Black Christmas (2019)

Uh…  So, how to tiptoe around this…  Um…  Maybe I should just dive right into the deep end for this week’s B-Movie Enema.

First off, let me say Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all my lovely Enemaniacs!  Next, this week’s movie, 2019’s Black Christmas, garnered a considerable amount of talk last year.  I don’t think I can avoid this talk, so I have to touch upon some touchy subjects.  I don’t doubt that all the people out there in the world who have come across this blog have a varying degree of points of view on social and political topics.  I’d be a real big idiot to think everyone who reads my blog share my exact views.  I suspect the same (maybe not the idiot part) should apply in the other way.  It usually doesn’t turn out all that well when people who go to a website begin making assumptions of what the author or content creator’s opinions on varying topics are.

That said, I do try very very hard to separate the creator from the content.  Unless the content is particularly bad or saying really harmful things, I have to separate that creator from what is produced or I’d drive myself insane.  I feel like we live in a world where this is becoming more and more of an increasing issue.  So, just keep in mind what I’m going to put into this article may or may not jibe with all your personal views, but I don’t think that should be too much of a problem.

Now that you’re still here, let’s talk about Black Christmas in a few ways.  First, in its original 70s version.  Next, on a more higher level about remakes.  Then, the backlash this film received.  After that we’ll get to the movie itself.

So, let’s start, yes?  In, 1974, the original Black Christmas was released by director Bob Clark.  It’s known as one of the very earliest slasher films – predating John Carpenter’s Halloween by four years.  Oddly enough, both this and the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were released on the same date of October 11, 1974.  What made this movie so interesting is that it seemed that the largely female cast had a much higher amount of agency than in the past.  Our leading lady, played by Olivia Hussey, is making her own decisions about where she wants her life to go despite her boyfriend (Keir Dullea) having different expectations.  She even makes her own decisions about her pregnancy as well.

It’s probably undeniably a “feminist” horror film without trying that hard at it.  Honestly, it’s not the themes of the movie and that agency stuff that was mostly focused on by critics of the time.  Most just called it trash and unnecessarily violent.  Over the years, though, the film got re-evaluated.  Now, it’s considered much classier and much more interesting than originally given credit for.  Is it a perfect movie?  No.  There are many sloppy moments.  However, for the most part, it established a lot of things that would be later seen in several other horror films.

About the biggest piece of controversy the film was met with on a public scale was when it was set to premiere on TV in 1978.  Just weeks before the premiere, some girls at a Florida college were killed.  We’d later learn the killer was Ted Bundy.  However, the Governor of Florida at the time called NBC and asked for a change.  NBC offered several affiliates in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama the option to run a different movie if they so wished.

Let’s talk about remakes real quick.  First and foremost, remakes have been part of Hollywood and filmmaking since day one.  Frankenstein, Dracula, Ben Hur, The Maltese Falcon, and many other greats were all remakes.  Remakes happen.  So let me just get this out of the way – I do not generally groan when I see a trailer for a new remake unless 1) I’m groaning at a bad trailer or 2) I never liked the first one anyway.

Remakes happen for two main reasons.  First, it’s a property that a studio thinks it can still milk money out of.  That’s why we’ve seen three start ups for Spider-Man.  This is something that we just have to deal with.  As long as we buy products with something’s logo on it, they’ll keep feeding that to us.  If you don’t want no more Star Wars movies, stop buying Star Wars stuff.

The other reason is a little more noble…ish.  This is the remake to modernize or update the message of a thing.  Maybe it’s something like Perry Mason.  You had a really, really popular book series that was followed by an extremely popular TV show.  That TV show couldn’t do some of the stuff the novels did, opting for itself to follow more the themes and feel of the 50s and 60s.  Now, we have a new Perry Mason that CAN do the feel and angle of the novels thanks to being made for HBO and is being released in a time where some things are less censored.

