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:

            

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

It took a long damn time but I finally got around to checking this piece out.  Sunset Boulevard is one of my favorite movies of all time and this seemed like it would be in the same vein.  There’s something about has-been entertainers that really interests me.  From a filmmaking standpoint it presents a wealth of material for an actor to draw from and usually results in a depressing yet sympathetic performance.  But in both film and reality there are many forgotten about celebrities that are totally delusional.  That’s the good shit and this film delivers just that.

We start in the old vaudeville days where we see that baby Jane is a dancing and singing little girl.  The audience loves her and she even has her own doll for sale.  The problem is that she’s a stinking brat that throws tantrums.  Jane’s sister, Blanche, seems annoyed and perhaps jealous of her success.  Cut to 30’s Hollywood where the tables have turned and now Blanche is a famous adored actress while Jane is a rotten one that nobody cares about.  One night the two of them get into a car accident causing Blanche to become paralyzed from the waist down.  Now skip to modern day (of 1962) where the sisters live in an old dilapidated mansion.  Blanche (Joan Crawford (Mildred Pierce)) is wheelchair bound and confined to the upper floor of the house.  She looks to be in good health though and seems like a nice person that enjoys reading fan mail and getting a kick out of her old films.  Jane (Bette Davis (All About Eve)) on the other hand looks like total shit.  It’s like they cast Leatherface with her sagging skin, enormous amount of lipstick and dreadfully messy hair.  She’s grown frumpy, lumpy and dumpy.  Jane is also mean and controlling.  Since Blanche depends on Jane to feed her and take care of everything Jane takes advantage of her position by doing shit like taking Blanche’s telephone away and imitating Blanche’s voice to order booze over the phone.

Almost the entire picture takes place inside the house and that helps to give it a real confined feel.  Whenever there are shots of anything other than the house it’s a relief and then depressing when we eventually go back to the mansion (just like Sunset Boulevard).  Blanche is more or less a prisoner and things escalate pretty quickly when Jane kills Blanche’s pet bird and serves it to her for lunch.  From there on Blanche fears all the food that Jane gives to her causing starvation.  And that’s just the beginning.  Jane goes on to do even crazier shit and by the end she sinks totally into her own mentally distorted mind.

Speaking of the ending (don’t worry I won’t spoil it), it’s the key to the film.  So the whole time we’re chugging along taking sides and figuring out what’s what but then at the very last moment the filmmakers throw a monkey wrench into the damn thing.  For me it completely changed how I viewed these characters and the overall movie.  They present us with something that’s genuinely fucked up and makes the picture you’ve witnessed seem even more fucked up than before.  They got me.  I never saw it coming and I’m very happy that this ending is almost never talked about. 

The only thing that kinda bothered me throughout the film was the score.  Only sometimes did it fit well with the images on screen while most of the time it was too bright and/or peppy.  And I want to make clear the distinction between busy and peppy.  You can have a busy dark score that evokes feelings of creeping and impending doom.  Psycho is a good example of that.  It’s very unsettling and nervous.  Peppy has a bounce to it that isn’t so concerned with what’s going on or what’s to come.  This movie’s score is more suited for a drama that isn’t so heavy and gloomy in my opinion.  Ultimately the music doesn’t ruin the film but it’s out of place enough to be noticed.

C'mon guys, tell me that's not Leatherface

Both Crawford and Davis give great performances here.  Davis has the harder role and really nails this character.  There’s a lot for her to work with and she truly becomes this person.  Crawford’s role is hard too but in a different way.  She’s limited in her movement and restricted as an actor because of the wheelchair.  Crawford makes it work real well though.  What was interesting to find out after seeing the film was that these actresses really did hate each other in real life.  I kind of wish I had known this going in because it would have been another layer added to the viewing experience but the film was pretty great anyway.

So what ever the fuck did happen to baby Jane?  She became an absolutely insane psychotic bitch.  It’s not as good as Sunset Boulevard but few movies are.  I think you should see it.  It’s a good take on the same idea.  Damn, I can’t get over how disgustingly extreme Bette Davis’ face looked in this. 

187

There was a rash of inner city school movies that came out in the 80’s and 90’s like Dangerous Minds, The Substitute, Stand and Deliver and Lean on Me.  I thought 187 (the police code for homicide) was following in the tradition of teacher arrives at tough predominantly black and/or Latino high school, is shocked to see how fucked up it is, students reject new teacher and make his/her life hell, teacher sticks with it and earns the students’ respect through some unorthodox activity, students turn their lives around, teacher gets fired or attacked, students come to his/her aid, teacher retains his or her job/dignity, everyone lives happily ever after, the end.  Well, some of this happens in our movie but it goes in a totally different direction in general and by the end I didn’t quite know what to make of it.

