carnivorous reindeer. In fact there’s not too much of a Christmas ambience in the thing. But it does take place over Christmas break. This sorority house has been getting weird phone calls from some anonymous pervert. In the opening, one of the girls is attacked and suffocated in her room and taken up to the attic. The rest of the characters spend the whole movie trying to find her.

Black ChristmasThe next day, the girl’s dad shows up on campus to pick her up. After waiting forever he starts asking around for help and ends up meeting people who know his daughter, and together they look for her. Luckily her boyfriend has an in with the John Saxon at the police department so they are miraculously able to put together a search party when she hasn’t even been gone a day. (It’s refreshing to see a movie with a missing person where they don’t mention that “she has to be gone for 24 hours before she can be considered missing” thing.)

There’s a bunch of different characters. Two of them are alcoholics. Margot Kidder plays the trashiest girl who’s always drunk. I don’t really get the popularity of Margot Kidder, she is just not that appealing. But she seems like a real person. You also have Olivia Hussey, who is pregnant and wants to get an abortion. I’m not sure how they would portray that these days but in this movie they are sympathetic towards her. And you are definitely supposed to be suspicious of her boyfriend, who wants to keep the baby. He’s played by Keir Dullea, and it’s nice to see that he can be in college five years after being an astronaut in 2001. He plays kind of a cold, creepy classical pianist. There’s a weird scene where he does an important recital drenched in sweat and playing some crazy atonal thing that doesn’t go over well. Then later he violently kills the piano. Hmmm.

The phone calls that they get every once in a while are really creepy. In one case they’re aggressive and explicit, even using the c-word which is still pretty taboo all these years later (bet they don’t use that in the remake). But mostly they’re just bizarre and you can’t really figure out what they’re talking about. The guy keeps referring to himself as “Billy” and changing voices. There is a female voice too. It could be more than one killer or just a weirdo who’s good with voices or who knows what exactly. I hope it’s not that guy from POLICE ACADEMY who does the sound effects. Or any of those cartoon voice guys, you don’t want any of those freaks sneaking around your sorority house attic. Oh shit, or the one uncle from “Full House” who always had to do the Popeye voice and the Bullwinkle voice. That would be fucked up to have that dude stalking you. But at least you’d be able to spot him from a distance because of his Hawaiian shirt.

And seriously, it might be him. Here’s a big fuckin SPOILER. The twist at the end is that when you apparently find out who the killer is, it turns out not to be true. And then the movie ends without revealing who the killer really is, just that he’s still up there in the attic making phone calls. This is kind of a cool twist, but at the same time a little frustrating. Because you’re really programmed to think all this “it’s me, Billy” shit is gonna tie together and make perfect sense by the end. But you get no explanation at all. Who the fuck IS Billy? I don’t know.

I’ve always heard from certain horror snobs that HALLOWEEN is an inferior rip-off of BLACK CHRISTMAS. Now that I’ve seen it I know that idea is pretty ridiculous. Both take place on holidays, but the stories are completely different. The killers are nothing alike, the types of scares are nothing alike and the storylines are nothing alike (BLACK CHRISTMAS is a whodunit complete with black herrings and the whole works). The one major similarity is that both open with an extended voyeuristic shot from the POV of the killer. The scene is way creepier in HALLOWEEN but I have to admit that the one in BLACK CHRISTMAS is shot even better. I guess the cameraman attached a camera to his shoulder so he could turn, look up a ladder and that kind of thing. We go with him as he spies on the sorority house, climbs up the side and crawls into the attic. It’s very impressive.

I liked this, it made me want to watch other Bob Clark movies in case I missed some good ones. I’ll probaly skip SUPER BABIES, but KARATE DOG isn’t out of the question. I’d probaly start with CHILDREN SHOULDN’T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS, though. Or at least PORKY’S.

I should note, there is a remake of BLACK CHRISTMAS already being made, I believe by the FINAL DESTINATION dudes. I liked their remake of WILLARD so I don’t want to write it off, but it seems like a modern version would abandon everything that makes it BLACK CHRISTMAS. I mean, a huge part of the plot has to do with the police desperately trying to trace the phone call, and the killer having a phone hooked up in the attic. That’s not gonna cut it in the days of cell phones and caller ID. More importantly, I doubt they would keep the unresolved ending. You know they’re gonna come up with a backstory and a solution to the mystery, and since it wasn’t planned that way the first time it’s gonna feel phony. I think. But hopefully not.

