"You messed with the wrong sisters!"







-Kris Presley





As winter break begins, the sorority sisters of MKE starts to go missing. As the sisters fight for their survival, they also have to discover who is behind the attacks and what they find is worse than any of them could have imagined.









What Works:





This section will be extremely brief. The only thing I appreciated about Black Christmas is the general story. A group of sorority sisters taking on evil frat guys is a a fun idea and very different from the other movies in the series. On paper, this sounds like a fun movie.









What Sucks:





Where do I even begin? Black Christmas is the worst movie I have seen this year (haven't seen Cats yet). Far and away the main problem with the movie is the characters. The vast majority of them aren't memorable and the ones that are are unlikable. Besides Kris (Aleyse Shannon), none of the girls have any personality.





Speaking of Kris, while she does have personality, she is completely insufferable, but I think the movie wants us to like her. She's obnoxious to an extreme. Her character is focused on fighting the patriarchy, which is fine and with the themes of the story, it makes sense to have a character like her, but have a little bit of subtlety. Kris ends up being just the worst aspects of Tumblr personified.





What really rubbed me the wrong way was how Kris treats our main protagonist, Riley (Imogen Poots). One of the frat boys raped Riley some time before this movie begins and she is struggling to recover from that event. Kris keeps trying to push Riley into doing things she is uncomfortable doing or simply not ready for because that's how Kris wants her to respond. Victims need to handle their recovery in their own way and Kris' behavior really aggravated me. Listen to what the victim wants and needs! It's not about you, Kris! This would be fine if we weren't supposed to like Kris, but the message of the film is that Kris was right all along. It's incredibly frustrating.





This movie is even flawed on a technical level. The cinematography isn't very good and could have been much more stylistic with the Christmas theme. The movie also has way too many crash-zooms.





There are also a few key plot points that are brushed over very quickly. We see a list of names at one point that is evidently important, but we only see it for a second. There's also an important YouTube video, but it's hard to see and hear. It doesn't matter if it's more realistic, if it's important for the audience to know, show it to us!





Finally, the kills in this movie are so lame. It's a PG-13 movie, which sucks, but still. There's only one kill that has any amount of creativity and it's the first one. The rest simply suck.









Verdict:





Black Christmas is one of the worst movies I have ever seen in theaters and was an utterly miserable experience, which really sucks because the trailer makes it look really fun. The characters are boring or obnoxious, the cinematography is bad, the editing is flawed, and kills are underwhelming to say the least. It's somehow worse than the 2006 version of Black Christmas and that is saying something.