Sam Jackson (Menace II Society) is Trevor Garfield, a somewhat happy science teacher at a high school in Brooklyn.  He seems to enjoy teaching his class and his students sort of respect him.  Well that is until he sees that someone wrote “187” in huge font on every single page of their textbook.  Trevor’s worried about it and after a brief investigation he finds out that a student (Method Man in his breakout non-self role) is pissed at him for flunking him.  In fact Method Man is so ticked that he stabs Trevor in the back with a giant nail like a dozen times.  I would think this would be enough to kill anyone or maybe paralyze them but it’s not gonna keep Trevor fucking Garfield down.  Cut to fifteen months later where he’s now in L.A. and settling for substitute teaching positions.  He gets a gig at a local high school and his world goes from bad to much worse.

First Trevor goes into the wrong classroom and gets embarrassed.  Then he runs into Benny (Lobo Sebastian (Ghosts of Mars, Leprechaun in the Hood)) who’s a gangbanger and gives him some attitude.  Trevor discovers later that the pretty computer science teacher, Ellen (Kelly Rowan (Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh)), is being terrorized by him.  The other bad guy in this is Cesar (Clifton Collins Jr. although he’s credited here as Clifton Gonzalez Gonzalez (Tigerland)).  He’s another gangbanger, the toughest kid in class and the cause of most of Trevor’s problems.

Cesar steals Trevor’s watch, smokes weed on school property and kills Ellen’s dog.  I thought the goal of Trevor was to turn Cesar around and make him see the error of his ways but that’s not what’s going on here.  Spoilers.  If you’re actually going to see this movie don’t keep reading.  Instead of being the enlightened professorial sage that we expect, Trevor goes to war.  The incident in New York killed him inside so now he has no patience for troublemakers.  Benny dies fairly early on in the film and as the picture progresses we’re led to believe that Trevor killed him.  We’re also given clues that he drugged Cesar and cut off his finger.  I thought at the end it was going to be revealed that someone else did it and our faith in our lead would be restored.  However when Cesar has finally had enough and confronts Trevor with his gun toting gang Trevor admits to doing the deeds.  He could’ve snapped and just be saying that because he doesn’t care anymore but I believe that he really did kill one student and mangle another.  Then out of nowhere comes a Russian roulette scene (ok fine, Cesar was watching The Deer Hunter before but you don’t think anything’s going to come of it).  Trevor loses it and pulls the trigger three times instead of your usual one time and demands that Cesar play along with him. 

I mean what the fuck?  This movie has such a bizarre feel to it and is very unlike those other inner city school films.  This was directed by Kevin Reynolds and you may know him from the pretty bad Waterworld or the really awful Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.  I actually kind of enjoyed The Count of Monte Cristo (2002) though.  Technically most of the things he tries here don’t work that well.  A couple of examples are that he has the students and classroom be out of focus when Trevor first starts teaching and there’s a scene where there are these shadows of kids playing basketball that get bigger and more aggressive while Trevor and Ellen have an increasingly tense conversion.  New York is shot with icy blue filters while L.A. is hot sticky yellow.  We’ve seen that a lot before but I still think it looks cool and is effective.  Every once in a while Reynolds will throw in a cool shot.  There’s one that’s particularly badass, it’s a close up of a teacher (John Heard (Home Alone, C.H.U.D.)) holding a gun in front of a certificate that reads “excellence in teaching”.  

As for the story side there are some things that are brought up that don’t get resolved and plot devices that are mentioned once and then forgotten about.  The whole story seems kinda out there but the way they get around this is at the end there’s some text that reads “this movie was written by a teacher”.  According to him on the commentary track a bunch of the things in this film actually happened to him in real life.  I’m still reluctant to believe that he killed one of his kids though.

Overall this is a pretty fuckin’ weird movie.  It’s interesting to see a teacher fight back against the students but it wasn’t done explicitly enough.  Most of the accusations are just that, accusations.  The filmmakers leave it up to the audience to decide if Trevor really did do the things he admits to.  The problem is they didn’t make it ambiguous enough.  I think by the end it’s pretty clear that Trevor is capable of the crimes presented to us and that he did carry them out.  So if you’re going to tell us this stuff then why not go all the way and show Trevor committing the murder and de-fingering.  You want to side with the guy because he’s trying to help these kids but at the same time he’s acting worse than the students.  It brings up some intriguing questions about teaching and at what point, if ever, do you give up on certain kids.  What extremes do you go to in order to get through to them?  Would you sacrifice your life to set one kid straight?

Do I recommend it?  I guess so.  I’m not very enthusiastic about it but it’s definitely a twist on the sub-genre.  Sam Jackson’s kind of stiff in it most of the time but he lets loose at the end which is the best part of the movie.  John Heard is entertaining as a burned out teacher that keeps a gun in his desk drawer.  Kelly Rowan is alright but I don’t buy for a second that her character and Trevor get together.  The part where Rowan tells her students about e-mail is very outdated and funny to watch.  It’s kind of annoying when I don’t know how to feel about a film but that’s the magic of cinema, right?

Pusher (and a bit of Drive)

I’m still not sure why I didn’t write a piece about it but I thought Drive was one of the best movies…well…I guess I’ve ever seen.  I mean it’s not perfect and has its share of problems but goddamn does it have style and balls.  From the hot pink cursive credits to the gory skull crushing, I loved it all.  The track over the opening credits is particularly awesome:

As a result Nicolas Winding Refn has instantly become one of my new favorite directors.  He seems to be a bit peculiar though, which is always welcome in artists of any kind.  When Ryan Gosling recalled his first encounter with Refn in an interview he said that they drove around L.A. listening to pop music when suddenly Refn started crying and then singing at the top of his lungs while pounding his fists on his knees and exclaimed that this is what the movie is going to be, a guy driving around at night listening to pop music.  Gosling has also described Drive as, “a violent John Hughes movie fairy tale”.  I’m not sure about the latter (full disclosure: I’m a huge John Hughes fan that has a titanic sized place in my heart for his films…well most of his films anyway, man the end of his career really sucked didn’t it?) but the former is a good start of a description of the picture.

I saw this thing twice in theaters (a buddy of mine saw it three times) and I can’t remember the last time I did that (I’m pretty sure this has happened in the last ten years but I’m having trouble thinking of what movie it was).  Admittedly I thought it was good but not great the first time but the second time it blew me away.  I could focus on the parts I really liked and not be bothered so much with the parts that I didn’t.  You guys gotta see it, it’s badass as shit and incredibly well made.

So after all of that I had to go back and check out his acclaimed debut, Pusher.  It’s about a drug dealer, Frank (Kim Bodnia (Bleeder)), that gets in deep with his supplier, Milo (Zlatko Buric (2012)), for a ton of cash.  He has only a couple of days to get it or Milo’s thug, Radovan, will take his knee caps.  That’s quite a pickle if you ask me.

So it’s a basic premise that we’ve seen before but this one comes off a bit different.  Frank’s situation is bad from the start because he already owes some money to Milo even before he blows the big score that puts him eyebrows deep in debt.  So you have to assume that Milo is somewhat upset with him from the get go even though he doesn’t show it.  I mean what crime boss is going to take lightly someone not paying him his money?  I guess you would see that in a mob-boss-with-a-heart-of-gold type movie (most likely directed by Brett Ratner), but this isn’t one of them.

At every turn Frank can’t catch a break.  He tries to collect some money from people that owe him, steal other’s drugs, rob people at gunpoint, etc.  None of it goes his way.  He needs to come up with so much money that it’s hopeless.  But the way Frank goes about all of this is strange and interesting.  He doesn’t seem to be that concerned with the situation he’s in.  He takes his time trying to gather the money and continues to snort heroine and hang out with his girlfriend that he treats like shit.  I didn’t know what to make of his nonchalant attitude.  I thought either he doesn’t care what happens to him or he has an ace up his sleeve.  Well I turned out to be wrong on both accounts.  Frank doesn’t want anything to happen to him but at the same time he can’t bring himself to move quickly to get the money.  He’s his own worst enemy.

The ending was sudden and not what I expected.  I won’t give it away but I would have a totally different idea about what happened if sequels to this picture weren’t made.  But then again I haven’t seen the sequels yet so it’s still up in the air for me.

There are a lot of similarities between this and Drive.  Both involve the main character in a situation that spirals totally out of control making you doubt that he can get out of it, there’s not a terrible amount of action but when there is it’s pretty grisly, the soundtracks are cool and fitting and both have a couple of scenes that are strange but fascinating and even touching.  In Drive there’s the part where Gosling puts on a mask and peeks in on Ron Perlman at his pizza parlor laughing very hard in slow motion.  In Pusher Frank and Radovan are on their way to try and collect some money after the blown score and they talk about how Radovan doesn’t really like what he does and that he wants to open a restaurant ‘cause he makes a killer shish kabob.  They’re laughing and having a good talk even though one minute earlier Radovan tells Frank that one time he had to take out a guy’s knee caps with a knife because he didn’t pay.

Refn knows what the fuck he’s doing and this is a real strong debut for any director.  On the extras there was a documentary called Gambler that followed him around while he was trying to get financing for Pusher 2 and 3.  He says in it that it’s (and I forget the exact word that he used) a curse to have a hit for your first film because everyone sees everything else you do after that as inferior.  The doc was good by the way and very interesting because it shows the business and politics behind trying to get a film financed and made.  Refn went bankrupt after Fear X (in the doc he calls it his best film) so he needed to attract investors to get Pusher 2 off the ground.  But the Pusher 2 money would only pay his debts so he needed to make Pusher 3 to actually get some income.  It’s complicated because Refn wants to make a film that satisfies him creatively but at the same time he also needs to make something that will please his investors so they keep giving him money to make movies.  The whole process looks pretty fucked up.

The thing about both Pusher and Drive is that they’re arty but not necessarily farty.  They have attitude and conviction that walks the walk and talks the talk.  They’re so well put together that the pretentiousness melts away to reveal an endoskeleton made of masterful cinematography, great story telling and pure psychotic aggression.  I look forward to whatever Refn does in the future ‘cause he dishes out some damn good entertainment.