092: SoraRabbit Does a Christmas Special: Slasher Edition Sequel Double Feature

Many years ago I made a Christmas post about one of my favorite holiday movies, the timeless festive classic Silent Night, Deadly Night. I mentioned at the end of that post that I was thinking of doing a double feature post covering the first two sequels. So, finally, here we are! The original post is below:

051: SoraRabbit Does a Christmas Special - Slasher Edition

I also covered the board game in a later post:

SoraRabbit Short Hop 018: The Horrifying Return of Santa Billy!

Here we goooo! (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

The first Silent Night, Deadly Night follows the tale of Billy Chapman, who was traumatized as a child when a man dressed as Santa killed his parents. Forced to wear a Santa costume at his job, he snapped and wandered around killing people he deemed as naughty. He ended up being gunned down in front of his brother as he tried to kill the Mother Superior of their orphanage.

Just as with the original film, I watched both of these when I was a teenager. Unlike the original film, I didn’t think back on these two with near as much fondness. I remember them being a slog to get through, laughable in their laziness, and certainly not up to the standards of the original film. Did my impressions change with the passage of time? Let’s find out!

Title card. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 was released in theaters in 1987 by Silent Night Releasing Corporation. It is a direct continuation of the story from the first film, continuing with Billy’s little brother Ricky, now grown up and crazy in different directions from his brother.

One notable thing about this movie is that there is far less original content than you may expect. This film uses around 25 minutes of recycled footage from the first movie, presented as a story the main character tells, even though he was not present for most of the depicted events. This was a very odd choice, and one that makes this movie stick out to me as lazy and thrown together.

First, my usual content warning: These movies contain blood, murder, naughty language, excessive nudity, bad acting, an insane overuse of archival footage, silly deaths, attempted suicide, more bad acting, odd casting choices, improper use of jumper cables, and one very exposed brain.

The new Ricky. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

This movie starts with a long, lingering shot of the main character smoking while the opening credits play. It’s one of those movies that’s in no hurry to get started. The pacing is really slow, especially in the beginning, so I’ll cut to the chase. This is Ricky from the first movie, all grown up and confined to a mental hospital. If you recall from the first movie, it ended with Ricky witnessing his brother wearing a Santa suit, shot and dying at his feet. He looked up at Mother Superior and said “Punish!” indicating he was as crazy as his brother. If you don’t recall this, don’t worry… this movie shows that scene again.

Almost five minutes into the movie, Doc Henry comes in to talk with Ricky, who’s painfully snarky. So far the movie has wretched dialogue, long stretches of just nonverbal communication, and generic suspense music. We later learn that Henry is Ricky’s 13th doctor. No one can crack him.

The Doctor has a headache. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

Billy’s entire origin story is related to the Doctor in the form of extended clips of Part 1 with Ricky narrating. I won’t go over any of this because you can read about it in the first post. The point is, this backstory takes up nearly a third of the movie.

Also, Ricky explains away how he knows all this by claiming Billy would tell him about it. So I guess Billy was a great story teller. (He also apparently told his little brother about that time he spied on the teen orphans making out and when Murder-Santa exposed his mom’s boobs.) Ricky also knew all about the circumstances around Billy snapping and all the people he killed on his way to the orphanage. You have to really do some mental gymnastics to accept how he knows what happened in Ira’s Toys… the next time Ricky saw his brother, he was bleeding out at his feet. I could say that maybe he gleaned it from news reports, but there were no survivors, so no one could have told the reporters.

Nuns on the street. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

So now that both the premise and our suspension of disbelief have been taxed to the breaking point, we finally find ourselves with some original footage. Between the slow establishing shots and the archive footage, we are now 39 minutes into the movie. 39 minutes and the movie can actually begin.

We learn Ricky was sent to live with the Caldwell’s, a Jewish family presumably chosen specifically so they won’t celebrate Christmas and trigger him. They actually seem to genuinely care for him. But poor Ricky still has issues. He sees two nuns walking in slow motion on the sidewalk and panics. (Honestly I’m on his side here… they were weirdly creepy. I half expected them to be mobsters in disguise or criminals of some sort about to go on a mugging spree.) He also sees some red cloth, which flashes him back to his brother’s death.

