A movie like Silent Night, Deady Night Part 2 had spent years banished into the ether of forgotten low budget movies sitting around in the horror section of some dive video rental place where they still used pinewood shelves and the clerks dressed like they were going to a Grateful Dead concert instead of forced to wear khakis and a pull-over collared shirt with the company’s logo on the breast pocket.
That was until the Internet and social media resurrected it a good 20 years after everyone had forgotten about it. The image of a young man who screaming “Garbage Day!” before shooting a poor suburban dad went viral for its awfulness.
But is the movie as bad as they say? No, it’s worse than they say. Despite the title, most of the action takes place in a generic empty space room posing for an interview room at a mental hospital and then in the warm sunny atmosphere of southern California. The first movie was controversial for its marketing depictions of a killer in a Santa Claus suit and it was immediately pulled from theaters by the then upstart TriStar Pictures following public outcry.
The 1984 release of Silent Night, Deadly Night also signaled the end of the peak of the slasher craze of the early 1980s. They were cheap movies made for a song featuring actors willing to work for peanuts just to get a screen credit. The major studios bought the distribution rights and made a fortune.
But horror movies had become almost on the same level as porno movies by the mid-1980s. Luckily, the rise of the home video market meant they would live on albeit in a lesser stellar medium. Most slashers had been released in regional theaters mostly through deals with independent movie theater owners back when there were more of them anyway. So the home video market brought them to a wider audience.
Yet, this movie has all the look and feel of someone who just tried to bullshit an oral report of a book they didn’t even read. The first half of the movie consists of its main character, Ricky Caldwell (Eric Freeman), recounting to a therapist Dr. Henry Bloom (James L. Newman), the events of the first movie which are shown. It’s odd this movie came out a few months before Jaws: The Revenge, another bad horror sequel that escalated the ages of the kids from the previous movie to full-grown adults but actually has a character recalling memories of events they never witnessed.
This movie wouldn’t really work if it wasn’t for the over the top overacting of Freeman, who is mostly a character actor who appeared in a lot of forgettable roles. He had previously appeared as an orderly pushing Jackie Gleason in a wheelchair in his last movie Nothing in Common. Hey, if you can work with The Great One, you can get the lead in a bad movie.
Freeman, who took a long sabbatical from acting before the Internet sleuths found him thus leading to his return to character actor mediocrity, said he acted so over the top on performance on purpose. It’s not bad. It’s no where near the Nicholas Cage style but it’s on par with Al Pacino.
From my understanding of the movie’s production, it was shot over a period of 10 days in January of 1987 before released in theaters on April 10 of that same year. Yes, they didn’t even wait until the summer season. But it’s all good because this movie is about as much about Christmas as It’s a Wonderful Life is (Hey, just admit it!)
There’s a brief moment in which we see Ricky go on his rampage of people at a movie theater which looks more like a meager screening room and outside in a southern California neighborhood where he shoots and kills people before being arrested. The violence is so over the top, it’s hard to take this movie seriously. It works better as a dark comedy instead of a horror.
The first movie had its main character, Billy Caldwell, being traumatized by witnessing his parents killed by a man dressed in a Santa suit. Orphaned, he and Ricky were sent to a Catholic-based orphanage where the Mother Superior subjects him and others to extreme violence through corporal punishment for minor offenses for being naughty. By the time he’s grown up, Billy still suffers from post-traumatic stress and when viewing a co-worker sexually assaulting another one, he snaps and goes on a murder spree.
None of the actors from that movie appear in this except in archived footage. I’m sure this didn’t sit well with any actors. Reportedly, a lot of the cast and crew weren’t paid or got stiffed on their wages. This was before Crispin Glover took on Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg for using footage of him in the second Back to the Future and caused changes across the board.
Lilyan Chauvin wonderfully played the evil Mother Superior in the first movie. But she’s been replaced by Jean Miller who is given some scar tissue make-up that looks about as convincing as Dr. Tom Mason the chiropractor Ed Wood had double for Bela Lugosi.
Needless to say, the movie only made about $154,000 on its release but received a bunch of negative criticism, which is very warranted. Nowadays, Killer Santas have their own subgenre in horror. A remake of the 1984 original has just been released with Rohan Campbell who was in Halloween Ends in the role of Killer Santas. There also was a sequel to this movie that carried on the Ricky storyline with horror icon Bill Moseley in the role. It’s not as good as this one because it takes itself too seriously on an absurd plot.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 