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50This 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.
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50The flashbacks are wittily gothic, and the present-day murder scenes have the absurdist, chain-reaction intricacy of the "Final Destination" deaths.
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38Where the first film was a seminal forerunner of early stalker classics like "Halloween," this version feels as stale as old gingerbread.
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38Morgan borrows Christmas-specific nastiness from a wide range of fright flicks, but the result is less than the sum of its parts.
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38Silly, obvious, clumsy, and just gruesome enough to keep jaded genre fans from angrily throwing popcorn at the screen.
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30There 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.
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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.
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30It exchanges the police subplot that gave the earlier film its steady pace for a lot of pointless backstory about the mother-fixated stalker.
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25Props 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.
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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.
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Twice as many accidental laughs as scares.
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25Seems to go out of its way to obliterate all the elements that made the original so special.
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20Bad film fans will think Christmas has come early, everyone else should ask for the receipt.
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20With 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.
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10It'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.
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10The remake neither pays perceptive tribute to the original nor updates it in anything but hackneyed form.
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The product itself isn't so much afterthought as afterbirth -- a bloody mess to be dumped discreetly.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 14 out of 30
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Mixed: 2 out of 30
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Negative: 14 out of 30
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LoganH.10I loved the sense of violent tension.
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WesleyE.7