My point is that sometimes you have themes that are timeless or need very little tweaking to make it modern.  Shakespeare’s works are often modernized in this way.  Contemporization happens all the time.  You have something timeless enough as a theme, it will be used often and over and over.  I don’t care what anyone says about Star Wars: The Force Awakens because it needed to do three things:

  1. Sell Star Wars shit
  2. Restart the series for a new generation of viewers
  3. Sell a SHITLOAD of Star Wars shit.

How do you do that?  You go back to its origins and retell the “hero’s journey” for Rey.  It might rehash some ideas, but that hero’s journey is used all over the fuckin’ place.  To rip The Force Awakens for using that story formula means you gotta rip a lot of other movies – like almost ALL of the Marvel movies.  And I don’t think you want to do that.

Alright, so let’s crack the real issue open – modern day online reactionary types.  Black Christmas was remade for the SECOND time (it was already remade in 2006).  Thanks to some bad faith portions of the internet, people started figuring out that if you yell and scream and complain about stuff based on a one to two minute clip, you can get a LOT of attention.  Over the past, oh, five years or so, it’s become really popular to watch a movie trailer, make a snap judgment on said thing, and then go online and bitch about it.

This came to a massive head with 2016’s Ghostbusters.  I’m not here to talk about that movie.  I don’t care how much you do or don’t like that movie.  But an objectively bad trailer led to a big ol’ fight because some people didn’t stick to just saying the trailer was bad, but had to take it further.  MUCH further.  It became a political fight.  If you liked the trailer, you were a liberal turd drone.  If you hated the trailer, you were a conservative shitbag.  Those who gave their actual feelings about the content of the trailer or the move Sony made to make a movie without it being a true sequel and a passing of the torch were lumped into the latter.  This was a flame war.  Those who were more critical became more popular.

And they kept using that popularity to rip on other movies.  Many went after Captain Marvel, and, more personally, Brie Larson for things she said that could have been either taken out of context or expressed somewhat unclearly.  Anything that seemed to give any kind of agency or power to a woman was deemed all sorts of things usually rooted from various 4-letter words.  Some even went after Wonder Woman with some really hilariously dumb critiques (“not American enough”, didn’t have big titties, etc).  Modernizing things (She-Ra, for example) also found a great deal of vitriol online.  Hell, I’m not even bringing up stuff from African American folks like Jordan Peele.

Say what you will, this is a cool ass poster.

Then came Black Christmas 2019.  At first, most of the backlash was “They’re remaking this again?!?”  But then the worms started surfacing.  This was mostly due to cherry-picked comments and full interviews that pointed toward this movie being “woke”.

There’s a word I’d like to see go away.  “Woke” means that you’re awoken to social or political issues that you either hadn’t considered before or were ignorant to or whatever.  It’s become red meat for opposing views to use it as a negative term in phrases like “get woke, go broke” and all that bullshit.

The reaction to the movie’s okay trailer went from “Eh, I already saw one remake” to “Oh fuck those cunts!  WOKE ASS SHIT!”

Now, allow me to pull back the curtain for you.  I’m a Democrat.  I don’t believe my ideas of how the world should work is all that far left, but I’m pretty far from conservative.  That may disappoint some because I tend to try to remain as irreverent as possible and sometimes that means I may say or do things that some “liberals” would not do, say, or admit to thinking.  There are plenty of places to poke fun at, even on my own team, capisce?  That said, I generally believe that you can do whatever you want for your story.  If it works, it works.  If it doesn’t, I should be allowed to say it didn’t.  ANYONE should be allowed to provide their honest opinion about media.

I do not believe most backlash movie trailers or movie plot descriptions written in some magazine or website is enough to label a whole movie.  Period.  End of story.  Go see the movie.  Try to have an open mind.  If it doesn’t work for you, fine, but don’t find shitty reasons to dislike something.  ESPECIALLY don’t use a knee-jerk reactionary review to make money on YouTube to flirt with a bunch of mostly hateful and angry little people.  Got it?  Sometimes movies have bad trailers.

