Silent Night, Deadly Night 1-5 (Merry Fucking Christmas)

One of the best movie posters ever.

I’m all for holiday related horror movies and especially Christmas ones.  A killer Santa or snow man is the kind of material that gets me going and into the spirit of things.  The Silent Night, Deadly Night series is a mixed bag (like almost every series) so let’s sort out what’s good and what’s crap.

When I went back to check out the first film again it was better than I remembered.  In fact I would call it a classic.  It’s an interesting take on the slasher genre because instead of keeping the killer’s identity a secret you know who it is the whole time.  The killer Santa, Billy, isn’t out for revenge, he’s just psychotic.  His parents were killed by a Santa when he was about five so now he gets a little weird around Christmas time.  The nuns that raised him were very strict so it’s been instilled in him to punish people that are naughty.

It’s a really great concept and it’s pulled off well.  This is the raunchiest in the series with the most gruesome deaths.  I give it a thumbs up.  Most people didn’t though and TriStar pulled it from theaters amid controversy from the public and scathing reviews from critics.  This film really became popular and a cult favorite when it came out on video.  This led to the making of the second film. 

Initially Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 was supposed to be just a reediting of the first picture with maybe some new scenes thrown in to extend the shelf life.  The editor/director hired to do the job, Lee Harry, agreed to recut the movie but also convinced the studio to let him make his own film.  So the result is something unusual.  The first third or so is Ricky (Billy’s brother who’s also crazy) telling Billy’s story to a psychiatrist (I think) while he’s locked up in a mental institution.  This is your reedited portion.  After that Ricky moves on to his own life story and how he came to be in the hospital.  This is your new material portion.

So what Part 2 boils down to is it contains all of the deaths from the first film and its own movie’s worth of killings.  Add that up and it’s double the amount of a normal slasher film.  The only problem is that the deaths from the first movie are recut to be less graphic.  But this doesn’t bother me so much because you still see the people getting killed.  It’s just that some shots were either dropped or shortened to make things less gory and shocking.  And I know there are people out there that have been or are going to be offended by this but this is what Harry was hired to do.  In my opinion I wouldn’t say that all the balls were chopped off.  It’s more like they were trimmed a bit.  Keep in mind that we’re given a whole new set of homicides to compensate.  And they came up with some good ones too like they stick jumper cables in one guy’s mouth, a loan shark gets impaled by an umbrella and Ricky goes on a shooting spree at one point.  So I think it’s a net gain.

The only real problem with Part 2 is that Ricky’s story doesn’t have anything to do with Christmas.  The retelling of the events from part 1 is all murdering Santa but Ricky’s story is about how he had this girlfriend and then snapped one day possibly during or not during Christmas.  He gets in the Santa suit at the end though which is redeeming.

Now onto the acting.  I have to mention it and if you’ve seen Part 2 you know what I’m talking about.  The guy who plays Ricky is a really bad actor but hang on folks, he’s so goddamn entertaining.  The put-on attitude, the bulging eyes, the fake deep throated voice, I love it all.  It only makes this thing more watchable and more fun in my opinion.  I don’t know if it’s the mother from Troll 2 or the wife from Gone With the Pope bad but it’s up there.  That last sentence was meant to be a complement by the way.  I’m putting this guy in prestigious company.

For a taste here's the infamous "garbage day!" line:

I really like Part 2 and think it’s the best in the series.  Some people might get turned off on it though because it may seem like the filmmakers sort of played it for laughs this time with the lighter tone of the new material.  But I say “sort of” because there are still a bunch of people that get merced and there aren’t any deliberate jokes thrown in.  I don’t think they meant to make their film funny but rather they just didn’t want it to be as dark as the first.  Combine that with the fairly atrocious acting, not very good writing and just ok production and it could get misinterpreted.  I think they tried hard to make their own horror flick and this is how it came out.

Moving on to the third one I’m gonna get right to the point and say don’t see it.  It was very terribly painfully and mercilessly boring.  Not a goddamn thing happens for pretty much the entire picture.  The story goes that Ricky has been in a coma for the past bunch of years, suddenly wakes up and then continues to kill people.  He works his way to this blind teenage girl (who kinda looks like Jennifer Connelly) that he has a psychic connection with. 

