Movie Review: Black Christmas

Black Christmas (2006) 

Directed by Glenn Morgan 

Written by Glenn Morgan

Staring Katie Cassidy, Michelle Trachtenberg, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Oliver Hudson, Lacey Chabert

Release Date December 25th, 2006

Published December 25th, 2006

In 1974 Black Christmas shocked audiences with a Christmas based, blood soaked massacre. The film was only notable for its Christmas horror setting and was soon forgotten. 32 years later a pair of shock masters, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who know a good marketing hook when they see one, acquired the remake rights and rushed out new version of Black Christmas just in time for the holiday season.

Crafted by one of the minds behind the Final Destination series, Glen Morgan, Black Christmas is, once again, only notable for its release date. Though soaked in bloody, horror film tradition, Black Christmas is simply yet another rehash of horror movie cliches.

Michelle Trachtenberg, of Buffy The Vampire Slayer fame, heads a cast of pretty faces as a sorority sister who finds her self stuck on campus for Christmas. Along with her sisters played by Katie Cassidy, Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Final Destination 3), Lacey Chabert (Party of Five) and their house mother Mrs. Mac (Andrea Martin, star of the original Black Christmas), she is exchanging gifts and trading stories when a strange phone call sets off a series of horrifying deaths.

It seems that the girls sorority house was once the home of a serial killer who killed and ate his mother on Christmas day; some 20 years earlier. Now, having escaped from a mental institution, Billy (Robert Mann) has come home and is ready to make the sisters his new family. Billy isn't alone, the daughter he had by his own mother is also home to get in on the carnage.

It's a creepy idea but in execution, Black Christmas is little more than a collection of horror movie cliches. Nubile flesh is modestly displayed. Girls run upstairs when they should run outside. Cops are incapacitated and the killers make their murders more elaborate and gruesome when a simpler approach might save some time and work more effectively.

I was surprised to find this collection of cliches was directed by Glen Morgan who with his producing partner James Wong worked on the X-Files TV show and created the clever, if over done, Final Destination series. Morgan's direction of Destination 1 & 3 was, at the very least witty, if not all that frightening. Going for classic slasher movie scares in Black Christmas, Morgan loses the wit in favor of more blood. He should have stuck with his wits.

The cast of Black Christmas reads like the rejected casting for the WB teen drama One Tree Hill. Michelle Trachtenberg, former Harriet The Spy and Buffy The Vampire Slayer alum, Lacey Chabert, the forgotten member of the Party of Five cast, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, star of Final Destination 3 and....nothing else, and Oliver Hudson who knows his way around a teen drama, he guest starred on Dawson's Creek as a wrong side of the tracks bad boy.

This Clearasil approved cast is pleasant to look at but their acting leaves much to be desired. Not that Black Christmas calls for much acting beyond run, scream and die painfully. Though the film does carry an R-rating, the fresh faced cast is not called upon for the kind of nudity that might give a slight erotic charge to all of the carnage. There are glimpses of a naked back in the shower, but only hints of the kind of exposure we are used to in the slasher genre.

Black Christmas pales in comparison to the creepy 1974 original, though that film isn't all that great either. Too weak kneed for a typical exploitation film, but too bloody for the dull PG-13 lot that has been stinking up the horror genre, Black Christmas inhabits an unhappy middle-ground between enjoyable crap and just plain crap. Any less interesting and Wes Craven would have slapped his name on it as producer.

Movie Review: Final Destination 3

Final Destination 3 (2006) 

Directed by James Wong 

Written by Glenn Morgan 

Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman, Gina Holden, Texas Battle 

Release Date February 10th, 2006

Published February 9th, 2006

Final Destination was an inventive little horror movie featuring a cache of young semi-recognizable faces including future stars Sean William Scott, Devon Sawa and Ali Larter. The film, written and directed by the X-Files team of James Wong and Glen Morgan, cleverly devised unique and terrifying ways of dispatching their film's teenage victims without the aid of a supernatural killing machine ala Jason or Freddy.