And don’t even get me started on assumptions made for movies for certain cultures, races, genders, etc.  Not every movie is made specifically for you (whoever “you” are).  So many people want to pull out their crystal ball and predict movies will fail because of its messaging yada yada yada.  Well, the crystal ball is configured based only on the predictor’s own views.  What makes or breaks a movie is its own merits, period.  So many thought the aforementioned Captain Marvel would be a bomb because of its feminist messaging.  It was a huge hit because it was fun and had some good action in it.  Ghostbusters failed not because of its cast or messaging, but because the movie wasn’t very good and failed to deliver on quality due to mostly being a messy, mostly ad-libbed, unfunny movie as a whole.  NOT because of an all-female cast.

As for Black Christmas 2019, I opted to do this movie for this because 1) today is Christmas and I wanted to be cute and 2) there were many, MANY reviewers from people whose opinions are very close to my own that did not like this movie.  So I got curious.  Here I am, already gobbled up half the word count for most of my articles.  I suppose I should get a move on with this actual movie.  Where I can pick up any of the above things I’ve already gone into way too much into, I will.

I can also say the creative team behind this movie is comprised of two women – Director and Co-Writer Sophia Takal and Co-Writer April Wolfe.  If you don’t think that they won’t place some emphasis on things they think is important, I’m not sure what to tell you.  I will also say, though, that sometimes you can line up lots of things and it can all seem like it will go just the way you want, but a final edit here or a mandate there and suddenly you have a completely different thing on your hands.  I’m not saying that happened here, but sometimes best laid plans of screenwriters and lady directors can get steamrolled by budgetary problems, running out of time, or just simple mistakes anyone can make

Will I like this movie or dislike it?  Will it be one of this “for what it was” sorts of reviews?  Will it just simply fall flat on its face?  It’s time to find out.

The movie opens with a statement made by some Hawthorne fella about how man possesses powers that can only be described as supernatural.  If you learn how to use them properly, you can go out and conquer the world or something.  We then see what appears to be some sort of secret society in a fraternity.  It then switches to a sorority (Mu Kappa Epsilon or MKE).  Girls are having a little wholesome holiday party with cookies and candy canes and what have you.  They are waiting on their friend Lindsey, who’s on her way home from the library.

Lindsey is not coming back to the sorority house.  She’s going home for the holidays.  If you are curious what her Secret Santa got her for their gift exchange, it was a dildo.  Just throwing that out there.  One of her sisters got her a dildo because hers went missing.  The implications of that is both fascinating and gross at the same time.  Fascinating because, c’mon, hot chicks buying each other dildos.  Gross because someone stole a used dildo.  That would be like me asking my buddy to jerk me off.

Anyway, Lindsey gets a mysterious text from what appears to be the founder of Hawthorne College.  She also thinks the guy right behind her is the one being a creeper, but he’s incidental.  The real problem is the masked and hooded guy that is also following her.

She tries to run away and get help, but she’s unsuccessful.  She tries to call her sorority sisters but they don’t hear the phone.  She tries one more house, but a hooded and masked guy is there too.  The guy kills Lindsey with an icicle.

We then meet Riley (Imogen Poots).  The rest of the school is preparing for winter break.  She still has a class to go to where professor Cary Elwes reads from a book that seems to make it seem like he’s teaching from a book that seems pretty patriarchal.  He is trying to make a point that he’s finding the actual curriculum to teach very difficult because there is an active petition on campus to have him fired for teaching misogynistic subjects.

This is headed up by Kris (Aleyse Shannon) who has already successfully petitioned to have the school’s founder’s must removed from the grounds of the school due to his nefarious past of being a northern slave owner and his own misogynist history.

