Black Christmas  (MA) **

PRE-release publicity for Sophia Takal’s third feature as director and second as writer made references to it being a horror movie.

That’s not quite correct. The gory bits of “Black Christmas” give so much away in advance that “horrid” or “horrifying” might categorise it better. Most of the characters are sorority members at Hawthorne College. Before morning after the last night of their academic lives, some will be murdered or raped. The rest will be terrified. 

What is unarguable throughout the film is its theme of brutal denial of feminine supremacy. The film’s young men are a secret society of Hawthorne fraternity members whose attitude toward women is, at best but never declared in either dialogue or behaviour, that they are inferior beings unworthy of admiration or respect. 

The situation reeks with implications of unseen unfulfilled sexual hanky-panky.  The plot becomes increasingly complex as the night progresses. One of the women has drawn ire by creating a petition requesting the removal from the main building of a bust of the university’s notoriously misogynist founder and another requesting the dismissal of a professor (Cary Elwes) who refuses to teach books written by women. 

There’s a lot of “Look out, you don’t know but we in the audience can see the bloke behind you brandishing a knife or some other portent of murder”. The women, led by Riley (Imogen Poots) begin to understand what’s going on and to retaliate. 

There is an audience for films like “Black Christmas”. It’s not the most memorable of its kind. For that, I go to “Saw”, Australian filmmaker James Wan’s 2004 scream movie that I respected and which spawned five sequels that I found cumulatively tedious. Cary Elwes was also in the original of that series. Just thought you might like to be reminded of that in case it crops up at a “Trivial Pursuit” night.

At Dendy, Hoyts and Capitol 6