<

This entry was posted on Monday, September 25th, 2006 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Horror, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

6 Responses to “Black Christmas”

  1. Vern, you mentioned that you might check out some more Bob Clark. I might be able to save you a trip to the kiddie section of the local video rental joint — KARATE DOG was a little disappointing, though not without its merits.

    Somehow, the filmatists thought it’d be okay in a movie called KARATE DOG to have one scene of the dog doing karate at the beginning and one scene of the dog doing karate at the end, with little to no karate in between. I mean, I’m not calling my lawyer with a false advertising complaint or anything, but I have certain expectations when I queue up a movie called KARATE DOG.

    As far as kids’ movies go, the hijinks & animal humor is pretty good, better than merely tolerable despite the mugging & wacky sound effects, and the dog does hilariously drive a convertible through a fence into some sludge. And Jaime Pressly can sure wear a dress; that’s the kind of body even the 7 year olds in the audience can appreciate. Also, if you think you’ve seen all the Matrix bullet time rip-offs the cinema of the early noughts had to offer but you haven’t yet seen KARATE DOG, you’d be wrong.

    One semi-Seagalesque touch is the dog Cho Cho’s philosophy of why he talks human English only to the main guy, a law enforcement computer nerd who struggles to earn the respect of his disapproving colleagues while he investigates a murder conspiracy & theft of a mysterious substance. The dog’s reason for barking and doing dog stuff with everyone else but talking perfect English to the protagonist is that he is the one human who “seeks the truth.” I could see Seagal ad-libbing that into the dialogue while Cho Cho lights incense and accepts tea from a modern geisha house poodle. The other humans are not truth-seekers, they are out of touch with their animal spirit, so they are all unworthy of hearing the dog talk, which is unfortunately in Chevy Chase’s voice in this one.

    The real star is Jon Voigt, whose character grows utterly insane due to drinking the magic revitalizing potion he stole from Pat Morita. His performance is a peaceful form of mega-acting. Voigt is in his own world in this one, sometimes deliberately spacing out like ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner used to do when he did interviews with Megan Kelly on Fox, sometimes rocking Michelle Bachmann-style crazy eyes and creeping out everyone else on the set, sometimes looking like he’s just there for the paycheck but is enjoying the hell out of himself regardless. His kung fu fight finale with Cho Cho is entertaining, making it the 2nd best animatronic/CGI creature versus human moment in Voigt’s career, after MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and ahead of TRANSFORMERS.

  2. I think you may have forgotten ANACONDA, Mouth. That was the film that really opened my eyes to the possibilities inherent in a fight to the death between Jon Voight and computer graphics.

  3. and speaking of Bob Clark, I will now discuss something that I don’t think gets enough credit, the shower scene in Porky’s and how realistic it is

    yes, I said realistic, if you notice in a lot of movies of the time when they needed a T&A scene they got really hot women, sometimes a Playboy model or something like that

    but the girls in the shower scene in Porky’s, while not unattractive, look like normal girls, not Playboy models

    it’s that context of realism, that if you were to really spy on girls showering in the 1950’s this is what you would see, makes the scene a lot sexier to me than most movie nude scenes and solidifies it’s status as a classic

  4. Good catch, Jake. Shit, I’ve gotta recalibrate everything I thought I knew about the *Jon Voigt vs. computer graphics* chapter of world history.

    Also, I’ve got the sudden urge to watch PORKY’S for some reason.

  5. I just watched this one last nite and the only thing I really liked about it was that it added to one of Bob Clark’s themes: people laughing uproariously at things. In Porkys you had the staff cracking up at Ballbricker, in A Christmas Story you have the mom dying over her son being a little piggy, and in this one the detective can’t stop laughing over the “fellatio” phone number. I like these scenes and the realistic infectiousness it brings to the films.
    Does it happen in any of Clarks other films? I can only hope there’s a scene like that in Deathdream or something.

  6. R.I.P. Margot Kidder

    You were so damned good in this great movie.

Leave a Reply





XHTML: You can use: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>