So here's the story of two slashers that almost made the grade.
Hell Night certainly starts off like it's going to make that grade. The first half of the movie, establishing the plot of a frat/sorority combo hazing initiates by making them stay in a mansion that was the scene of a family massacre, is great. Most characters are likeable, nonstandard types who speak dialogue that is fairly clever, sets are appropriately spooky, and there's an undercurrent of suspense deep enough that you almost don't mind that nothing in the film has happened for like 45 minutes. After all, they've gotta have some pretty spooky scares and satisfying kills lined up in their coat pockets, right?
It's at the 45 minute mark, when stuff occasionally starts to happen, that you notice a certain problem with this film. You know those scenes in famous horror movies when a victim is slowly moving down a hallway or staircase, the camera slowly tracking behind them as they take one small step after another, and you're left wondering what's going to happen, and then AGGGGGH???? Imagine that, except it's happening every scene and usually leads to nothing happening. This isn't even an exaggeration. No staircase, hallway, or hedge maze is safe from 5-minute walkthroughs of agony where the character steps, turns their heads, steps again, pretends to be scared about something we don't hear, steps again, and GOD IT IS JUST A STAIRCASE CAN YOU PLEASE JUST WALK DOWN IT MORE THAN A STEP A MINUTE
I understand the "reasoning" behind the decision. Hell Night really wants to bring in an element of Gothic horror, in the grand scheme of Byron, Dark Shadows, and a million other films about people wandering around in spooky houses with vague dreads skulking about. The director even has everyone wearing (i mean aside from the token slut but who cares) period clothes in some effort to trick our minds into thinking that it's perfectly okay to have a 4 minute cave exploration that is literally just two corridors filmed at different angles over and over again. But there's a fine line between "classically raising tension" and "clearly just trying to pad film length because if any of these people moved at normal speed we'd have been finished with this shit thirty minutes ago." In other words, if you're going to meld traditional slasher style with something out of a forgotten Vincent Price film, you actually need to include some traditional slasher style in your idiot soup.
It also doesn't help when the primary party in all this wanderdashery is Linda Blair. I mean Linda no disrespect, but holy god I hope that her acting fee wasn't the reason that the sfx budget in this film is limited to "fake stabbing pitchfork and dollar store monster mask." Every other actor is clearly enjoying themselves in the picture, but Linda clearly hates everyone and everything around her, viewing the film as just another paycheck summoned from the wailing of a thousand nerdy fans of the Exorcist. And the only thing to distract us from a chubby 30-year-old pretending to be a sexy coed are slow walks and probably the lamest death scenes imaginable. Granted, 1981 and everything, but the murders just feel like afterthoughts: "oh no something scary guess I should get my neck snapped or something." Worse is the fact that deaths somehow get progressively lamer, going from workmanlike beheadings and stabbings to "get bonked off camera" and "most unsatisfying defenestration ever."
If it sounds like I hated Hell Night, that's not true! I'm hurt by it, since the first half is so goddamned good and spooky and fully deserving of the hype people seem to set towards it, but then the second half devolves into some sort of weird parody of what was excellent before. Don't do that, films. My heart, she holler.
Black Christmas, on the other hands, seems to exist purely as the least hype movie in existence. Critics hated this movie with a white hot passion, and pretty much everyone seems to have followed suit. I can virtually guarantee that, after watching the remake of one of the grandpappys of slashers, that most of these people just read a summary of the original film and decided that REMAKE EQUAL BAD ARRRRRGH. Black Christmas is not a great movie, but lumping it in with shit like "Anything from Platinum Dunes" just shows how banal and uneducated most critics are about horror films that aren't presented as some GENRE DEFYING MASTERPIECE. Let's be clear here. Anyone who started their review with some adulation of the original are talking out of their butts. The original Black Christmas was a massive inspiration for alot of movies I love, but taking it on its own merits, there's so many goddamned problems with this movie. Bored actresses, boring deaths, scenes that go nowhere...wait. Let's not talk about this anymore. I feel weird.
What I find so weird about reviews trashing the remake is that they generally treat the film as basically identical to all the other horror remakes released at the time. You know the type: PG-13, a completely soulless plot where like 3 people get killed, an unceasing feeling that your life is slowing draining out as you watch some CW actress run down another corridor. While Black Christmas has significant issues, being a pale cookie cutter remake is not one of them. The plot operates fast as hell, there's a genuinely funny black humor throughout, and while not especially gory, it gets the job done. The actresses are still CW garbage, but the movie rightfully notices this and thus paints them all in as unflattering a light possible.
Black Christmas is not really a good movie. The plot is occasionally too ridiculous for its own good, and there's roughly thirteen subplots that seem to go absolutely nowhere since it's basically impossible to identify any of the actresses among each other. Making actresses unlikeable still doesn't really help with their lack of acting chops, and there's tons of confusing offscreen deaths that ruin the flow of the film. Still, considering it was made during the second half of the 2000s (destined to be known as possibly the worst time for horror since the 1910s), whatever. Go watch it on comcast on demand. It's FREEEEEEEEEEEE.
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