As with most things that have gone all fiddle faddle in my life, I find that a lot of the blame can be put on my family.  At first glance everything seems pretty alright, but if you scratch the surface you better give yourself a tetanus shot because underneath there lies some shit, and you will find that all at once you are waist deep in it.  Don’t get me wrong – my parents are the shit, I’m not complaining..  But there’s been a few “MY FUCK” moments.

Most of the moments center around my Dad’s insistence in mowing the lawn in his Scooby-Doo underpants, or picking up the phone to occasionally meow into it when I phone to speak to my mother (?).  However, one moment from my youth sticks out in particular and it is one where I was probably twelve and up late being a rebel and either writing bad poetry that used the words ‘darkness’ and ‘bleak’ a lot, or painting my nails black..  or both.  My Dad was a shift worker his whole life, so on his days off he kept some pretty strange hours and I found him watching a movie and decided to join him.  My Dad, coffee in hand began to tell me about how this was one of his all time favourite movies, a horror movie called Black Christmas.  I assumed, because I was twelve and spooky as hell, that my Dad was an idiot who wouldn’t know a scare this side of Tim Burton (which BTW, my Dad is now obsessed with.  He owns all of the Tim Burton movies..  and Invader Zim..  my 63 year old father is actually a 14 year old goth girl).

Anyways, truth be told, I didn’t actually recall much of Black Christmas after I watched it, because I’m fairly sure the part of my brain that would be activated during being abducted by aliens or abused by a priest flared to life, because that movie was horrifying.  It was two hours of boredom punctuated by disturbing phone calls, creeping moaning and someone dying by being stabbed with a unicorn.  I remember leaving that experience a changed person, and it became something of a joke for my Dad to ask me if I wanted to watch it again.

And the truth is – I didn’t watch it again until not too long ago, and only for you my dear spooky friends did I once again venture into that mess.  I only was able to sell it to Scotty Floronic by saying it was fucked up and someone gets stabbed with a unicorn.  He was skeptical, if only because we saw he atrocious remake a few years back..  but if we have learned anything from remakes (and apparently we haven’t because people still make them, and people still go see them) it’s that the original was always better.  And how true that is in the case of Black Christmas.

I have to say, by the way, that I have no fucking clue as to what is going on in that poster, or what having too tight skin might be..  or even feel like?  Can your skin be on too tight?  Is this a thing?  Should I be concerned?

Anyways.  We settled in with some rum and egg nog to enjoy Black Christmas and I had totally forgotten (read blocked out) how entirely strange the movie is.  The bedraggled sorority mother Mrs. Mac is basically my spirit animal..  she spends most of the film either drunk, getting drunk, searching for hidden bottles of booze, or talking to herself about nothing.  This made me realize that Black Christmas is actually a touch humorous and not just the horrifying childhood ruining experience it had been to me.  Basic plot goes that some heavy breathing weirdo staggers into a sorority house and sets up camp upstairs and starts making creepy rapey perverted phone calls to the “hot” sorority girls…  I write “hot” in quotation marks, because this is 1970s hot, not like current hot..  so while these girls might have had all the boys fantasizing about taking off their high waisted fortrel pants, these girls would today be lucky to be in the school cafeteria playing Magic: the Gathering..  and that’s being kind.

ME GUSTA

Also..  I’m not entirely sure why the sorority mother is like 60 years old..  don’t get me wrong, I’d totally buy a hooker with that lady (if she wasn’t dead) and have her teach me all of her secrets involving surreptitiously hiding bottles of alcohol in books, but I can’t really see or understand as to why she’s ministering to sorority girls?  Like..  Okay..  We don’t really have sororities in Canada so I can’t really pretend to know what exactly they are/do, but I assumed that the people who led sororities would be..  you know peers slightly older than yourself to aid in your college experience?  I mean hey whatever, maybe this lady is like the female and grandma version of Van Wilder.  I don’t know.  I don’t give a fuck.

Anyways..  the girls are all having a super fun time partying with Boozey McGrandma and they’re getting ready for Christmas break.

And the only thing that could bring down this party faster than grandma forgetting her heart pills is a weird perverted phone call..  and not like the teenage boys giggling and yelling “fart” kind of perverted phone call..  the noises coming out of the phone actually sound like a combination of Hell and Regan from the Exorcist and then just divulges into talk of “licking pretty pink piggy cunt”..  Hahahaha, man could you imagine if it was like Grandma’s boyfriend and she was all into the shit and he called like the wrong line instead of dialling her directly and he was all hard of hearing and shit so he couldn’t tell it wasn’t old lady Gladys plunging her dried up poonanis to his creepy voice..

…

…….

…uh…

………moving along.

I think we all know that it wasn’t any boyfriend of Grandma’s making the calls, because as soon as one of the bad ass rebel sorority girls tells him off, he replies simply with “IM GOING TO KILL YOU” and hangs up.  What a downer.

Also this movie really glorifies smoking..  and drinking to be sure, but people are practically holding two cigarettes at once, lighting their new smoke off the old one.  Mmm..  could you imagine the smell coming off those too tight fortrel pants?  SMELLS LIKE TUNA AND AN OLD PACK OF CAMELS SOMEONE SPILLED BOOZE ON AND WORE CHEAP LIPSTICK TO SMOKE.  ME GUSTA.  OH MY GOD….  could you imagine if some dude was all getting fresh with one of those sorority sisters and he like peeled off her sick ass pants and found just a random ass old cigarette butt in her panties..  Hahahaha, would that be a game changer or what?

Also – the other thing that really puzzles me about this whole bit is that these girls have been receiving a fair number of these perverted phone calls..  so question remains..  why answer the phone?  Or why not change your number?

Ah the days before caller ID.