Oops. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

We then jump to five years later… and the fifth actor Ricky has had, counting the baby. In this flashback, Ricky sees a couple making out in a field. The girl resists and the guy starts slapping her around. Teen Ricky gets mad about this and says “Naughty.“ Ricky runs him down repeatedly in a (red) car and the girl thanks him.

You should never open your umbrella inside someone. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

The Doctor makes a point to write in his notes that it was a red car, which Ricky is sarcastic about, saying the Doctor is just about to figure him out. There’s another time jump and Ricky is 18 now, played by his current actor. He works as a dishwasher and sees a guy getting beaten up in an alley. He somehow holds the attacker over his head without showing the slightest bit of strain or effort and impales him with an umbrella.

Artsy. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

Sturdy umbrella huh? There are a couple of artsy shots of the blood-soaked umbrella in the alley. The Doctor is very unprofessional and visibly rattled by the stories, complaining there was nothing in his file about this. Trying to recover, the Doctor asks about Jennifer and Ricky refuses to talk about her.

Headshot. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

Doc Henry then produces a photo of Jennifer. (Signed and everything. It’s clearly the actor’s professional headshot.) Ricky relents, telling the story of meeting Jennifer and falling in love. They have sex, Ricky losing his virginity and assuming it was Jennifer’s first time too. They go to see a movie and it just happens to be the clip of the killer Santa robbery from the first film. Ricky leaves to (presumably) kill a couple of loudmouths in the back of the theater and Jennifer is harassed by her ex boyfriend Chip who talks about all the sex they had.

Later they come across Chip on the street and he brings up their sex life again, which upsets Ricky.

Ricky: “I’ve had enough.“

Chip: “That’s what she said when I fucked her brains out in the back seat of my car.“

Did… did this movie invent “that’s what she said”?

And this is what Ricky does to Chip:

POP. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

Pretty sure that’s not how jumper cables work.

*choking sounds* (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

Jennifer screams at Ricky, telling him she hates him. He chokes her out with Chip’s radio antenna. Then he starts a very cheerful rampage. (For real, he’s smiling and chuckling the whole way.) He shoots a cop with his own handgun somehow. He randomly shoots a dude who’s coming out of his house to see what all the noise is about. And then comes the most famous scene in the movie.

GARBAGE DAY! (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

A guy is minding him own business, taking out the trash, apparently not having heard the gunshots. Ricky, in the silliest voice possible, says “Garbage day!“ and shoots him. I’ve seen memes of this scene.

Now seems as good a time as any to mention Eric Freeman’s acting choices. Everything Ricky says is deliberate and deep, with a sarcastic lilt to his voice. Almost every one of his lines is laughable. For example… Doc Henry: “Do you dream, Ricky?“ Ricky: “I. Don’t. Sleeeeeeep.“

The best way I can think to describe his delivery is Bruce McCulloch from Kids in the Hall anytime he has a fake mustache on. Not joking.

In my research I found that Freeman claimed he thought this was meant to be a comedy, which is why he acted this way. I’m including that as a courtesy to him… I am absolutely certain that after the movie released, he heard all the critics and fans complaining and was like, “Oh yeah. I did that on purpose.“

Ricky taking a stroll through suburbia. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

After this, a little girl bumps into Ricky and apologizes. He says “That’s all right.“ She’s not naughty, so she gets to live. The car that then drives by was apparently naughty, because Ricky puts three rounds into it and makes it explode into exaggerated flames. (It was probably naughty because it was red.)

Side note: For years I misremembered this scene. I was certain that he had fired a couple dozen shots, like he had one of those video game guns with unlimited ammo. But this time I counted and he only fired six shots.

Anyway, Ricky comes up on a police roadblock that was somehow erected very quickly and silently as he walked down the street. He laughs and points the gun at his own head, but now he’s out of bullets.

The Doctor is out. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

Ending the flashback, Ricky says that the cops stopped him before he was able to do what he really had to do. He’s also killed Doctor Henry at some point in his story, strangling him with the ribbon of his tape recorder.

We finally, FINALLY get to leave the bare white room and see a detective talking with a nun. She explains that the orphanage has closed and Mother Superior had a stroke and retired. They’re trying to figure out where Ricky went and, really, there’s only one option.

Mother Superior has a great makeup game. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

Ricky kills a Salvation Army Santa and steals his suit. He then calls Mother Superior to let her know Santa is back in town. For some reason that the movie is not at all concerned with explaining, she has partial Freddy Kruger face. She’s also lounging around the house in her nun’s habit, which is silly. Are nuns not allowed to wear civvies? No, really asking. I don’t know and I’m under too much of a deadline to look it up.

Either way, it’s weird that she’s all disfigured, since she was not injured at all in the previous movie. The prevailing theory is that they did this to cover up the fact that she was not portrayed by the same woman. But counter argument— why would this movie pay attention to something like character accuracy after spending a third of the movie retelling a story of which Ricky couldn’t know the precise details? Anyway, she’s all messed up, it’s not explained, and clearly Ricky is out to finish the job his brother couldn’t do.

Ricky looks so bored by being Santa here. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

After scaring some kids, Ricky Santa arrives at Mother Superior’s house. (Her house number is “666” by the way.) He chases her through the house, chopping things up and having a great time.

Now Ricky’s having fun. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

M.S. is not able to get into her chair lift in time and rolls down the stairs. She finds her guts and demands that he drop the axe and take his punishment. “You’re being very very naughty” she says. “Naughty this!” Ricky replies nonsensically, killing her.

Punish. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

The cops and the nun arrive in time to find M.S. sitting silently at the dining room table. Her head rolls off and the nun screams. Before Ricky can kill the nun, he’s gunned down by the cops and flies backwards through the window. Please note for later reference that Ricky was shot three times in the chest and not even once in the head. Just saying…

Ricky dies. Kinda. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

The cop tells the nun that it’s all over. Ricky opens his eyes and the movie ends. And that’s a wrap on Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2!

Therapy. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

Thoughts: So that was… something. I don’t know that I’d call it a movie, exactly, but it was something. First off, the most obvious part is the overreliance on the clips from the first movie. This is the second laziest movie I have ever watched. (The laziest was Dollman vs. Demonic Toys. That movie was 64 minutes long and had 15 minutes of clips from previous movies.) Also note that every nude scene in the first movie was included in this one. I kept a running tally and we ended up with 6 nude scenes in all. Also I should note that the clips from the first film do not match the picture quality of the rest of the movie, which adds to the uneven feeling of the whole thing.

But it wasn’t all clips. The other major problem with this movie was the painfully slow pacing. I feel like I should reiterate how frustratingly slow the beginning of this movie is. We see Ricky in an all-white room sitting and smoking and glaring at an orderly that was given no dialogue. The orderly leaves and comes back a couple of times as the Doctor comes in and sets up. Ricky and Doc Hank banter for a bit, and I know it was probably meant as a psychological game of wills, but it didn’t come across that way at all. It felt like padding. After the clips (both Billy’s and Ricky’s) it felt like maybe we would see an actual movie, but Ricky leaves the hospital, kills one street corner Santa, and goes straight for Mother Superior. After a tense chase against an elderly woman in a wheelchair, suddenly the movie is over. What? Imagine buying a movie ticket to this and mostly getting replays of the first movie. I would be pissed. (That’s probably why the third one was direct to video.)

Anyway, the parts without the archival footage were all right. Laughable but enjoyable. I did gain a new appreciation for this movie on this viewing. It’s so schlocky, so over-the-top, so lazy. But somehow it ended up being fun.

As an amusing side note, Cocoashade watched both of these movies with me, and she commented that they should make an expansion to the board game where you have a second board like in Battlestar Galactica. Every time you draw a flashback card, you switch to the original board and play there for awhile. This is a great idea, and if the development team is reading, you can have that idea for free.

Title card. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! was released straight to video in 1989. It also continues the story started in the first two films, but in a looser manner. It also contains some archival footage of the first movie, but much less.

Yet another Ricky. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

A young woman naps through the opening credits in a bare white room. She wakes up and an irritating high-pitched noise plays for several minutes. I’m not exaggerating, it was driving me crazy. She approaches a guy lying on a hospital bed. He has a see-through dome on the top of his head where his skull has been removed and his brain is showing through.

