Now Playing
Critics & Publications
Archives: A-Z Index
Advanced Search

Upcoming Release Calendar
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

sort by name

sort by score

38 12 Rounds
48 17 Again
76 Adventureland
48 Angels & Demons
54 Battle for Terra
xx Bruno
80 Coraline
40 Dance Flick
83 Drag Me to Hell
72 Earth
45 Fast & Furious
61 Fighting
34 Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
72 Gran Torino
73 Hangover, The
47 Hannah Montana: The Movie
51 Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
54 Imagine That
41 Knowing
32 Land of the Lost
56 Monsters vs. Aliens
34 My Life in Ruins
51 My Sister's Keeper
46 Next Day Air
42 Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
54 Observe and Report
25 Obsessed
48 Proposal, The
70 Public Enemies
61 Soloist, The
83 Star Trek
64 State of Play
55 Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, The
52 Terminator Salvation
35 Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
77 Under the Sea 3D
88 Up
43 X-Men Origins: Wolverine
34 Year One

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

sort by name

sort by score

67 $9.99
75 24 City
66 Adoration
74 Afghan Star
48 Alien Trespass
56 American Violet
82 Anvil! The Story of Anvil
57 Away We Go
81 Beaches of Agnes, The
62 Big Man Japan
28 Big Shot-Caller, The
78 Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story, The
55 Brothers Bloom, The
82 Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
xx Call of the Wild
63 Cheri
62 Cherry Blossoms
63 Dead Snow
65 Departures
18 Downloading Nancy
58 Easy Virtue
70 End of the Line, The
77 Every Little Step
64 Examined Life
80 Food, Inc.
38 Gigantic
56 Girl from Monaco, The
67 Girlfriend Experience, The
87 Gomorrah
89 Goodbye Solo
63 Great Buck Howard, The
79 Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
xx Home
82 Hunger
91 Hurt Locker, The
16 I Hate Valentine's Day
81 Il Divo
54 Is Anybody There?
71 Jerichow
58 Julia
74 Lemon Tree
36 Life is Hot in Cracktown
40 Limits of Control, The
42 Little Ashes
64 Lymelife
50 Management
57 Merry Gentleman, The
66 Moon
35 New York
62 Not Forgotten
xx Offshore
78 O'Horten
64 Outrage
40 Paris 36
54 Pontypool
71 Pressure Cooker
52 Quiet Chaos
83 Revanche
67 Rudo y Cursi
86 Seraphine
65 Sex Positive
70 Shall We Kiss?
77 Sin Nombre
59 Sleep Dealer
74 Song of Sparrows, The
54 Stoning of Soraya M., The
82 Sugar
84 Summer Hours
61 Sunshine Cleaning
28 Surveillance
42 Tennessee
63 Tetro
64 Throw Down Your Heart
80 Tokyo Sonata
63 Tokyo!
70 Tony Manero
74 Treeless Mountain
88 Tulpan
74 Two Lovers
83 Tyson
83 U2 3D
60 Under Our Skin
69 Unmistaken Child
69 Valentino: The Last Emperor
22 What Goes Up
45 Whatever Works
57 Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Black Christmas
Dimension Films / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer


3.6

based on 17 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 107 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

FILM:

Willard

MPAA RATING: R for strong horror violence and gore, sexuality, nudity and language

Starring Katie Cassidy, Michelle Trachtenberg, Kristen Cloke, Crystal Lowe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Oliver Hudson, Lacey Chabert, and Andrea Martin

The remake of the classic 1974 horror thriller in which a sorority house is terrorized by a killer who makes frightening telephone calls before murdering the sorority sisters during the Christmas break. (Dimension Films)

GENRE(S):	Horror \| Suspense/Thriller
WRITTEN BY:	Glen Morgan Roy Moore (1974 screenplay)
DIRECTED BY:	Glen Morgan
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: April 3, 2007 Theatrical: December 25, 2006
RUNNING TIME:	84 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	Canada / USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

LA Weekly Chuck Wilson

The flashbacks are wittily gothic, and the present-day murder scenes have the absurdist, chain-reaction intricacy of the "Final Destination" deaths.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

This film is an evocative, effective entry into the holiday blood-spray subgenre in its own right. And if it doesn't make your skin crawl ... you probably ate too much Christmas dinner.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Morgan borrows Christmas-specific nastiness from a wide range of fright flicks, but the result is less than the sum of its parts.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

Where the first film was a seminal forerunner of early stalker classics like "Halloween," this version feels as stale as old gingerbread.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Silly, obvious, clumsy, and just gruesome enough to keep jaded genre fans from angrily throwing popcorn at the screen.

The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen

There are a couple clever touches here and there, including one sequence in which the end of a candy cane has been carefully licked into a highly lethal weapon, but for the most part the accompanying histrionics feel more regressive than retro.

Los Angeles Times Sam Adams

Like an ugly tie or a pair of slipper socks, Black Christmas is destined to be forgotten the instant it's unwrapped, gathering dust until the season rolls around again.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

It exchanges the police subplot that gave the earlier film its steady pace for a lot of pointless backstory about the mother-fixated stalker.

Entertainment Weekly Gregory Kirshling

Twice as many accidental laughs as scares.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Seems to go out of its way to obliterate all the elements that made the original so special.

San Francisco Chronicle Peter Hartlaub

Props to the Weinstein Brothers for having the guts to release a slasher film on Christmas Day. Too bad this one is the cinematic equivalent of tryptophan.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Jason Anderson

Lazy, perfunctory and free of tension, the new version will satisfy neither the admirers of the original nor anyone looking for a gory respite from seasonal good cheer.

The New York Times Jeannette Catsoulis

With a peephole-riddled set and a flashback-heavy screenplay, Black Christmas smothers terror beneath a blanket of unnecessary information, revealing too much and teasing too little.

Empire Kat Brown

Bad film fans will think Christmas has come early, everyone else should ask for the receipt.

Variety Joe Leydon

It's debatable whether the original 1974 "Black Christmas" is, as its most rabid fans claim, the mother of all slasher movies. But there can be no argument regarding the scant merits of its slapdash, soporifically routine remake, suitable only for the least discriminating of gore hounds.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

The remake neither pays perceptive tribute to the original nor updates it in anything but hackneyed form.

Village Voice Jim Ridley

The product itself isn't so much afterthought as afterbirth -- a bloody mess to be dumped discreetly.

The average user rating for this movie is 3.6 (out of 10) based on 107 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Ryan S. gave it a0:
Probably one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Acting is terrible, story sucks...everything about this movie is horrible.

Dan A gave it a0:
So stale. Nowadays the horror film doesn't consist of tactics to scare the audience, but instead we're treated to good looking women who are killed by random people with no story and all in the same exact way. I'm not kidding. Every single person in this movie other than the killers and one woman are stabbed to death. One person's stabbed with a pen, another with a candy cane, and ice skate, a FREAKING unicorn decoration, an icicle magically falls through a woman's face. It's ridiculous.

James H. gave it a2:
A clumsy remake that did much more to buitcher the plot and dark ending of its namesake than it did to butcher utterly forgettable sorority girls.

Logan H. gave it a10:
I loved the sense of violent tension.

Wesley E. gave it a7:
A surprisingly large amount of fun packaged into what could be viewed as a very mediocre set of decorations on a rotten Christmas ham. One of the better horror remakes of recent times, made all the better by it's lack of morality. Certainly better than the recent The Hills Have Eyes II.

Patrick C. gave it a1:
This film is a poor versoin of the original, baring the same name. No film of last year was great, but this film was just awful. Everything about this movie is just terrible.

Mark C. gave it an8:
I was pleasantly surprised by this movie, I expected a total ripoff of the original but found a more extended background for the Christmas Killer. Found myself saying more than a few times "nasty", is the way people where killed off. To Glen Morgan I would like to say that I've gone from Renting this DVD to Buying it, it is a good companion to my original, thank you for a new Christmas Slasher movie.

Black Christmas Dimension Films / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Black Christmas
Dimension Films / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer