Black Christmas (Blu-ray)

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Before "Halloween" there was "Black Christmas," an early slasher entry that features all the conventions you've come to know and love (or hate): the isolated setting, the group of college-aged students (preferably girls), the voyeurism of a stalker-killer watching, and the methodical (well, at least in the killer's mind) elimination game that he plays. Why, there's even a hockey mask in this flick, though it's worn by a goaltender in a game, and not some chainsaw- or knife-wielding psycho.

A few notable names pop up in this low-budget--under $700K Canadian--flick, among them John Saxon (who would later appear in another slasher pic, "Nightmare on Elm Street"), Olivia Hussey (who was a lot sexier in "Romeo and Juliet"), and Margot Kidder (who looks more like a housemom than sorority girl, and such a skanky lush that it's hard to imagine her playing clean-cut Lois Lane opposite Christopher Reeve just four years later).

Aside from some interesting camerawork--including some POV roving angle shots with a hand-held camera that predate "Blair Witch Project" by 25 years--there's nothing to really distinguish this film from hordes of others. Except, perhaps, the single image of the first victim we see throughout the film.

Director Bob Clark ("Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things," "Dead of Night") seems to have more fun with this than the audience, as he revels in creating an atmosphere of creepiness. Even the good guys are creepy. When, for example, we see a man waiting outside a college entrance, we don't know if he's the killer whose hands we just spotted scaling the trellis into the sorority house, the perv who keeps phoning the house to breathe heavily and talk dirty to the sisters, or a normal person. Whether that's effective or affected will be a matter of viewer taste. A cat named Claude also factors into the mix, though it's not black. It's white--heavy irony.

So what happens is this: a perv keeps calling, people disappear, the police get into the act, and they try to track the caller and the killer. Suspects? Well, practically everyone, since practically everyone seems creepy or a little off-center in this film. Jess (Hussey) has a boyfriend who's just a little weird and who makes threats to her if she goes ahead and aborts their baby. Barbie (Kidder) is a raving alcoholic who shows disdain for almost everyone. Then there's Mrs. Mac (Marian Waldman), a closet tippler who comes and goes like a tenant and does nothing to really care for the girls she's supposed to be house-mothering. Other boyfriends and would-be boyfriends also lurk rather than simply smile and knock on the door and go off on dates, as they would in any other movie or any other sorority house. No, everything here is cloaked in the same sort of gauze that hangs all over their Christmas tree (I mean, come on, who decorates their tree like that, except perhaps Elvira?).

Those who live for suspense will find a few moments, but not many. The minute the first girl (Lynne Griffin) announces she's going upstairs to finish packing, you know she's a goner. It's the same with the second victim, whose fate is telegraphed as much as the first the instant she enters the room where you-know-who is hiding.

The one thing that writer Roy Moore manages to do that's skillful is to delay the finding of the bodies so that there's a gap between what the characters (and possible victims) know and what the audience knows. But that's just not enough to compensate for a plodding narrative that tips its hand way too many times. The moments of terror are also so abbreviated that there's hardly time to savor (or be repelled by) them.