Ricky and his dome head. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

I’ll sum it up. This is Ricky, played by his sixth actor, and in a coma from the gunshots he suffered at the end of Part 2. This is why I told you to remember his injuries. He was shot three times in the chest and fell backwards through glass. He was not shot in the head. Why his skull was removed and replaced with a dome is casually explained away as “repairing the damage done to his brain”. It’s never elaborated on, and the dome is never mentioned again, not playing a part in the plot in any way except for likely being the reason Ricky acts like a lobotomized zombie now.

The woman is Laura, a blind psychic who is unwittingly probing Ricky’s mind. He awakens and chases her through his mindscape. How do I know it’s his? Because Laura comes across Santa Claus.

A look of sheer terror. I guess. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

She follows this strange Santa to a second location and sits on his lap, asking him in a childlike voice for the normal things a little girl in the 80s would ask for. (A dolly, a Mickey Mouse watch, ballet shoes, etc.) Santa draws an already-bloody knife on her and she screams.

Here I’d like to mention that Laura’s actor looks like she always moments away from cracking up. This scream was a good example. You can see in the above screenshot that the terror is not present in her eyes, which sparkle with mirth. This is her default setting for this movie, and it’s hilarious.

Laura having her tests. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

Laura wakes up and tells Doctor Newbury about her dream. (He’s played by the guy who plays Ben Horne on Twin Peaks.) She mentions that she could see in the dream and Santa was there. Doc seems very interested in all this. Cutting to the chase again, the Doctor is secretly putting her through tests to see if she can communicate with Ricky’s comatose mind in an attempt to find the cure for serial killers. This is explained slowly over the course of the movie and I’m saving time by putting it all here up front. You’re welcome.

They have another test and we’re “treated” to some more archival footage of Part 1. Thankfully they use it sparingly and spread it out. It basically shows that they’re psychically linked now and she’s tapped in to his traumatic memories. I’m not sure why Ricky’s memories are all from his brother’s POV but whatever. Again, I guess Billy was a really vivid storyteller. (And yes, in case you were wondering, for the third movie in a row we see Mrs. Chapman’s blouse ripped open by Murder Santa.)

Laura doesn’t go into detail about what she saw but casually tells the Doctor that she’s heading to a town called Piru with her brother to visit their grandmother for Christmas. She wants to stop the tests but the Doctor tries to manipulate her into continuing. After she leaves he gets real creepy about it with the nurse. “She’ll be back and then she’ll let me go as deep as I want. She likes it. Loves it.“ He goes on to describe it as “penetrating” Ricky’s mind and yeah, I’m sure I’m not reading this scene as anything other than an unethical Doctor creeping on a blind girl.

Laura has a vision. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

We also see a single tear tracking down Ricky’s face as he lies motionless in bed. Laura is waiting for her brother and realizes it’s gotten too quiet. The bitchy receptionist lady is dead, her throat slit. Laura screams and wakes up with her brother sitting next to her. It was a dream, but she seems to think it was prophetic, hinting to the receptionist about her impending death as she leaves.

Her brother, Chris, has fantastic 80’s heavy metal hair and the two have forced-sounding dialogue where they tease each other. It was at this point that I realized we were over 20 minutes into this movie and nothing had really happened yet. Yay.

One down, several to go. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

After they leave, there’s a guy walking through the hospital dressed as Santa to visit the patients. He’s drinking from a flask and making lewd comments to the nurses. He makes rude jokes at Ricky’s expense and drinks more. Ricky wakes up, probably due to the proximity of such blatant naughtiness. He kills Santa and does the unexpected— he leaves the costume behind. He wanders into the hallway, heading out to slit the receptionist's throat just like Laura saw.

During this, we sit through Laura's psychiatrist appointment. He says she’s imagining things and projecting her negative emotions onto people and she should totally keep seeing that other creepy doctor. So, yeah, another excellent psychiatrist like Dr. Hank. All we really get from this scene is that she’s been having psychic flashes since her parents died in a plane crash. She’s been repressing her anger and struggles against her powers, just wanting to be normal. She has a vision where the Doctor is replaced by Ricky and she screams.

Hilarious. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

In the car, Laura is catty towards her brother’s new girlfriend Jeri, who’s honestly a really sweet lady. Far away from them, Ricky walks through the parking lot and through their psychic link hears the directions to grandma’s house. In order to achieve this, Laura has to awkwardly recite the directions for Jeri, who’s not even the one driving. Chris is driving and presumably already knows where gramma lives. Very awkward.

