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Black Christmas
Dimension Films / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Black Christmas reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 22 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
3.6 out of 10
based on 17 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 105 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

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 

What The Critics Said

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...

50
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.
Read Full Review
50
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.
Read Full Review
38
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.
Read Full Review
38
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.
Read Full Review
38
Boston Globe Ty Burr
Silly, obvious, clumsy, and just gruesome enough to keep jaded genre fans from angrily throwing popcorn at the screen.
Read Full Review
30
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.
Read Full Review
30
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.
Read Full Review
30
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.
Read Full Review
25
Entertainment Weekly Gregory Kirshling
Twice as many accidental laughs as scares.
Read Full Review
25
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.
Read Full Review
25
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.
Read Full Review
25
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.
Read Full Review
20
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.
Read Full Review
20
Empire Kat Brown
Bad film fans will think Christmas has come early, everyone else should ask for the receipt.
Read Full Review
10
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.
Read Full Review
10
Washington Post Desson Thomson
The remake neither pays perceptive tribute to the original nor updates it in anything but hackneyed form.
Read Full Review
0
Village Voice Jim Ridley
The product itself isn't so much afterthought as afterbirth -- a bloody mess to be dumped discreetly.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 3.6 (out of 10) based on 105 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.

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