by Jason Adams
We had intended to use this week's edition of our new "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Stuart Rosenberg's The Amityville Horror with an ode to Margot Kidder's performance... but then we re-watched The Amityville Horror, and it is so very much worse than we remembered. Not scary, tedious, with cardboard performances; a mere shadow of that decade's many better horror films. I have no idea how it became a hit, and I felt actively bad for Margot while re-watching it.
So in order to make it up to the actress, let's take a look instead at the crown jewel in her horror crown (give or take a Sisters), her hilarious work five years earlier as the deliciously crusty co-ed Barb in Bob Clark's slasher Black Christmas...
Barb, the sorority's loud-mouthed alcoholic, is the film's comedic relief, and watching Kidder rip into outlandish speeches about the mating habits of turtles it's easy to see the snap crackle pop she'd bring to a certain comic book character just a couple years later. She is life. Barb's a tongue in a light socket -- she's a real charge.
But also like Lois Lane, who was always just one skyline flight away from waxing philosophical, Barb's a sad creature too, hiding her damage behind her brashness. Kidder keeps finding the moments to make us feel for this girl, so young and already so jaded, so when the inevitable falls -- here in the form of a crystal unicorn figurine, of all things -- we really feel the weight of it; of a damaged girl robbed of the chance to repair.
