For anyone who's gone through the holidays some depression is bound to set in at one point or another. Presents to wrap, cards to send out, dinner to make, cookies to bake, lists to check twice, that kind of thing.
It stands to reason that the cheer and good will wears on you after a while, so what's the best way to cope? Have some eggnog? NO; kill a few people! It sure worked for Billy Caldwell, our protagonist/antagonist from 1984's Silent Night Deadly Night.
Now there was a movie that, while not necessarily good by any stretch of the imagination, sure did make the most of its 15 minutes of fame by capitalizing on the fact that it featured Jolly Saint Nick as a killer. ...welll, maybe not Santa per se, but a dressed-up psycho facsimile who traveled from rooftop to rooftop killing, murdering, raping, pillaging, impaling, et cetera.
And hoo boy, did the parent groups of the good ol' U.S. of A. ever run the 400-meter hurdle with that; protests at every theater that dared show it, petitions signed and mailed in demanding a nation-wide pull of the flick, picket signs denouncing producers Ira Richard Barmak, Scott Schneid and Dennis Whitehead, director Charles E. Sellier Jr., and Tri-Star Pictures, not to mention the lack of mistletoe sentiment onscreen.
Forgetting a moment that this wasn't Santa Claus himself doing the dirty deeds (dirt cheap), or that there's been movies that featured a psycho in a Santa suit killing and maiming before this (1972's Tales From The Crypt, 1980's To All A Good Night and Christmas Evil), all these passels of picketing parents could be forgiven for mistaking this as an affront to their Christian (and Christmas) sensibilities since the posters for said flick featured a suspicious Santa arm dragging an axe down your chimney... as they say, that is packaging that sells.
And it would seem all that picketing and bludgeoning of SNDN paid off for the outraged lovers of Yuletide, since the film was immediately pulled from theaters all over the place (after making back double its $1 million-plus budget), and yet becoming such a raging underground hit that its video release was grabbed up judiciously by naughty kids worldwide. So then you can guess what happened - sequel time!
And just like Blair Witch 2: Book Of Shadows, Zombie 4: After Death and Alien 2: On Earth, a sequel was rattled out a few years after the fact so that a few right unjolly elves in upper studio management could cash in because of a few bad kids who enjoyed the original with a sequel... and not just any sequel, but a sequel that did its best to pick up where the original left off ... in spite of the fact that this is one present that should never have been opened to begin with.
Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 seems to understand the rules of cheap-jack sequels that grab up every cheap buck they can, because they may have taken three years to get this follow-up out the door, but not only does it feel like it came out a month after the original's release, but (for a sequel) it's telling a story that's already been TOLD!
Look at this pile of figgy pudding: Back in 1984, a young man named Billy Caldwell snapped after seeing his parents murdered by a criminal in a Santa suit, not to mention years of physical and psychological abuse at the hands of the Mother Superior of an orphanage, and slaughtered several people before being killed himself. Three years later, his now-grown little brother Ricky (Eric Freeman) is in a mental hospital, carrying with him the terrifying memory of his brother's death and the burning image of the Mother Superior that helped bring about Billy's violent demise. But starting a new life means avenging his brother's death by any means necessary... and this will be one night that definitely will not be silent.
Hey kids! You wanna make a sequel that people who watched your first film will clamber for? Just use footage from your first film in it! Lots of it! MOST of it! Cram it all into the first half if you can! Yeah, Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 takes pride in the fact that, during Ricky's analysis segment with Doctor Bloom (James Newman), which consists of, say, 75-80% of the film itself, we get an outright clip show of Silent Night Deadly Night itself, right down to several scenes involving Billy's murder sequences and the murder of his and Ricky's parents (when Ricky was a baby himself, mind you), as well as scenes where there was no possible way Ricky could have even been present! It doesn't make a lick of sense, especially when you consider that it was big brother Billy whom was taking care of business.
At one point, in fact, Doc Bloom even asks Ricky how he could remember the night "Santa" killed his and Billy's parents, since he was a baby at the time, after all.
Yeah! Doc's speaking for you, the viewer, right there!
Ricky's response? "I was there!"
Well, so much for explanation....
That's something else: this guy that plays Ricky, the aforementioned Eric Freeman, apparently is either one of those guys who was hired because he had this leading man look to him, or someone owed him a favor. And as far as line readings go... well, maybe we can overlook that. We could, save for the fact that he invokes a very loud, growling tone in every line of dialogue. Of course, it's all accompanied with wide eyes, sneering lips and nostrils flaring so as to put a rabid rottweiler to shame.
Oh, we could say that Eric decided this whole enterprise was so outlandish and nonsensical that he believed the best course was to take it at face value and essay one of those patented "over-the-top" performances. Or this could just be how he talks normally and he just read his lines like another day at the office. Seeing that I think there are moments when I saw Eric's hair overact, however, I think this is an acting choice. Not a GOOD acting choice, but hey; a choice is a choice. And the over-riding emotion in watching him essay Ricky is not one of a tortured soul being driven to insanity, but that he's a Mad Slasher in-training searching for his own Camp Crystal Lake.
Eric's insistence on putting emphasis on every third word, leering evilly over one shoulder and gritting his teeth angrily make you miss that fact that he's not wearing a tall top hat, twirling a long black mustache and waving a long black cape around.
Not that anyone going into Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 is going in for a realistic depiction of murderous madness, a la Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer, but when your headlining killer's biggest contribution to the Mad Slasher world is the creation of an awkward Internet meme ("GarBAGE Day!!!"), suffice it to say there's not much hope that he's going to be all that threatening. He can electrocute as many people he wants to with battery cables, impale them on umbrellas, strangle them with car antennae, and shoot innocent bystander after innocent bystander - but he is not a threat: he's more like a "Saturday Night Live" character they introduce at about the 1:00 AM mark.
