This past weekend, I had the good fortune to go on a trip with some good friends of mine. One of them brought Black Christmas on the grounds that it would be a great movie to watch and laugh at while drunk. Of course, this meant that I couldn’t hear much dialogue, but with a movie full of such chestnuts as “It tastes like chicken… because it is,” I’d call that an improvement.

And anyway, it’s not like anyone would need dialogue to understand the plot of this movie. There’s a killer on the loose, there’s a sorority house full of college girls, they all argue over what to do as they’re brutally slain until one of them survives long enough to dispatch the antagonists. I went over the plot synopsis before writing this article just to make sure that I had everything straight and it turns out that the only thing I had wrong is that I thought our slasher had sex with his mom to father a child by incest. No, it turns out that the mother’s husband was impotent, but she wanted another child so badly that she raped her son to get one. Thanks a lot for clearing that up, Wikipedia.

I could go over the plot holes, but why bother? This is, after all, a genre of films that depends on our main characters making one bad decision after another. Even so, the film goes to some ridiculously contrived lengths to keep our coeds from leaving the house or calling for help. Additionally, the killer has methods of escape and means of getting around any building he happens to be in that are totally implausible. Even by DTV slasher movie standards, this film’s suspension of disbelief could be made out of paper clips and a rubber band for how strong it is.

Of course, the characters are all interchangeable and unlikeable. There’s Lacey Chabert, Michelle Trachtenberg, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, a blonde girl, a geeky girl who only gets one scene, some older bitchy woman who’s looking for her sister and a few other lambs for the slaughter. It wasn’t long before my colleagues and I were all placing bets on who would last longest. A couple bet on the “Party of Five” girl, I bet on Ramona Flowers and everyone else bet on Buffy’s little sister. To our great amazement, we all lost. “Great,” I thought. “Now who am I supposed to root for?!”

The villain is even more of a disappointment. Imagine Norman Bates without the mysterious past, the disarming mild-mannered demeanor or the psychological speculation into his mind. Better yet, imagine Michael Myers without the well-adjusted upbringing or the “babysitter’s worst nightmare” premise that first made The Shape so compelling. The killers in this movie (oh, didn’t I mention? There are two of them) are one-dimensional psychopaths removed from all nuance, believability and originality.

So, in a movie with predicable and crappy writing, unlikeable and interchangeable protagonists and unoriginal slashers totally devoid of subtlety, what scares are there to be found? Absolutely none. The scares are all telegraphed in advance, including the fake ones. The characters are so disposable that their deaths carried no weight of any kind. In fact, our villains are much more brutal to each other than to any of our heroines. Case in point: Easily the most gruesome death in the movie is when one of our maniacs kills his mother (the one who raped him, remember) and makes Christmas cookies out of her flesh. She obviously had a bitter end coming, so how is this supposed to make me feel? Sad that this she-devil is dead? Happy that this lunatic delivered her just deserts? Entertained by this pointlessly grotesque act of matricide, cannibalism and warped yuletide imagery? I don’t know about you, but I personally hate all of these options.

Still, the cherry on top of this shit movie has to be the ending. It starts when our killers inexplicably come back to life. Then comes an unsatisfying end to a running subplot about a present, among some entirely predictable deaths and shamefully telegraphed scares in what has to be the worst, least secure hospital ever. There’s a showdown, our killers die (what’s to stop them from coming back again?) and curtain. That’s it. The threat’s passing is not treated as a means to an end, but an end in itself. Furthermore, since the killer’s death was a foregone conclusion from the start to any sentient audience member, this movie is essentially about nothing.

Black Christmas sucks. The writing is awful, the acting is mediocre, the villain is stock, the kills aren’t remotely frightening and the scares are anything but. It’s just another dime-a-dozen “horror” flick that promises and delivers nothing more than blood and nudity. Hell, if that’s all you’re after, a simple Google search will yield more of either than even the unrated cut of this movie will. The image search will also be more entertaining, I can guarantee.