Black Christmas

Eye eye, what we got ere then? There's a running eyeball motif throughout this revamp/reimaging of Bob Clark's much revered culter of the same name (1974), after sitting through it you may, like me, feel like extracting your own eyeballs and playing ping-pong with them! Bunch of pretty sorority girls get menaced and mangled by a deranged killer who has come home for Christmas... This lacks everything that made Bob Clark's film so effective. The less is more approach has gone, thus there is very little suspense, and in place is a gigantic back story for the killer. The characterisation of the girls, some acted by some very capable actresses, is practically non existent, so very little emotional heft to draw you into a state of caring for them. There's some good gore on show, but since tonally the pic is all over the place, it's never once scary or ironically funny. A poor show all round. 3/10

Obviously doesn't hold a candle to the original, and some of the acting is pretty genuinely bad, but it knows what it wants and it goes for it. What it wants, here being: To be hamstrung to keeping in step with its predecessor but also being wildly different enough to piss anyone off who was expecting an actual "remake". _Final rating:★★½ - Had a lot that appealed to me, didn’t quite work as a whole._