In the one genuinely humorous shot of the entire movie, Ricky is shown hitchhiking— still in his hospital gown with his brain out— in front of sign that shows Piru is one mile away. The part that makes this even funnier is that it takes them several more scenes and a couple of stops to get there. That was one long mile!

This is a full service station. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

Anyway, Laura dreams more clips from Part 1 and a guy in a red sweater stops to pick up Ricky, who kills him, steals his stocking cap and car, and goes on to also kill a gas station attendant wearing a Santa hat. He does not take the hat. The attendant’s girlfriend tries to have phone sex with his decapitated head.

Aww, how wholesome. What could go wrong? (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

Grandma is at home preparing a turkey. We see that she also has psychic powers, because she announces aloud that the phone is about to ring. It’s Chris telling her they’re almost there. They took a break in their journey for a pitstop and to stretch their legs. (Again, it’s a really long mile.) We also learn that they’re in California, which is weird, since the first movie took place in Utah. Maybe they moved Ricky’s body across state lines so Doctor Newbury could play with his brain?

Ricky arrives at Grandma’s house, his dome barely covered by the stocking cap. (How did he get there before the others? Don’t think about it.) Granny is unphased and decides to feed this silent drifter who came up to her door after dark. She seems to read his mind, telling him he doesn’t need to thank her. Still, she’s not a very good psychic because she seems to sense no threat from him. Grandma makes the mistake of saying Santa left a present under the tree for him, so Ricky kills her. Not to victim-blame, but Granny kinda left herself open for this.

He left the hat behind. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

The cops are investigating the hospital killings and we meet the last new character of the movie, Lieutenant Connely, a sarcastic, streetwise Detective who’s intent on stopping the killing. He talks with Caldwell and this is where we get some more of the backstory I already spoiled. He does mention that they reactivated the memory centers of Ricky’s brain and Connely is rightfully worried that there is a zombified serial killer on the loose who can only think of his past trauma. Maybe a misstep by Dr. Caldwell? Who can say?

The surveillance camera shows Ricky said “Laura” before leaving, so they know where he’s going. By the way, all this stuff happens in cuts as they jump between the three groups of characters. I grouped it all together for brevity.

Knock knock. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

The kids finally arrive at Piru, at the end of their dreadfully long and tiring journey of one mile. Even though grandma is mysteriously missing, the siblings drink together and Jeri gets naked to take a bath with Chris. (All I’ll say about this scene is Chris is drastically hairy. I don’t think they invented manscaping until the early 2000s.) Eventually they all decide to be worried and while Chris and Jeri go out to hunt for Granny, Laura sits and listens to TV. It’s just as compelling as it sounds. After he gets back, Chris watches his sister change shirts for some reason and then they all wonder if Granny wouldn’t mind if they stop searching for her long enough to eat. But then Jeri comes back in and mentions Chris’s car has disappeared. They find his car upside down, Laura (who is blind, remember) notices her photo is missing from the mantle, the phone line is cut, and Ricky is outside the window.

Ricky bursts his hands through the front door (I guess he’s super strong now? Or Granny’s door is really old) and starts choking Jeri. (Rude! Jeri is delightful.) Chris stabs him and so now Ricky has a knife. Great. Chris grabs a shotgun and they go outside where Ricky immediately drops from a tree and knocks the shotgun out of his hands. As they struggle, Ricky stabs Chris and the girls get away.

Ricky and his Doctor. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

Intercut with all that “action” were scenes of Lieutenant Connely and Newbury, following Ricky’s trail of destruction all the way to Granny’s house. (They must have stopped for dinner, because they are way behind.) Newbury now regrets his kooky ad unethical experiments, lamenting that he should have let Ricky sleep. So why didn’t he? Because he wanted to eliminate all murder. There is a seriously bizarre scene where they stop everything so Connely can give a dissertation on how handy car phones are. It goes on way too long and adds nothing to the story. It was so weird.

At some point Connely gets out to pee at the side of the road because, again, it’s a terribly long mile to Granny’s house. Right after Chris is stabbed, Newbury pulls up and tries to talk sense into Ricky. He then plays a tape recording of Laura screaming. (Yet another odd choice.) Ricky stabs the Doctor and keeps zombie-ing his way to Laura.

