Annual Counterprogramming

Black Christmas (Glen Morgan, 2006) - C-

The key was to invert the holly jolly Christmas signifiers into portents of doom, but the movie is sloppy and impatient -- it's on to something with the persistence of blinking lights (though those are kind of like clowns, in that it takes but a minor tweak to take them from cheery to eerie) but most other attempts to toy with the iconography backfire, largely because every scene quickly devolves into either typical horror violence or over-the-top baroque absurdity (e.g. the cannibalistic Christmas cookies). The tone is all wrong, too: Morgan goes for sarcasm when he needed solemnity, even if it was of the self-conscious variety; little things like the faux-Christmas font in the title cards give the film the impression of being delivered with a sneer. Worse, it's mostly tension-free, since Morgan is weirdly committed to his silly backstory, leaving the terrorized present-day characters to be interchangeable and irrelevant. I thought Glen Morgan was promising after the lithe, beautiful Willard, but he seems to be joining James Wong and Rob Bowman on the list of "X-Files alums not worth a whole heck of a lot." Shame.