Black Christmas

I didn't have a rental DVD to watch this week, due mainly to the weather, so I watched this film I'd recorded over Christmas.

It's actually really old - 1974 if memory serves - but it's quite good. I think they remade it recently, which seems to be quite a trend. I think they're remaking both Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street too.

I guess it's because the remakes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween must have done okay box-office wise. Dunno, it seems a bit ill-conceived to me.

Anyway, Black Christmas is a bit of an odd beast. The killer in it appears to be a truly deranged psychotic and he's pretty scary. There's lots of point-of-view camera work where he stalks around, for example. Also the scariest bits are these mad phone calls he makes where he rants and raves in weird voices and makes animal sounds.

I think also these are meant to provide you with some of the back story to his character. Some of the stuff he says hints that he was an abused child and stuff.

The problem is this doesn't really make sense. I mean, it's not like he behaves normally at all, and yet the flashes we get of him he seems to have a decent (70's) haircut and wears fairly new clothes. He also seems clean and presentable (very neat nails, for example) - how would he be like that if he's a total nut job?

I think what they were trying to do was sell a red herring to the audience about who the killer is supposed to be. The problem is that although this red herring is believable for the characters it isn't for us. Given some of the stuff we've seen it makes no sense as a red herring and so doesn't really provide any kind of scares.

There's also a lot of stuff that doesn't quite make sense. It's like one of the dead bodies is basically next to a window and although that window is for an attic it's weird that nobody sees it at all.

There are also quite a few moments where the noise of a murder is meant to be disguised by another sound, like carollers singing (it's set at Christmas if you hadn't guessed) but these don't really add up. Carollers aren't that loud.

Plus some of the ways people behave don't quite make sense.

I'm probably being too harsh here - it was a low budget psycho-killer film before such things were commonplace and as far as the actual killings go they're pretty good. It's just it seemed a bit long and with some long gaps between the murders that were filled with some stuff that didn't quite make sense.