Ricky is in a hurry to get into the bathroom. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

Laura apologizes to Jeri just in time for Ricky to kill her. (Seriously, Laura was weirdly bitchy towards Jeri for the entire movie to this point for no reason.) Now she’s all alone, truly the “final girl” of this movie. She evades Ricky as he blunders his way through the house. In a really disorienting scene, she appears to duck into the bathroom closet, but I guess it’s just a second exit from the bathroom because then she’s running down the hall. Ricky smashes through another door and Laura hides in the safest possible place in any horror movie… the basement. Why didn’t she go outside while Ricky was stuck in the bathroom door? I think I covered this by pointing out it’s a horror movie.

He’s jealous of Chris’s hair. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

In the basement, Granny the Ghost talks to Laura in her mind, telling her that she has to accept her gift and use it for good. Share the light of her mind with the darkness, stuff like that. Okay, thanks Granny. No advice on how to get out of this specific predicament? You know, the thing with the serial killer? No? Alrighty then. She’ll get right on that “using her power for good” thing.

Laura also finds Granny’s body down here. She breaks the lightbulb so now they’re both blind. As though Ricky can’t just read her mind through their well-established psychic link. She weakly tries to attack him with a broom and before he can kill her, Chris reappears, still alive, and with Chekov’s shotgun. Chris quips, “Is it live, or is it Memorex?“ before shooting him. (Utter nonsense. Saying that at that moment means absolutely nothing. It could well be the ranting of a dying brain as Chris starts to succumb to his wounds.) The pointblank gunshot doesn’t affect Ricky since he’s apparently bulletproof now.

He quickly chokes Chris out with the gun and returns to stalking Laura, who’s still lying on the floor. She breaks the broom to give it a sharp point and Ricky smoothly impales himself on it. Ricky survived a direct gunshot blast and died to a sharp stick. Oh, did you think their final battle would have something to do with her psychic powers or their mental link? Haha good one, expecting this movie to follow any sort of narrative logic.

The police finally arrive. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

Lieutenant Connely arrives with backup just in time to see Dr. Newbury die. He hammed up that death, though. He made it count. Laura is found cuddling her brother’s corpse. They cart away Ricky’s body, saying that if they get him on life support right away they can save him. (Were they planning on bringing him back for Part 4, maybe attached to a portable iron lung or something? That would have been awesome.)

Yay I survived a horrible visit to grandma’s! (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

Laura gets into the car with Connely and he asks if she’s okay. She says she’s fine. Then she stares smiling out into space and says “Merry Christmas.” The cop drives off and we see Ricky superimposed over the scene wearing a suit and bowtie. He smiles at the camera and says “And a Happy New Year!“ The end credits roll.

Why couldn’t the whole movie be this cool? (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

Thoughts: Did I seriously complain about the pacing of Part 2? That movie raced along compared to this one. While most of it was original footage, it was somehow more of a slog. There was so much padding. The movie ended with everybody slowly leaving a crime scene! Still, it was better written than the second film, and it had some creative direction in places. There were some interesting camera angles and composition. But this was sporadic.

This movie had a surprising amount of star power. New-Ricky and Connely were character actors that have an extensive catalogue. Three of the stars were actors we knew from later David Lynch productions— two from Twin Peaks and one from Mulholland Drive. (How does that happen? Was Lynch a fan of this movie? It’s possible. He was a strange dude and I mean that with the utmost respect. Guy was a legend. A legend and a strange dude.)

Speaking of acting, while this movie was not fueled by Freeman-Ricky’s fantastic performance, we had Laura’s performance to chuckle about. I mentioned this a bit earlier, but she was inadvertently hilarious. This was the second of only three movie roles in her catalogue and it shows. The girl constantly looked like she was trying not to laugh. She would break into a smile at the worst moments. There were a few times in the movie where you can see her consciously forcing her face to display a different emotion as though she were thinking “Sad. I need to look sad now. Or was it scared?” It was incredible and made the movie so much better to have something to focus on in between plot points. I feel for the cast and crew, however. It had to be so difficult to deal with during filming. I can only imagine they had to do multiple takes and take breaks so she could get her giggling fits under control. Of course, this is just speculation, but once again I am as absolutely certain of this as I was about Freeman’s acting choices.