(R-L) Kris, Riley, and Marty

Okay, so I’m already expecting in the 30 or seconds that I’ve seen and learned about Kris that she’s a problem some people had about this movie.  Here’s this woke broad going to a school that she doesn’t like the history of and making all these changes when, well, she could just leave.  I can already hear the manosphere saying that she could leave if she isn’t going to get in line.  Whatever.  I suspect, and I’m only saying this based on how much I’ve seen of her, her dialog, and how she acts, that she is this way on purpose as a planted caricature of this “type” of person.

Let’s continue.  Kris also states that Hawthorne supposedly used dark arts and sacrifice to punish disobedient women.  The bust has now moved to the Delta Kappa Omicron.  A member of that fraternity, Brian Huntley, raped Riley some three years ago, but no one other than her sorority sisters believed that this Huntley dude did anything.  Still, he was forced to leave the school, but Riley never really got any actual closure over what happened.

That night, the sisters from MKE are going to perform at a talent show at DKO’s house.  Before the show, Riley sees the bizarre pledge ritual of DKO – which involves guys in robes and smearing blood or something bleeding from the eyes of the founder’s bust’s eyes onto the foreheads of the pledges.

Riley finds the fourth member of the sorority who is performing the show, Helena, nearly blackout drunk, and in a compromising position with one of the frat guys.  This means the main singer in the act is out.  Kris wants Riley to take over, but she’s shrinking from the spotlight because her attacker will be in attendance.  Kris says this just wouldn’t be a sustainable way of life.  She just keeps running from the fact that she was raped, no one believed her, and she no longer fights for herself.

She agrees to take Helena’s place.  The song is a parody of “Up on the House Top” but with a little more grown up lyrics if you catch my drift.  Riley sees Huntley and starts to freeze up, but Kris rights the ship, and Riley finally starts to sing the part of the song that deals with being raped.  Of course, this splits the room pretty good.  Girls cheer, but guys throw stuff at them and they have to beat a hasty retreat out of the house.

After the performance, a guy that was sweet on Riley earlier in the day, Landon, approaches her to chat her up some more.  He decides to join the sisters for their last night to hang out.  Helena is alone back at the MKE house packing for her trip home.  She gets some bizarre texts from the Hawthorne guy and she hears the front door close.  When she looks out of her room to see who may be there, someone is waiting for her in her room.

It’s starting to become obvious that Lindsey has not gotten home to her grandma’s yet.  Also, the sorority’s cat has the black goo stuff from that ritual last night at DKO on her paws.  While some of the girls are off to do their normal stuff for the day, Fran, who is soon to be heading home for the holidays, is left alone.  She’s looking for the cat when she’s suddenly attacked Exorcist III style by one of the hooded guys.

After Fran is killed, Riley and the others start getting strange text messages similar to what the others girls were getting.  Also, now Helena has gone missing and her parents are wondering where she is.  While Kris, Marty, and another sister, Jesse, think everything is okay, Riley believes something is really off.  When she goes to the campus security station, she’s surprised to find Landon there almost as if he was waiting for her or following her.

She is trying to report her friend is missing.  The man at the security station is dubious of her claims.  He says that Helena is probably just with her boyfriend.  The weird messages from the Calvin Hawthorne account is probably just boys being boys.  If Helena doesn’t turn up tomorrow, she can see the campus police dude again.  She’s startled by professor Cary Elwes who she knocks some papers out of his hands when she jumps.  Picking up the papers, she notices a list of sororities with specific women listed.  The prof then tells her that their little “prank” the night before with their performance went a little too far and he wants Kris to remove the video from online stating that her “passion for equality cannot be bridled.”

He then goes onto say that Hawthorne has meant so much to him and that many… er… sacrifices have been made for this school.

“Oh, dear. I maybe shouldn’t have said that last part.”

We’re halfway through this movie and here’s how I feel…  This movie really isn’t all that bad.  Yes, you can argue about the Kris character either being purposely over the top or badly written over the top.  The movie is… fine.  It’s not great but it isn’t bad.  It’s certainly not saying anything I haven’t directly seen people say to each other in the real world.  Maybe it’s a little to on the nose, but that’s okay.  I can accept it for what it is.

The biggest problem is that I think this movie is a bit neutered from having a PG-13 rating.  Maybe the idea was so that younger girls can see this movie and understand some of the themes in it.  I’m not sure they did, but I’m wondering if that was the take for not going for the R.  I don’t even care about the R allowing for nudity because nudity wouldn’t have worked in what the movie wants to do.  It’s PG-13, it’s on the nose, and it probably is that way to express its point of view in as easy of terms as possible to a younger audience.  The kills have been badly diced up because of it though.  There’s not that one character who drops F bombs all the time.  There’s just a maturity missing from this movie because it is PG-13.

So I’m a bit conflicted with this because there have been some decent scenes and jump scares that I’ve been impressed with.  Since there is a lack of subtlety as well, it comes off as aggressive.  It comes off as something almost poking the bear that is the manosphere (they are a bear because I’m guessing that is what role they’d play at a gay bar – ZING!).  I know a big twist is coming and I don’t know what it is, but I can at least say that at this stage in the movie, being a little too aggressively unsubtle can create some mistakes.

Alright, so this is where things start to not look so good for the girls.  Jesse is upstairs to get Christmas tree lights for their new tree.  She gets snatched by one of the hooded guys.  In the previous scene, the prof revealed to Riley that the video of the performance, and something said at the end about Huntley was uploaded to the internet and has several tens of thousands of views.  Riley confronts Kris about it and Kris pushes forward with her perspective that they had absolutely no other choice but to upload the video to empower women.  Riley feels it is betrayal because it’s not empowering anyone as much as it is making some people pretty mad.  She’s getting texts, calls, people are missing.  Kris doesn’t seem to care and Riley finally says that some people don’t want the same things as Kris does in the way she wants things done.  Kris fires back that being raped has made Riley disappear and it pisses her off.

Things get a little hairy and here’s where I think sacrificing subtlety hurts the movie.  Marty’s boyfriend, Nate, ends up saying to Marty, Riley, and Kris that they should have expected this.  That they rattle the cages and maybe felt like the cage wasn’t going to rattle back at them.  He said he was concerned about reprisal.  He says some things that don’t go over too well with the audience, but not unworthy of discussion.  He drops dog whistle type of terms like “man-hating” and so forth and he gets kicked out by Marty to which he then, naturally, says she’s being “hysterical”.

This is where I say being too on the nose can be a mistake.  This does not feel like a natural progression.  Earlier, Nate and Marty seemed to be just fine.  In fact, everyone got along with everyone else.  At the start of this sequence Marty is perplexed by Nate liking beer.  It’s as if she thought he was someone else or looked down on him for liking beer.  Granted, Nate says he’s got a bad headache and it might be making him grumpy.  Either way, now the two characters suddenly snip at each other.  I think that was put in as a throw away to help build up to the big explosion at the end of that scene, but it is very sloppy and suddenly adds this conflict that feels really forced just to have a male character say all those things that are used as totems to fight against.  I’m not saying those things aren’t real, but I’m saying that suddenly dropping it in this way doesn’t really work for the script and the movie.  We needed to see them bicker more commonly to where this is just one of the things they do and they make up later and both are better for being able to do so.  This just… happens.

Okay, moving on into our final act.  Immediately after tossing Nate out, the three girls get arrows shot at them by one of the masked/robed men.  The girls all managed to drop their phones when they ran away to hide.  Riley goes out to get a phone so they can contact the police.

Two more bizarre mistakes are made in the movie.  First, Kris goes to find Jesse.  She goes upstairs to see her wrapped in Christmas lights.  She turns her around to see her, and it awkwardly cuts away back to Kris’ reaction.  WE DO NOT SEE WHAT WE’RE SUPPOSED TO SEE.  I have no idea what the situation is with Jesse.  I don’t know why I’m supposed to be as scared as the character on screen.  This is like a shoddy TV edit.

The next is having Nate come back.  He tells Riley he wants to talk to Marty.  He had a migraine and it made him say things he is really sorry for and just wants to apologize to everyone.  Riley tells him someone is in the house and he needs to shut the fuck up (not in those words because, y’know, PG-13), and he starts having another headache.  He then has a different demeanor, demands to know where Marty is, and picks up a hatchet saying it is his DUTY AS HER MAN TO PROTECT HER… He gets arrowed in the eye and killed by the hooded dude.  Now, I get it.  The girls don’t need a man to protect them especially when he’s no better off to protect them than the girls are protecting themselves.  Sure!  I get it.  It really makes sense.  But the change in demeanor with the headache is… odd?  Stupid even?

The hooded dude carves a couple lines into Riley’s face and tries kissing her because they are under the mistletoe.    She uses Nate’s keys, that he dropped (FOR NO REASON), to punch/stab the bad guy in the throat.  He bleeds black goo.  Riley goes to take off the mask but discovers there is another hooded dude.  Marty grabs Nate’s phone and they are headed for a door when a third hooded dude blocks the exit.

Marty plans to attack the third hooded guy with the hatchet she got from Nate as well and the hooded guy immediately takes it from her and uses it on her stomach.  She’s able to reach for the phone to try to call campus police.  While the campus police dude arrives, Riley and Kris plan their escape.  They get attacked by one of the hooded guys.  You think the campus police guy has arrived to help, but he goes to another sorority house where they are dealing with their own attackers and the cop is killed by yet another hooded guy.

They turn the lights on to realize what we’ve already seen – the attackers are not bleeding blood.  The attacker they just killed was the guy Riley saw earlier getting initiated.  The third and final attacker is still in the house and attacks Kris when she goes for Nate’s keys, but they get away.  Riley tells Kris that she thinks something is really strange with the initiation ceremony at the DKO house.  Obviously something changes the pledges into something a little more than human.

Riley starts putting it together.  The bust was removed from the main hall and placed in the DKO’s frat house – which was Hawthorne’s frat.  There were new initiations.  Huntley was there to oversee the new pledges.  They all start getting bizarre messages.  Girls are missing.  Girls are dead.  The black goo streaming from the founder’s bust is behind it all…

Wait wait wait…  What?

Yes.  There is evil magical shit afoot at Hawthorne College.  The founder’s bust has goo that ends up possessing the bodies of the frat guys.  They are using that power to put some bitches in their places.  Aggressive masculinity is caused by black goo.  More on that in a bit.

Kris does not buy into this crazy shit that Riley is talking about.  I’m not sure I believe it yet.  She’s going to the DKO house and she’s got help from Landon.  Meanwhile, Kris is driving around and planing on going to the cops and she sees several more girls who have been through similar attacks tonight.  An army is forming.

Landon goes inside and sees that his mixer used for the talent show has been ruined.  He has a small (big) freak out.  This gets some of the DKO dudes to show up and suddenly, Landon has some bad headaches.  As Huntley says, it is “the founder bringing out his true alpha” (blech).  Downstairs, Riley sees the bust and is about to smash it.  She hears Helena and she goes to save her but she’s a trap and Helena is a purposeful distraction to knock Riley out.  She wakes up to see that Landon has been initiated.

She also gets exposition dump from Professor Cary Elwes and hooo boy.  Here we go.  When Kris successfully petitioned for the founder’s bust to be moved to the founder’s fraternity, the frat guys discovered something “magical”.  You see, Hawthorne was a practitioner of the dark arts (as previously rumored).  He used it to help keep out of control women in their place.  Well, he left instructions on how to create an army of young men to forge a way forward to set the world right after these dumb broads began marginalizing these poor white bro dudes.  The goo possessed the pledges and filled them with supernatural strength and purpose.  They just needed to be pointed in the direction of the bitches that needed correction.  Those out of line would be killed.  Those willing to be subservient (like Helena) would be spared.  Ugh…

I mean… right?!? You hearing this shit too?

