Directed by: Justin Russell
Writer: Justin Russell
Well, for a change here's a new slasher film that doesn't suck! This achievement is made even more spectacular by the mere fact that this is a direct rip-off of Black Christmas, the legendary movie that (almost) started it all (and it also happens to be one of my favourite movies). When you mess with a legend, you can easily get burned. Ask Glen Morgan for example - his official Black Christmas remake was stupid unwatchable crap. So, what did Justin Russell (the writer, director and pretty much everything else here) do to avoid the pitfalls that are usually the death of most of his colleagues?
The most important thing is that he tried his best to make this look like a real damn movie and not like some crappy home video. Most of the scenes are carefully set and there are some really nice establishing shots. The movie actually takes place in 1981 and I can only congratulate the director on the bravery of attempting to recreate the era in such a low budget movie. While he doesn't succeed completely (certainly not as Ti West did with The House of the Devil), you still get a refreshing feeling of something different - the clothes, the music, the interiors, etc. - it's all done very nicely, the only small problem is, as one IMDb reviewer has nicely observed, that the photography is a bit too polished for the time. But that's just a minor objection. One great consequence of this setting if that finally we get a break from listening to teenagers bitching about their cell phones not having a signal.
As I said, the movie heavily borrows from Bob Clark's Black Christmas without an ounce of shame. There's a sorority, there's a lot of girls, some boys, mysterious killer, scary telephone calls and everything else. There are many people here (some would say - too many), which is great for at least two reasons: 1) They don't have enough screen time to "develop" and become irritating, and 2) It's more victims for the killer! Seriously though, except for the two guys, pretty much no one was getting on my nerves too much.
The weak link here are the murder scenes. Russell has obviously studied the classic slashers well, which is evident by his building of the tension through the camera positions, the murderer POV, etc., but the murders themselves are either badly directed and edited, or they are ruined by bad special effects. For example, the first murder features a surprisingly explicit head violence scene - the killer raises a hammer above a completely unaware Jessica Cameron and where most other directors would make a cut and show a wall behind being sprayed with blood, Russell bravely decides to explicitly show how the hammer hits, and ultimately breaks, the poor victim's head. The problem is that the head model is horribly unconvincing which takes a lot from the effect of the scene. The same goes for the beheading scene later in the movie, where the severed head is shown, but again the model looks very bad. Nobody expected Tom Savini, but I'm sure there are people who could have done a better job with the same amount of money. And while I can only congratulate the director on showing almost all of the murders explicitly, the way those scenes are cut, the way the victims and the killer move, it's simply not convincing enough.
As I said above, due to the large number of characters, the body count is significantly higher than in most similar movies and killer is really entertaining with his prank calls and crying into the phone (?!) and similar weird things. Strangely, the killer's face is shown from the very beginning, yet we never learn who the hell he is. I actually like this, it adds a strange feeling of mystery.
The ending deliberately features every single horror cliché we have seen before: the victim runs, the killer walks; the killer is killed, but he isn't dead; the killer (previously extremely efficient) suddenly turns into a complete moron when faced with The Final Girl et cetera - all those things we loved in the old movies. There's also a completely gratuitous dance scene, the weirdest one since Calvaire, yet somehow strangely cool due to the great disco music.
All in all, I am very satisfied with this movie and I'll pay attention to Russell's further efforts. I'm already looking forward to seeing his Dead Stop Holocaust. He just has to pay some more attention to his murder scenes and he's good to go.
The most important thing is that he tried his best to make this look like a real damn movie and not like some crappy home video. Most of the scenes are carefully set and there are some really nice establishing shots. The movie actually takes place in 1981 and I can only congratulate the director on the bravery of attempting to recreate the era in such a low budget movie. While he doesn't succeed completely (certainly not as Ti West did with The House of the Devil), you still get a refreshing feeling of something different - the clothes, the music, the interiors, etc. - it's all done very nicely, the only small problem is, as one IMDb reviewer has nicely observed, that the photography is a bit too polished for the time. But that's just a minor objection. One great consequence of this setting if that finally we get a break from listening to teenagers bitching about their cell phones not having a signal.
As I said, the movie heavily borrows from Bob Clark's Black Christmas without an ounce of shame. There's a sorority, there's a lot of girls, some boys, mysterious killer, scary telephone calls and everything else. There are many people here (some would say - too many), which is great for at least two reasons: 1) They don't have enough screen time to "develop" and become irritating, and 2) It's more victims for the killer! Seriously though, except for the two guys, pretty much no one was getting on my nerves too much.
The weak link here are the murder scenes. Russell has obviously studied the classic slashers well, which is evident by his building of the tension through the camera positions, the murderer POV, etc., but the murders themselves are either badly directed and edited, or they are ruined by bad special effects. For example, the first murder features a surprisingly explicit head violence scene - the killer raises a hammer above a completely unaware Jessica Cameron and where most other directors would make a cut and show a wall behind being sprayed with blood, Russell bravely decides to explicitly show how the hammer hits, and ultimately breaks, the poor victim's head. The problem is that the head model is horribly unconvincing which takes a lot from the effect of the scene. The same goes for the beheading scene later in the movie, where the severed head is shown, but again the model looks very bad. Nobody expected Tom Savini, but I'm sure there are people who could have done a better job with the same amount of money. And while I can only congratulate the director on showing almost all of the murders explicitly, the way those scenes are cut, the way the victims and the killer move, it's simply not convincing enough.
As I said above, due to the large number of characters, the body count is significantly higher than in most similar movies and killer is really entertaining with his prank calls and crying into the phone (?!) and similar weird things. Strangely, the killer's face is shown from the very beginning, yet we never learn who the hell he is. I actually like this, it adds a strange feeling of mystery.
The ending deliberately features every single horror cliché we have seen before: the victim runs, the killer walks; the killer is killed, but he isn't dead; the killer (previously extremely efficient) suddenly turns into a complete moron when faced with The Final Girl et cetera - all those things we loved in the old movies. There's also a completely gratuitous dance scene, the weirdest one since Calvaire, yet somehow strangely cool due to the great disco music.
All in all, I am very satisfied with this movie and I'll pay attention to Russell's further efforts. I'm already looking forward to seeing his Dead Stop Holocaust. He just has to pay some more attention to his murder scenes and he's good to go.
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