WITH Christmas already being promoted in shops with Halloween stock still to be cleared it's no surprise crazed killers are getting confused.

Black Christmas is essentially Halloween 8 in all but title.

Instead of a group of babysitters being terrorised by a psychopath on a killing spree, we get a sorority house revisited by the revenge killings that wiped out the family that once occupied it.

For Michael Myers read Billy Lenz, an abused and psychologically disturbed unwanted child now safely locked away. Except that as the sorority sisters unwrap their gifts around the Christmas tree, the phone rings with threatening messages that apparently are coming from somewhere inside the house. As the girls one by one meet gruesome deaths, the only hope for the survivors is to find the unseen guest before he finds them.

You'd think by now, after so many horror flicks, the girls would behave less stupidly than they do . . . particularly since the cast between them have appeared in When A Stranger Calls, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Ring 2 and the original 1974 Black Christmas . . . but of course the genre feeds off stupidity as much as nubile girls and gushing blood.

So have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, not.