Black Christmas (2006) DVD

Remake of the 1974 slasher classic where college girls try to avoid the chop. Deranged murderer Billy Lenz (Robert Mann) has escaped from a mental institution and is heading back to the house where he gruesomely murdered his abusive mother years before. After laying empty for years, the house has been renovated, and is now accommodation for a college sorority. Eight college students and their sorority mother, staying a night in the house before going home for Christmas, then start to receive worrying phone calls. It’s not long before they find out that Billy is heading their way, and he’s not bearing gifts.
Needless and unnecessary are two words that have little meaning in Hollywood, especially when you’re talking sequels or remakes. Case in point: Black Christmas, the revisionist version of the 1974 horror thriller largely thought to be the proto-slasher movie (this was four years before the first Halloween installment). The original, from director Bob Clark, is still considered a masterpiece of tension, understatement, innovative camera perspective, economic efficiency (a polite way of saying “ultra-low budget”), and killing off pretty young girls in grisly ways without any cumbersome exposition regarding the psychopath’s motives. This, by the way, from the same Bob Clark who would soon bring us the beloved Porky’s franchise as well as Black Christmas’s polar opposite, the sweetly nostalgic classic A Christmas Story.