Anyway – the one sorority sister whose name is Claire gets a bee in her bonnet and after this perverted call and heads upstairs to pack her shit to go home for the holidays and randomly she hears a cat meowing and goes to check it out..  which is kind of fucking retarded..  you have a cat.  Or rather, the sorority house has a cat…  you’d think if you lived there for any actual length of time you’d understand and accept that there is a cat around…  I have a cat and I don’t follow it around every time it meows at something, because chances are if my cat is meowing she’s at the window cat-wanking over birds she can’t get to, is looking at herself in the mirror, or is taking a relationship ruining shit in her litter box..  none of those things are particularly great so why would you want to bear witness to cat stupidity?

Anyways it’s curtains for Claire when she goes looking for Claude the cat, because the psycho puts a bag over her head and a doll in her lap and that’s about the end of that and no one is really the wiser..  Probably because Grandma McBoozey busted out some cocaine and things likely got a little foggy afterwards.

Anyway, despite being a moron, Claire apparently does have family, and her father comes looking for her the next day, and catches Grandma Boozey in the middle of what appears to be a pretty comical getting dressed while grossly hungover sequence.  Claire’s father appears to be all prim and proper and is quite offended by the suggestion of Grandma Boozey that his daughter might be getting drilled by her boyfriend.  Yeah, who’d ever think that a girl would go to college and start experimenting sexually..

Also there’s randomly a poster of naked asses making a peace sign and the old lady sorority Mom is desperately trying to cover it, because..  not only is smelling like a bottle of gin at you know one in the afterrnoon not so great, but heaven forbid you’d have a picture of a butt up for the whole world to see.

Anyways, Claire’s father is not happy about his daughter’s disappearance, nor about the house she has been living in.  More on that later.

Jess, another sorority sister goes to meet her janky as fuck looking “artist” (read hipster) looking boyfriend to tell him she’s pregnant and wants an abortion and this dude gets a fucking bug up his ass like it’s his fucking choice and is all, “let’s talk about this later” while he goes off to do something important and artsy (read blow another man while listening to the Velvet Underground).

Drunkey McBoozerton is apparently late for Murder She Wrote and a bottle of Slivovitz because she doesn’t go with Claire’s Dad to the police station to report her missing, and the police basically take one look at the obviously stoned Velma sorority sisters and laugh them out of the cop shop..  “Oh your slutty drunken friend went missing..  tragedy..”

Basically the police officer is like..  “Sir, did you know your daughter is a whore?”

Fact of the matter is that Claire is not a whore, she’s just dead in a rocking chair, putrefying.  So everyone kind of fucks off for a while and someone tells Claire’s actual boyfriend, who was not drilling her, that she is missing and he gets pretty pissed..

I guess they all band together to arrange a search party at some point, but not before deciding that they should have another party that night.  Wow, what are friends for.

Drunken Grandma hears the cat fucking around again and goes upstairs to investigate and crash bam she’s dead as fuck too, which is kinda shitty but at the same time, it really was time to re-up the sorority mom..  and heaven needed another drunken angel, so hey why not.

It only takes over 24hrs but finally someone takes the disappearances seriously and the sorority ends up having a trace put on their phone..  like holy fuck there police.  just bungle that like the East Vancouver Missing Women Robert Pickton Case..  holy sweet fuck.

Even though the sorority is having it’s phone tapped it doesn’t stop Barb from getting all liquored up and staggering around being a mess for some reason (cocaine blues), and everyone tells her to fuck off because she’s an annoying drunk.

And of course while Barb is having the spins and trying not to redecorate her room in vomit technicolor, in sneaks the creepy moaning rapist pervert..

…and he kills the shit out of her with that unicorn figure..  which is pretty well the best death in a horror movie…  EVER.

EVER.

EVER.

EVER.

all other horror movie deaths can pack up and go the fuck home.

Also is a coincidence that some random Christmas carolers roll up and drown out this poor girl’s screams with some terrible rendition of God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman or Frosty the Dickman..

Ugh.  Truthfully, I kinda started to check out at this point in the movie..  My reptilian brain had the orgasm with the unicorn murder and everything else was seemingly inconsequential.

Basically, the creepy calls keep occurring, but the girls manager to keep the creeper on the phone for long enough for the police to figure out that the calls are coming from Boozey Grandma’s phone line in the house, and they tell them to get out..

There’s an entirely too long sequence of fucking around and general idiocy that involves the girls going back into the house, swinging around fireplace pokers, and beating to death the artsy pianist dude..  the cops show up late as usual and don’t really check the house out and are all..  “well our job here is done, good job girls..” and fuck off.

What we are left with is the real killer (who was in the attic the whole time), descending the stairs to continue to kill the shit out of these moronic sorority girls.

Oh and the phone rings as the credits play.

Soooo..  with all this in mind, Black Christmas is actually pretty alright as far as horror movies go..  I still think that those creepy phone calls will likely haunt my nightmares for the rest of my life, but hey..  what’s a little emotional trauma now and then?

Watching this film now, I was able to see a lot more of the comedy in it and I appreciated the whole WTF factor that was going on in it..  I guess it also helped that I had fond memories of watching it with my Dad..  What a family tradition?  Maybe I will see if he wants to watch this year on Christmas Day.  It would sure beat the year my one friend brought over a bottle of Jack Daniels to our Christmas dinner, and got absolutely loaded and started screaming about it being “colder than a nun’s cunt”, and then pouring Jack Daniels in the mailbox to “mail it to Santa for Christmas”.  My mother took all of this in stride by the way.

So this year for Christmas/Vargsmas, or whatever the fuck you believe in, I hope you don’t receive any perverted phone calls (or make them), and that you drink a lot of Jack Daniels, keep warm and always remember to stay spooky!