Writer-director Glen Morgan's remake of a cult 1974 horror thriller, Black Christmas, has all of the gore of his Final Destination films but none of their intelligence, style or wit.

The blood runneth over and eyeballs are plucked merrily from the sockets of the pretty cast members. When will these girls learn that if they hear a suspicious noise in the attic, the sensible course of action is to run for help, not venture alone into a cobweb-strewn space where doom invariably lurks?

Venture they must and so it is the girls, glowing with youth and armed with acidic put-downs, who are carved up for Christmas and not the turkey. Slain belles, if you will.

Black Christmas opens with a nightmarish flashback to 1975, in which young Billy Lenz (Cainan Wiebe) endures yet another hellish winter with his mother (Karin Konoval) and father (Peter Wilds).

The old man is butchered and Billy is consigned to the loft where he sits menacingly in a rocking chair, allowing the years of psychological abuse and mental torture to take their toll.

Having wreaked bloody revenge, Billy is incarcerated and the Lenz home becomes a sorority house. Many years later, housemother Mrs Mac (Andrea Martin) encourages her girls to gather round the tree to exchange Christmas presents.
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Among the lovely ladies are Kelli (Kate Cassidy), Melissa (Michelle Trachtenberg), Heather (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Dana (Lacey Chabert) and the slightly tipsy Lauren (Crystal Lowe).

Gathering around the festive spruce, the girls are shocked to receive a series of threatening telephone calls. When it transpires that the calls are coming from inside the house, the friends fear the worst.

Trapped in the house in the middle of a blizzard, the girls must rely on each other to survive the onslaught, aided by Leigh (Kristen Cloke), sister of one of the missing-presumed-disembowelled students.

Little do any of them realise that the now adult Billy Lenz (Robert Mann) has escaped his cell and is coming home for Christmas.

Black Christmas has an extremely sick and twisted sense of humour, including a rather unsavoury incident with a cookie cutter. Morgan orchestrates a couple of shocks and his special-effects team slavers on the viscera, scything down the ensemble with furious abandon before the obligatory final showdown.

Violence is unrelenting but there's little in the way of dramatic tension to underpin the carnage. and the characters' aren't fleshed out enough to make them anything other than dead girls walking.

Cassidy plays her feisty blonde with plenty of gumption - "We're sisters, so act like it!" - but her co-stars are almost interchangeable.

The finale strains credibility, not that the film has much to begin with, including the obligatory resurrection of the monster, whom everyone foolishly presumes to be dead.