Katie Cassidyas KelliThe story
About Black Christmas
Over the Christmas break, the few students left in a snowbound sorority house start receiving menacing phone calls, and their friends begin to disappear one by one. The house has a grim history: years earlier, a disturbed boy murdered his family there at Christmas, and on Christmas Eve he escapes from the institution where he has been held ever since. A blizzard cuts the house off as the survivors try to work out who is inside with them.
The CineClaus verdict
A remake that trades the original's slow, creeping dread for gore, and loses most of what made Bob Clark's film frightening. Glen Morgan piles on backstory and grisly set pieces, so the tension rarely gets room to build, and the students trapped in the house blur into one another.
The Christmas trappings are real enough, though they mostly serve as set dressing for the next death. Strictly for slasher completists and the curious. Anyone else should watch the earlier film first, and may find they never need this one.
The family desk
Can the kids watch?
Our take: this is a gory slasher with sustained, graphic killings and eye injuries, so treat it as adults only while the UK certificate is still being checked.
BBFC advice: Contains strong gore, language and moderate sex.
Content advice & accessibility
- Where the advice comes from
- The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC).
- Our age guidance
- Editorial, separate from the official 15 certificate, and never looser than it.