That very well may be what director Lee Harry and writers Harry, Joseph H. Earle, Dennis Patterson and Lawrence Appelbaum had in mind. It's more than apparent that every scene in Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 is being played for laughs - bad laughs - even when there are no laughs to be had. Even though this came out some three years after the first SNDN, there is every feel that this is a slapdash effort put together in a rush with such a compulsion to make some extra scratch from fans of the original that you can barely disguise the fact that there's NO SNOW ON THE GROUND IN ANY OF THE NEW SCENES! People are dressed in short sleeves and light clothes like it's summer (which it probably was when they filmed their scenes). And our Ricky doesn't even put on a Santa suit until the last minutes of the film!
That's right; our Psycho Claus doesn't do anything his big (dead) brother did in Movie #1 - no bloody knives as gifts to kids, no naked girls impaled on deer racks, no stranglings with Christmas lights - but he does do something bro Billy didn't get to do: and that's get to the Mother Superior from the first movie!
Alright, alright - she's being played by a completely different woman (Lilyan Chauvin from the original, Jean Miller here), and in the three years time from movie to movie the orphanage has been closed, she has to get around in a wheelchair, she's had a stroke of some sort and lots of scarred, nasty Phantom Of the Opera-ish makeup on her face but yeah: the same character. Myself, I wouldn't think that one person could change so much in three years. I understand that the dynamic is that there had to be enough time for the pre-teen Ricky from before to age into the late-teen Ricky we have here, but Mom Superior...wow. This is like she has some sort of bad run-in with a Salvation Army truck.
Not one other actor makes any bit of difference here, but as anyone would expect, this is more about keeping the audience distracted with nonsense than it is about a story or (God forbid) characters. Everyone is an idiot, including Doc Bloom who just sits there, listening and setting himself up for something anyone could see a million miles away.... OOH!! But I almost didn't mention Ricky's girlfriend! Yeah; our nutcase lead had a girlfriend! And not just any girlfriend, his girlfriend Jennifer is played by b-movie legend Elizabeth Kaitan, who is by default the most entertaining, most interesting, most likable and most delightfully quirky individual in this whole opportunistic mess. Her eyes, her smile, her voice and certainly the way she just reacts to the nonsense around her suggest a movie that could have been. Here, she is introduced, shows Ricky some happiness, gets dispatched easily (*gulp* Uh-Oh!) and is forgotten. Too bad.
Something DID happen in the last scene, however. In this final stalking showdown between Crazy Ricky Claus and Evil M.S. in a darkened house as M.S. wheels around, yelling put-downs and nasty taunts at her executioner boy, we notice something happening. Hey... director Harry must have confabbed with cinematographer Harvey Genkins to give the scene a look that was darker, tighter, more ominous and more like a Mad Slasher movie than any other scene in this movie which is SUPPOSED to be a sequel to Silent Night Deadly Night! Yeah, you remember; a movie about a killer dressed up as Santa Claus?? NOT some crazy, over-acting guy who shoots more people than he Mad Slashers. In fact, this is the ONLY scene which actually has anything that anyone who saw the first SNDN would appreciate.
Up to this point, we might as well have been watching Charles Band's version of Silent Night Deadly Night - all play-up and no follow-through. Right up to the follow-through, which is actually set up and played-out so abrupt and so short that it might as well have been pre-edited for television.
(Sorry, I just had to interject something else - remember the first part of the movie where they show all the scenes from the first movie? Guess what? When they reintroduce you to Silent Night Deadly Night's Greatest Hits, they cut out the punch lines! Yeah; the overt violent aftermaths from these scenes are edited out so... what, they wouldn't offend anyone? Just in case more picketing moms wouldn't have so much ammo at their disposal? Fine, but if you're going to have a bloody, messy Mad Slasher movie, why be shy about it? Not that I'd advise you to watch the first film to begin with, but Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 doesn't even follow through on the Three Simple Truths For Sequels, uses stock footage from SNDN more than what SNDN used its own footage and stands by itself as nothing but the beginning of a franchise.)
We would get at least three more Silent Night Deadly Night films, not a one of which would even carry on the same storyline. Did we actually need more than one Silent Night Deadly Night movie to begin with? Of course not, but apparently the only reason that any of these were even made were the same reason Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 was made: da Benjamins, baby.
So, did it earn any? Let me just put it this way: it cost $250,000 to make... and made back a little over $150,000. So then of course NATURALLY it makes sense they'd make THREE MORE MOVIES.
After all is said and done, this is not even a Christmas slasher movie. This isn't even on par with Halloween II or even Friday The 13th Part 2. For all its faults and mistakes, Silent Night Deadly Night at least gave us a character that became, for better or worse, a crazy killer in a Santa suit. What do we get in Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2? A recap, a series of unrelated scenes, a few minutes of actual follow-through on the original story and one entertaining character (Kaitan), which all wraps up to make this whole thing turn out to be one huge lump.
Of coal.
In your stocking.
Of course, some people like coal. Some people like a little continuance on a story arc, too. Lots of others like Santa Claus, exciting stories and horror movies that make you want to watch what happens in them. I wouldn't suggest any of these people watch Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2. Unless they're just short on coal.
2 comments:
I like to think that Eric Freeman really was giving it his all in SNDN2. It enhances my enjoyment so much. This film has long been a Christmas classic among my friends, but it's cool to hear a fresh perspective on our fetish object. But seriously, I can't imagine watching this movie without having way too much fun.
Marvin - yeah, it's clear this whole thing was done as a lark by all involved. But you'd think they just did their own thing and then JUST HAPPENED to slap the SNDN name on it for recognition's sake and an excuse for them to have Santa in there at some point.
At least that's what it feels like.
- TGWD
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