This is what Ricky looks like in the
the third one, scary no? No.

Almost all of the deaths are offscreen, the characters aren’t interesting, the psychic thing is lame mostly because they don’t use it very much in the story making it kind of pointless, they try to turn Ricky into a Jason or Michael Myers type figure by making him be almost invincible even though he’s not scary or threatening looking at all and it has nothing to do with Christmas.  The movie happens to take place on Christmas or Christmas Eve (not sure which) but it could’ve taken place on March 5^th and it wouldn’t have made a difference.  This one offers nothing, skip it.

With the fourth installment they decided to take a departure from the original lineage of the first three films and make a different type of movie altogether.  This time a reporter, Kim (Neith Hunter (Less Than Zero)), is being harassed by some witches.  Kim has visions of bugs, some other bugs and yet more bugs.  In fact the movie was called Bugs in the UK which seems to be a more apt title.  Once again this one has nothing to do with Christmas.

Initiation: Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 isn’t a bad film on its own though and has some things going for it.  First of all it stars Clint Howard (Ice Cream Man, That Thing You Do!) who always plays such weird creepy characters in both shitty B movies and A movies alike.  I guess he’s par for the course in this one in terms of character and while he’s not the male lead he’s in this an awful lot which is kind of rare for him.  So if you have a craving for Clint this is a good opportunity to get a healthy dose.

The second cool thing is all the nifty effects.  There are giant bugs, hands and legs that turn into bug-like things, people on fire and other shit.  I was really impressed with how much the filmmakers were able to accomplish with what I’m sure was a very tiny budget.

Reminds me of A Clockwork Orange with Clint
in his raping mask.

The third cool aspect of this installment is that it was directed by Brian Yuzna.  He directed Return of the Living Dead III (which was alright) and The Dentist (which I haven’t seen yet but have heard is good).  And according to IMDB he also got a story credit for Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (don’t know how I feel about that one, I guess it’s cool?).

So like I said, it’s not bad but is a separate item unto itself and doesn’t fit with the series.

The fifth and final film that we have is The Toy Maker.  At last we have a viable Christmas type concept:  there are killer toys that are terrorizing people.  This one surprisingly stars Mickey Rooney (tons of shit, especially when he was really young) as the toy maker and (fuck it I’m gonna spoil it) he’s not evil actually.  He made a life size teenage robot boy that went crazy somehow and he’s the one that makes the deadly toys.  Not a terrible twist but the robot boy thing you can see coming a mile away.

The problem with this one is that it feels too sluggish and under baked.  In other words it doesn’t seem like there are enough toy deaths and the plot wasn’t worked out enough.  The overall Halloween III type idea of killing kids with something kid specific on a holiday is a great one but unlike Halloween III we don’t make it to our destination.  The evil scheme is unraveled before hardly any presents are given out so we never have this doomsday scenario or countdown to mass murder.  In fact only one kid gets hurt (but not killed) and he’s an asshole teenager (a little older and meaner than the targets these toys were designed for I think).  In Halloween III they had the balls to actually kill a defenseless innocent child.  I guess they didn’t want to go in that direction and in turn made it pretty tame.  This film was not ambitious enough and took an easier path.

This toy attack scene from part 5 was pretty
cool actually.

Part 5 was directed by Martin Kitrosser and the reason I’m mentioning him is because I thought it was impressive that he’s been the script supervisor for all of Quentin Tarantino’s films and also for Friday the 13^th 1 and 2.  Just some trivia for you.

So what about the series overall?  Well it’s a little weird how they all panned out.  I mean the first one is the only down and dirty legit slasher film.  I love Part 2 but it’s a strange hybrid.  Part 3 is garbage, part 4 has nothing to do with anything but is fine on its own and part 5 has a halfway descent concept but doesn’t offer great entertainment.  At least that one’s about Christmas though.  Parts 3, 4 and half of 2 aren’t really Christmas related.

And there you have it, the Silent Night, Deadly Night series in a nutshell.  So much potential, so many possibilities, some payoff, but so much disappointment.    

To end this piece on a high note here's an awesome scene from the first one, merry fucking Christmas: