It's hard to imagine anyone 30 years from now still talking about this remake, an unwelcome slice of holiday fruitcake that forgoes the original's scant innovations — the killer's point-of-view shots, the threatening phone calls made from inside the house, the vaguely feminist social commentary — for straight-to-video-grade shocks and "artsy" Dutch angles. There's no rhyme or reason to the brutal killings here, although director Glen Morgan (an X-Files veteran and co-writer on the Final Destination franchise) seems to think he's doing audiences some sort of favor by providing insight into the homicidal motives of Billy, the boy who grows up to be a serial killer. Do we really need to know how incest, abuse and "a rare liver condition" drove him to kill?

There's nothing much to remake, which is a large part of the problem. In the most rudimentary of body-count-producing premises, eight sassy co-eds are snowed in while a psycho crawls through the walls, popping out at random intervals to smother them with a plastic bag and spear their eyes with whatever sharp object happens to be near (candy canes, glass ornaments, fountain pens and ice skates all do the trick).

Some scholar could probably analyze the film and tell us precisely what cultural fear Morgan is trying to tap, but there's no deeper level operating here — just stock bogeyman hijinks. Even the Christmas angle is largely arbitrary. One sorority sister drunkenly attempts to explain how mistletoe, trees and such are just pagan symbols appropriated for religious significance, anyway. No doubt the young lady would be comforted to know that her character — the same one who finds time to shower amid all the killing — is just a collection of slasher-movie cliches being shamelessly exploited for commercial gain.

[as featured in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram]