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All too adjusted to the simple murder-death-kill-repeat demands of the Final Destination franchise, writer/director Glen Morgan doesn’t know how to balance exposition with execution, resulting in a clumsy flashback-heavy narrative that reveals the token menacing matriarch responsible for the behavior of butchering Billy (Robert Mann). Consequently, after Billy liberates himself from Clark (wink) Sanitarium with the help of an particularly obtuse security guard and returns to his former childhood home, any and all suspense escapes with him as he sets up base in the attic and proceeds to pick off the interchangeable sorority sisters that currently reside there.

Courtesy of convenient crawlspaces stemming from said attic into just about every room that are always large enough for an adult, Billy engages in the mundane M.O. of smothering a chick with a plastic bag and then stabbing them repeatedly with the nearest sharp object, whether it be a sharp ornament or a fountain pen. (Only with the dispatch of Ice Princess star Michelle Trachtenberg do we get the minor irony of death by ice skate, just one instance of patchy humor that threatens to manifest itself as a cohesive tone, but never does.)

Without a worthy heroine emerging from the thinning herd, all that remains are dense, foul-mouthed, never-nude victims, waiting to be picked off between exhausted red herrings and lewd prank calls on an obscenely loud phone (we’re talking some seriously unreasonable decibels here, much more grating than tense). Some characters appear as swiftly as others exit, while those yet to be killed are left to be differentiated by haircut and one character’s erratic Southern drawl. Morgan’s inept direction leans towards the over-the-top nature of the Final Destination films, but instead succumbs to a more garish tone that doesn’t prove nearly as effective, especially in a tacked-on climax that could be most kindly labeled as parody.

It isn’t bad enough that the material is insultingly stale, the direction unforgivably weak, and the casting regrettably lackluster (three are FD vets, while the dorm mom hails from the original), but the proceedings reek of the rumored reshoots and retooling to be expected with the post-production of most every Dimension release. Adding insult to injury is the absence of at least half of the death scenes eagerly flaunted in trailers and TV spots, a trend not uncommon but never so misleading as it is here.

With an overexposed, less-than-intimidating villain and no discernable talent on either side of the camera, the result is a monotonous massacre that manages to be even more tedious and unnecessary on its own terms than as a remake. Considering the gender predominance of its cast, it’s only fitting that 'Black Christmas' is so very much like a period: utterly predictable, inevitably bloody, and considerably unpleasant.

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originally posted: 12/30/06 23:04:10
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