Story-wise, the characters had strange reactions and motivations. They really didn’t make it clear why Ricky wanted to kill Laura so bad. Was it because she had his traumatic memories and this was his way of killing his past? No, that’s giving the movie way too much credit. And why did she have psychic powers? That is not at all in line with anything that happened before in the franchise. Here’s another of my certainties… they were ripping off Friday the 13th Part VII. That movie came out a year prior to this one and involved a kid with psychic powers.

Why Ricky has a dome showing his exposed brain is something I haven’t been able to figure out. I thought it was very odd that at no point did Ricky end up in a Santa costume. I feel like the film was purposely teasing that and refused to follow through. The first victim was a Santa, and he killed the gas station attendant put put on a stocking cap instead of the Santa cap. Ricky’s death was sudden and anticlimactic. What was that crap Granny was spouting about using her powers for good? Her powers made no impact on the ending. My research shows that this movie was written in one week and it really shows.

And don’t even bring up that ending. I think they were trying to be cute and break the third wall or something, but ugh. All I can think is they were trying to set up a Part 4, where Laura and Ricky continue to be psychically linked and maybe Ricky compels her to go around killing people since he’s in his iron lung now and they haven’t found a way to put wheels on it. It would have been a kind of buddy/slasher movie. Who knows what might have been.

Love it. (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

And there you have it, the next two installments in a very strange, very uneven franchise. After these two films, the story of the Chapman family is over and the next two installments are unrelated self-contained stories. It was intended for the franchise to become a holiday-themed anthology series, but Parts 4 and 5 were received poorly. (They were also straight-to-video like Part 3.) There have been two attempts to reboot the series, to lukewarm results. I plan to watch them someday, as well as revisiting Parts 4 and 5, but unless I get requests or a random urge, I won’t be doing another installment to Christmas Special: Slasher Edition. (If anything, I may include the other movies as parts of my Horror Movie Marathon posts.)

While I still believe strongly that the original Silent Night, Deadly Night is the best, (I consider it one of the great slasher films of the 80s) I did find new appreciation for the sequels in this rewatch.

Come sit on Santa’s lap. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)

While Part 2 relied way too heavily on archival footage, the new material was highly entertaining. The ridiculous deaths and the over-the-top performance delivered by Ricky’s actor made me wish there was more original material. The tones in the film were so back and forth. One moment you could believe it was a dark comedy, while the next it masqueraded as a straight slasher film. These disparate tones made for a surreal experience, and in talented hands this could be played to greater effect. If they had leaned just a little farther in either direction, or rotated tones more often, it could have been a solid movie. Even without that it was memorable, if for nothing else than for the silly overblown acting and the laziness of the flashback gimmick.

Part 3, however, was a true slog. It was so slow, so full of padding, and the refusal to commit to the bit was a bit strange. I mean, why not put him in the costume? Or at least prop the Santa hat on his weird dome. That would have at least looked funny. Speaking of, what was the thinking with the dome? Making Ricky a zombie running on instinct with his brain showing was an aggressively strange choice. The terrible acting of the lead was the best part, in my opinion. You would think bad acting would be a negative, but watching her trying to keep from smiling while her character was in mortal peril never failed to get a laugh out of me. I still smile thinking back at it. It was like seeing behind the veil of the movie at the actual person playing the role and I love it. The acting talent assembled for this movie was wasted, there were scenes of dialogue that made no real sense, and the murders were bland and unentertaining, especially when compared to those of the last two movies. The car phone scene and the endless mile they all had to travel were beacons of strangeness in a film full of strange choices. This was a definite low point, but I still found myself enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would.

All in all, the Silent Night, Deadly Night series is one of the most uneven horror franchises I’ve seen, with the quality and tone shifting not just between movies, but within the same movies. It was a muddled, jumbled mess and I love it so much. I’m glad that I revisited these movies and found new things to enjoy about them. I wish they had been better, but I can appreciate them for the strange, offkey offerings that they are.

He’s so happy! (Credit: Lee Harry, Silent Night Releasing Corporation)

Thank you for joining me for the latest in a long line of holiday-themed posts. I really enjoy these Christmas posts and I hope to keep doing them for as long as I can find material. I hope you’re all enjoying them just as much. Until next time, beware of Santa and try not to be . . . NAUGHTY.

And a happy New Year. (Credit: Monte Hellman, Quiet Films)