Instead, Wong and Morgan's killer was death itself, and it's fated design for all living things. A deep concept for such a B-picture. The film never really delves all that deeply into the philosophical, preferring to focus on staging its gore. In that limited capacity it was a pretty entertaining little flick. The sequel, the highly ironic Final Destination 2, continued the high-body-count, low-brain-function fun and now, six years after the original and with Wong and Morgan back at the helm (after abandoning chapter two), Final Destination 3 arrives with more gore and even less brain function.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead takes up the starring mantel of Final Destination 3 as Wendy, a soon-to-graduate high schooler who has an ominous vision of death at a carnival. As she boards a roller coaster called Devil's Flight, Wendy envisions the coaster flying off the tracks killing everyone onboard. Seated at the back of the coaster, Wendy freaks out and is kicked off the ride along with Kevin (Ryan Merriman), her best friends boyfriend; Lewis (Texas Battle), a combative jock; Frankie (Sam Easton), a camera wielding pervert; and Ashlynn (Crystal Lowe) and Ashley (Chelan Simmons), a pair of bimbo best friends.

Once everyone is removed, the coaster does indeed crash, killing everyone who remained onboard--including Wendy and Kevin's respective love interests. Something familiar in Wendy's vision of death leads Kevin to research premonitions and he finds the story of Flight 180, the plane explosion that killed a class of high school students on a trip to Paris.

As you may recall from the original movie, a boy (played by Devon Sawa) had a vision of the plane blowing up, got off the plane with a few friends and then witnessed the explosion. The fates then conspired to eliminate the survivors. Sensing a similar pattern could be in effect for the survivors of the roller coaster disaster, Kevin and Wendy set out to prevent fate from taking them and their friends.

As the film progresses--call this a spoiler if you like though the trailer has given as much away--each of the survivors is killed in a fashion that is as goofy and gory as possible. Two characters are cooked to death in tanning beds, another is the victim of a nail gun and still another is violently and bloodily crushed by a falling sign. Each killing is more bloody and violent than the last.

James Wong and Glen Morgan return to the series with a violent flourish. Taking on the challenge of finding more ingenious ways to brutally kill cute teenagers, Wong and Morgan have gone to extremes that only Saw series creator Leigh Whannell can possibly relate to. Elaborately constructed crushings, beheadings and burnings are the core of Final Destination 3, and with that limited criteria for judging the film, it's a pretty entertaining gore fest.

I must, however, wonder what it all means... The Final Destination series, that is. I compared Final Destination 3 briefly with Saw and Saw 2 because both films delight in the dramatically staged kill. However, the Saw films are clearly superior to Final Destination because writer Leigh Whannell posits a purpose to his violence while each of the Final Destination films are mindless exercises in staging violence.

In dealing with what is arguably mankind's greatest fear--death--where is the philosophy, where is the religion? If fate is the stalking killer of Final Destination 3, what belief system is then proving itself true? The film adopts the illusion of depth, but Wong and Morgan are never the least bit interested in exploring the subjects they raise. The film is simply an elaborate mousetrap game of staging and execution.

Since Final Destination 3 is just another mindless entry into the horror genre, you have to forgive the film's lack of depth to a point. From the perspective of this often vapid genre, the creators of Final Destination 3 are on the vanguard of staging the violent, exceedingly complex death scenarios.

One cannot deny that the many violent deaths in each of the three Final Destination films are well-staged and either terrifyingly horrific or ironically sublime. Indeed, as often as an audience is awed by the violent endings, we are left laughing at the elaborate conspiracy of innocuous coincidence that leads to the death of the idiotic characters.

Take, for instance, the deaths of  Final Destination 3's pair of bimbo high schoolers Ashlynn and Ashley. The two beautiful young ladies are dispatched in a fiery sunbathing accident. Both are needlessly topless and die while listening to the Ohio Players classic "Love Rollercoaster". The crafting of their death involves an electrical short caused by errantly placed slushy, a loose shelf, a coat rack and a tube of suntan lotion. Its impossible to figure if fate was at work in their death or maybe just the ghostly specter of McGyver.

It might be unfair to fault something as innocuous as Final Destination 3 for being mindless, but after three films, the premise is wearing thin without some kind of philosophy to underline it--some kind of intelligence to give audiences something to ponder.  Meanwhile, we await the next bizarre conspiracy of events to kill some nameless teen victim.

On its own terms, Final Destination 3 is undeniably entertaining. Forgive me, however, if I prefer the more cerebral (yet equally violent) Saw and Saw 2.