Black Christmas (remake)

Slaying siblings Billy and Agnes were kind of shrouded in mystery in the original Black Christmas film from the early 70s. Who were they? Were they both killing the stranded, snowed-in sorority sisters on that fateful Christmas eve, or was it an insane Billy acting alone but channeling his psychotic sister? And just what did Billy do to the baby Agnes, all those years ago?

Those were the great imponderables… until now. Unlike Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning — which promised a lot of back story and basically showed a deformed baby being born, then flashing forward 20 years — director Glen Morgan's remake tells a ton on the origins that twisted young minds and made killers.

Black Christmas 2006 vs. Black Christmas 1974 is like finding beneath your tree an X-Box compared to Pong, or a Tribotix Robotis Bioloid compared to a Malibu Barbie. In short: Things have definitely perked up in the gore department — in the original, we had one college girl die early on, get stashed up in the attic of the sorority house, then waited about another hour for the true shenanigans to begin. (In the meantime as we twiddled our thumbs, there were plenty of drunken antics from the Margo Kidder character, an abortion subplot with the Olivia Hussey character, a worried dad, and a baffled police department going through the motions.)

Here the Christmas stalkings are hung early on, and it's jingle hell all the way. In a nod to the original, Andrea Martin (who played a sorority sis back in the day) now plays the house mother. The story is basically the same: It's Christmas break but not everyone is going home, so some of the coeds have to spend the holidays alone together in the big, two-storey house that was once the site of a shocking multiple homicide.

The ensemble cast of Katie Cassidy, Michelle Trachtenberg, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Lacey Chabert, Kristen Cloke, Crystal Lowe, Jessica Harmon, Leela Savasta, and the token male played by Oliver Hudson all bleed in one way or another — but the most shocking and vomit-inducing ones are certainly in the flashbacks, in which Billy (Robert Mann) kills his abusive family using yuletide decorations and gingerbread man cookie-cutters as the implements of death.

The murder moments in Black Christmas teeter the line between raucous fun and disturbingly brutal. In the original, someone was suffocated with a clear plastic garment bag; the girl's dead face, as you saw it, was pensive, and therefore memorable and strangely sad. In this version opaque black bags are used, and the victims' unseen faces are viciously and repeatedly stabbed.

There were few death scenes in the original, relatively speaking, but here, thanks to Morgan and producer James Wong (the team genre fans know from The X-Files, the Final Destination films, and the Willard remake), the fatalities not only come fast and furious, the killer uses everything from icicles to ice-skates to skewer, eviscerate, cleave and strangle.

This remake is at times scary and suspenseful, deftly directed, and well-acted for the most part, but it was pretty outrageous in places (the clichés really push their luck, especially at the very end) and so extreme that I was sometimes pulled out of the film.

But Black Christmas was fun, and I do recommend it if you're in the mood for a lark (if not a partridge in a pear tree) on the 25th.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson