Black Christmas (1974)

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Summary:
Sorority sisters in their house are getting weird prank calls. Soon, they start disappearing. The reason is because there's a mindless killer loose in the house.

Review:
Bob Clark is probably most well known for directing A Christmas Story, then Porky's (which is actually a pretty darned good movie). Years before these classics was an entirely different class altogether. Black Christmas actually has a pretty influential cult following. I didn't know this until the release of the abominable remake last year. Like the pic above states, before Halloween and Friday the 13th, there was this 1974 slasher.
Within the first seven minutes, I was already impressed with the solid acting and well written dialog. Almost instantly, I was wondering how the remake went so far off track. Plenty of time was spent on the sisters within the house, building a solid foundation on who's who. I was laughing pretty hard at many of the vulgar jokes and honesty of these girls' attitudes. It's Margot Kidder's greatest performance in any movie I've seen her in. She pulls off the drunken straight shooter with no concern for hiding truths admirably. Olivia Hussey more or less ends up as the main hero , and she also does a decent job. I didn't know John Saxon was in it, either. That's another notch on the coolness scale right there!
For a horror movie released in 1974, there's a fair amount of tension building, and a masterful use of subjective and objective-subjective perspective camerawork (where we see RIGHT THROUGH the character's eyes, or just off the side of what the character is seeing). It never manages to lag in entertainment, either. Yet AGAIN another surprise, seeing as how most movies of the seventies can be dragged down with painfully slow pacing. Black Christmas was an all around nicely executed piece of cinema.
As if the perspective shots weren't enough to keep me interested, there's plenty of style in other areas as well. The murders are creative and somewhat frightening. I can't think of any movie that has the slasher monicker attached to it until a few years later with Halloween. After seeing this, I now know a where a lot of Carpenter's inspiration came from. I also really dug Clark's unwillingness to show us the killer, and not giving much of a reason behind the killer's intentions. For a movie like this, that's not particularly required. It has more to do with who's going to survive, and the depth of the sisters' relationship with one another and their realistic personalities helped jump the potential of their demise with a sense of dread. I actually think these women are worth saving.
Even more fantastic is that their train of thought, and the logic with which they proceed to deal with the disappearances are logically planned out. They DO call the police when the first girl is missing, and the police actually take the girls SERIOUSLY and try to figure who's making the calls, since that's the most likely suspect of the disappearances. Each prank call is traced, with a fascinating view of a huge warehouse full of oversized switchboards, with a man running from one end to the next frantically attempting to trace the origin of the calls. It's amazing how far we've gone with technology in 30 years. I found that to be a fun part of my moviegoing experience.

Black Christmas really is in a league of its own. It has some very stylish sequences, with a very appropriate music score adding to the movie's tone. I loved the smashing of the piano (that made me scream out loud, "NOOO! DON'T!"), leading into the score incorporating the smashed piano notes becoming a part of the next scene's music score. Very groovy, if I may say so myself. The great score, attention to fleshing out the characters, as well as the fresh approach to the then unnamed "slasher film" criteria makes this well worth checking out. So much was done right, and it deserves the accolades it's had over the years.
I liked this a lot more than Friday the 13th. That's actually really BORING. I haven't seen Halloween since I was a youngin' (although I plan to see it some day soon. It's been on my Netflix queue literally for YEARS), but I can honestly say that if it wasn't for Black Christmas, these movies might have been made and helped to jumpstart a slew of 80s copycats (which there were some successes within the majority of failures), but it wouldn't have evolved in quite the same way.

GRADE: A-

Reviewed 3/11/07