Say what you will about your standard Holiday movies, but there are few that feature this much incest and cannibalism. The much-maligned horror remake mania era of the early aughts tended to trend toward the "take an old(er) thing and make it gross" school of thought, and this is no different. There's some fun to be had with that mindset. It's not like the original Black Christmas was a sweet and cuddly bit a fluff itself. This particular remake eschews the tension of the original in favor of lurid visuals and outright lunacy. Your mileage will vary. This will truly be one of the worst Christmases ever.
We have sorority girls, and they are in peril. This is nothing new. What is new is that one of the traditions upheld by this particular sorority house is that they leave a present underneath their tree for "Billy." He's one of the former occupants; a legendary figure who murdered his own family on Christmas. The sorority sisters navigate their own dramas (relationships! rivalries! strong drink!) while a snow storm rages outside. In a somewhat inspired bit, Billy escapes the local asylum via the clever use of a sharpened candy cane. The rest goes on more or less as you might expect, save for the flashbacks of Billy's origin story.
This is the good shit.
Billy's origin story is one for the ages. He's an abused child, like you may expect. He has a liver disease that makes him look like Sin City's Yellow Bastard, which is a bit less expected. He falls victim to a series of unfortunate events. His alcoholic mother murders his father, marries her brutish lover, banishes Billy to the attic, and eventually rapes him and becomes pregnant. When Billy's sister/daughter is born, he goes a bit off the deep end which culminates in the enthusiastic murder of his stepfather, the partial blinding of his sister/daughter, and death by rolling pin and cookie cutter for his mother. When the police arrive, our boy Billy is happily munching on Christmas cookies made from his dead mother/lover's cooked remains. We even get some nice close-ups of Billy crunching on prop bacon covered in frosting to sell the idea.
This all culminates in Billy and his long lost sister/daughter crawling through the walls of the sorority house like the People Under the Stairs and murdering the everloving yule out of our paper-thin sorority sisters with icicles and broken ornaments. There's a moral here somewhere about the importance of family, but let's not kid ourselves. We're here for the blood, and there's a lot of it. In it's best moments, it is colorful and manic and fun to watch in a mean-spirited way. It feels a bit like a gross cartoon created by a disturbed teenager. Black Xmas is one of those slasher movies that spends a lot of time building sympathy for its villain and contempt for its alleged protagonists. I'm not sure if that's a reccomendation or not. Perhaps it will work for you. I've had fun with the occasional rewatch. Something about a neon yellow Christmas enthusiast and his genetically cursed child/sibling menacing Lacey Chabert and Michelle Trachtenberg tickles me. I am probably not a good person.
I rate Black Xmas 7.5 out of 18 acts of holiday matricide.
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