It's me, Barb

 I hope everyone has had a nice December and holiday season. As you can tell, I've taken a considerable break from the blog, with my Letterboxd account getting more attention. I do hope to add some content soon. Tonight I thought I would watch Black Christmas (1974) again, this time on Shudder. I'm not sure if I will revisit this again and again, but I also noticed that you can find this film on YouTube as well. It is cool that Black Christmas can be found in a variety of places now. I even think Tubi might have this available. Anything for this film to get more eyes on it. I think the film has really gained some good will, even more so than in the past twenty years. I watched Black Christmas for John Saxon's memorial after the horror genre and fans lost him this horrible 2020. I was watching a scene where Margot Kidder's Barb gets off the phone with her mom and moves down a hall into the living room and stairs, sort of a bit of melancholy since she's not been gone too long. Always a fun time to revisit the film and get a kick out of her foul-mouthed, unfiltered, unsophisticated Barb. I would like to comment further and perhaps will. I still hope to add a lot more content to the blog soon. Those phone calls, though, are classic.

I have been contemplating where this film should be in my personal Top 100. For years I've been debating on that. In terms of killers on phones, this is right at the top.

And some of that has to do with Barb. Now as a kid, I knew her from "Superman" (1978) and just a bit later, "The Amityville Horror" (1979) so when I first watched "Black Christmas" in the mid 2000s, it was astonishing, finding her in it. Around that same time, I also found her in DePalma's "Sisters", so her pre-Superman fame was really a neat discovery of a career with some unique characterizations. How Barb just unleashes on "pervert creep", Billy, seemingly having fun trading insults with him was a bit startling...and most amusing.