Okay.  Look.  There are a lot of dude bros (particularly ones who skate by on money and whiteness) who do some really really bad shit.  I am an ally of putting those dudes through the wringer to expose the bad shit they do.  But this…  This is goofy.  A black goo possesses guys, makes them assholes, and they want to be alpha males?  Why not just be bad dudes?  This supernatural shit is kind of a step too far into over the top silliness.  If you want to see the physical and visual representation of a movie that is just plain giving up, here it is:

Whatever.  Let’s just end this fucking movie, okay?

Okay, so Helena was one of these broads who believes the rightful place for women is behind men and that they are needed to fill particular natural roles in society.  You know, gender role shit, right?  Okay.  Well, she was in on it from really early on.  She needed to collect items from various women so the pledges could hunt them down like dogs.  Heh… Like bitches.  Anyway, Riley is mad and all like “How dare you betray your sisters and stuff” but she doesn’t really care what Riley thinks if she isn’t going to agree to be one of the “good girls”.

Huntley tells Riley it is time to figure out if she will join them or not.  She doesn’t bow when told, so they make an example of Helena by having this really scary hooded guy snap Helena’s neck.  The scary guy then begins choking Riley and just before she dies, he’s shot in the back by an arrow fired by Kris.  She’s brought the other surviving sisters and they are tearing through the frat guys.  Riley is pinned down by a frat guy and she has flashbacks from when she was raped.  She sees the big scary guy holding onto Kris and she gets the power to destroy the bust.

Kris tosses an oil lamp at Professor Cary Elwes and says, “Hey Professor Cary Elwes!  SUCK. MY.”  Then nothing.  They self-censored themselves for the sake of what?  You can tell someone to suck your dick.  You can probably even tell them to suck your pussy in a PG-13 movie.    Anyway, Landon is freed from the power and he and the survivor girls all leave while they gleefully watch the frat house burn down.

Yikes.

I was into it for about three quarters of this movie.  Sure there were some unforced errors, but over all the movie wasn’t all that bad.  The twist, though…  Oof.  Yes, the occult stuff was teased early on, but holy cow.  The final 20 minutes or so derails everything the first 70 had going for it.

Yes, I know that the black goo was probably meant to be some sort of play on menstruation, and yes, that would be a clever way to explain bad men behavior if it was a cyclical problem.  The problem, though, is that men who act badly act badly all the time.  So it’s kind of a funny joke to make, but it doesn’t work on the whole.

Could this movie be better if it was a little more fun or handled itself in a cheeky manner?  Maybe.  That would have smoothed over some of the unforced errors earlier and it could have helped transition to that crazy ass reveal a little better, but I don’t know.  It almost feels like the last 20 minutes were completely rewritten because they discovered they didn’t really have a version of the movie that stood enough apart from the previous two versions.  They could do a couple additional insert shots to help connect the dots when things were alluded to earlier in the movie, but I dunno.

There’s a left turn, and then there’s a complete and utter tailspin.

Midsommar did this better.

That does it for this week’s B-Movie Enema.  This also puts a lid on 2020 as a whole.  I certainly hope you and yours have a wonderful Christmas and Holidays.  I hope your New Year’s plans are safe and we all get our wish for a better 2021.  Next week?  Well, next week we have a couple things I’m real excited about.

First, on January 1, you have B-Movie Enema’s 250th post and the first of a whole new month of Full Moon Features that I’m dubbing Full Moon Fever II: Full Moon After Dark.

Second, B-Movie Enema: The Series begins!  Check out the B-Movie Enema website and the YouTube channel on Saturday, January 2, 2021 as B-Movie Enema: The Series premieres its first season!  Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and here’s us wishing YOU a wonderful New Year to come!

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