10/12/17 – day twelve of thirty-one days of horror!
What the heck is a Christmas movie doing here, it’s too
early! Well, as fate would have it, Bob Clark, the same man who gave the world a perennial holiday classic
with A Christmas Story also delivered its greatest Christmas horror present
(sorry Silent Night Deadly Night), Black Christmas. It’s a well-known fact that
Clark’s proto-slasher tale had a big influence on John Carpenter’s
genre-starting Halloween a few years later, but to reduce this yuletide tale –
of a sorority house being menaced by a prank-calling psychotic killer – to a
simple stalk-n-slash does it a great disservice. For one thing, there’s a
pitch-black streak of comedy running through Clark’s crazy little movie, aided
immeasurably by a great cast, with stand-outs being a drunken, foxy Margot Kidder,
a tightly wound Keir Dullea, a classy final girl Olivia Hussey, John Saxon as –
you guessed it – a cop and best of all, Martha Gibson as the booze-sneaking
house mother. My wife and I attend the New Beverly theater’s yearly screening
of this holiday classic as part of our Christmas tradition, and its zany 70s
creepiness never gets old. Sadly Clark died in a tragic car accident a few
years back, but thankfully he left us with a Christmas – and Halloween –
miracle, the original (don’t bother with the 2006 remake) Black Christmas!
