Writer(s): Paul Caimi and Michael Hickey, from a story by Caimi
Starring: Lilyan Chauvin, Gilmer McCormick, and Toni Nero
My my, how times do change.
It was roughly thirty years ago that Charles E. Sellier Jr.’s serial
killin’ Santa hit the big screen, to impassioned protests from angry parents
concerned about the level of sex and violence contained in a Christmas movie. Although pulled from its initial release due
to public pressure, future releases have used the controversy as a selling
point…along with the four sequels that it spawned. Nowadays, a movie this tame could open
without anyone so much as batting an eye (like the god-awful remake of Bob
Clark’s Black Christmas, which opened
on Christmas Day in 2006 with little-to-no resistance).
Silent Night, Deadly
Night is a curious picture; one that reverses the typical complaints I have
with slasher films. I’ve made the
analogy before that slasher movies are akin to pornographic movies; not because
they feature often copious amounts of sex and nudity, but because the only
reason people watch them is to see the violent kill scenes. Obviously, this is parallel to pornos, where
people skip the story to get straight to the “good stuff”.
Normally, I share this mindset, as many slasher films have
threadbare plots designed solely to contain as many graphic scenes of mayhem as
possible. Silent Night, Deadly Night is the first one I can remember that
gets off to a great start, only to get derailed once the pointless murders
start to take place. This bummed me out,
because the first half-hour really exceeded my expectations, to the point that
I thought we might have a new Christmas movie tradition in our family; alas, it
only turned out to be a lump of coal.
Billy is a child who was orphaned after watching his mother
and father get killed by a man dressed up as Santa Claus (he had used the
disguise to rob a bank). Life doesn’t
get much better in the orphanage, where he is treated like garbage by a
sadistic Mother Superior (Lilyan Chauvin).
The only person who seems to understand his ordeal is Sister Margaret,
but even she is powerless to stand up to her boss, and so the punishments
continue.
We flash forward ten years later, and Billy is now all
growed up (well, he’s eighteen). Sister
Margaret manages to get him a job in a local toy store, leading to one of the
cheesiest, most ill-fitting (and absolutely hysterical) montages in cinema
history. If it was purely intentional,
it’s easily the most inspired thing in the entire movie; it really is a stroke
of absolute genius (I always expect him to smile at the camera during the scene, which can be viewed below, while his name
appears underneath, in an ode to old sitcoms).
Of course, neither Billy, nor Sister Margaret has revealed
his “problem” to anyone, and so when he gets nervous around Christmastime,
everyone just thinks that he’s weird.
Also of course, when Billy’s boss approaches him, asking him to play
Santa Claus after their initial choice breaks his ankle while ice skating, he
somehow accepts, the lingering trauma of his childhood still fresh on his mind.
Surprisingly, he manages to keep it together throughout the
day, only severely creeping children out, without snapping. But everything comes to a head when the store
is closed, and the manager brings out alcohol.
He encourages Billy to drink…bad move.
Before long, he’s strangling an attempted rapist with a string of
Christmas lights…then turns his anger on the victim. The rest of the movie he spends killing
anyone who happens to get in his way, whether they are good or bad, naughty or
nice. But before he does, he always says
the word “punish” in an indescribably annoying way that grates at the nerves
before long.
Along with the drop in the overall quality of the film,
there is also a correlatable dip in the dependability of the performances. All of the main players at least met my
expectations, with many of them exceeding it; yet when the film decides to drop
two dimensions and become a one-dimensional killfest, with victims that only
have time to make out and get naked before they are killed, the acting talent
takes a noticeable nosedive. It honestly
feels like two separate movies were blended into one, with results that are
about on par with what you would expect.
RECAP: It starts off fascinating, by actually trying to
create a backstory for the killer, instead of just setting him loose on
victims; once it does set him loose, all the interest is gone. The kill scenes aren’t anything too original
or spectacular, with very few of them having any kind of Christmas theme. The biggest plus is an absolutely genius,
randomly cheesy montage that occurs about at the halfway mark…you have to see
it to believe it. Aside from that, if
you’re a slasher completist, then you might want to check this one out,
otherwise I would just watch the montage and steer clear from the rest.
RATING: 5/10
BRILLIANT MONTAGE
RED-BAND TRAILER
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