Silent Night (2012) – Review

Let me tell you about Christmas. It ain’t all candy canes and pretty lights. Christmas can fuck you up.
If any franchise tends to mirror that quote, it’s the Silent Night Deadly Night franchise, a twisted, sleazy and malformed string of movies that’s courted controversy and out and out weirdness since the first film enraged parents with its killer Santa ad campaign. It’s been something of a wild ride since that first film back in 1984 and after that had finished missing people off, the sequel arrived to eventually be “beloved” as one of the worst movies ever made as its “Garbage day” line made it confoundingly immortal.
From there, things got really weird as a third movie threw brain surgery and blind telepaths into the usual slasher shenanigans and the fourth and fifth entries dispensed of the slasher stuff entirely, offering up tales of a bug worshiping feminist cult, or a robot Mickey Rooney. However, in 2012, Silent Night Deadly Night finally entered the realm of the remake while dropping the “Deadly Night” part of its title. But could a redux possibly hope to match the highly questionable “glory” of the original?
Christmas is a time for miracles, people. Even really shitty ones that see nude women shoved into wood chippers…

Like many small towns in America, Cryer, Wisconsin, has something of a dark, murderous secret that relates to a famous, seasonal holiday. But instead of Valentine’s Day or Thanksgiving, it’s Christmas that proves to be the point of contention when a burly man clad in a Santa suit and mask takes it upon himself to start punishing those he deems as naughty. Starting strong by electrocuting the town’s bed hopping deputy sheriff and chopping up the married woman he was having an affair with, he soon targets other, less wholesome members of the community like a group filming a porno at a local motel or a reverend who regularly dips his fingers into the donation box.
As Santa’s naughty list shrinks alarmingly, Deputy Aubrey Bradimore is brought in on her day off by her ignorant, tough talking boss, Sheriff Cooper to cover the shift of the slain officer and soon finds herself knee deep in blood and gore.
But who could be perpetrating these acts of seasonal slaughter? After all, it’s the time of year where every one and their dog is wandering around dressed as jolly old Saint Nick, but Aubrey manages to narrow down her suspicions to either local drug dealer Stein Karsson or drunken, nihilistic Santa performer, Jim Epstein. However, it soon becomes clear that this new massacre probably has something to do with an incident that occured years ago with a guy in a Santa suit going batshit with a flamethrower, so can Aubrey put aside her own feelings of inadequacy to put this psycho Santa down for good?

It had been a fair few years since the Silent Night Deadly Night franchise dipped it’s black buckled boots back into realms of killer Santas after the 90s saw the series enter a Halloween III phase and try vastly different things in a seasonal setting. However, thanks to the era of horror remakes that stretched from the 00s to the 10s, it obviously was high time for the movies to get back to its roots and the result turned out to be an above average slasher that slotted in nicely with flicks of a simular theme.
Simply put, if you’ve seen either Patrick Lussier’s 2009 swing at My Bloody Valentine or Eli Roth’s 2023 feature version of his Grindhouse trailer, Thanksgiving, you’ve pretty much seen Silent Night already as the tone, content and even some of the actors (Jaime King, we think you for your service) pretty much feel interchangeable, but thankfully director Steven C. Miller has a fair grip of both the genre and the legacy he’s playing in. For a start, he knows he can’t pussyfoot around when it comes to a slasher franchise (even a lesser one) that became notorious for pissing people off solely thanks to its parent outraging trailer and he delivers the requisite amounts of vicious gore and gratuitous nudity that comes with a flick that’s beloved for a sleaze factor that’s so tangible, you can almost taste it like stale eggnog in the back of your throat.
Of course, manufactured modern sleaze isn’t exactly the same as the kind we got back in the 80s and while it’s a little complicated to explain to a more rational cinema goer, that scummy feel is almost as vital to the series as the sight of a hulking Father Christmas gripping a razor sharp fire axe.

However, Miller also knows that you have to tip your cap to the more infamous aspects of your inspiration and so we get “Garbage day” in-jokes and a dutiful recreation of Linnea Quigley’s famous impaling on a set of antlers, but he never lets it get in the way of telling his own story. However, what with this being a Silent Night Deadly Night remake, there’s not a whole lot of actual story to really tell, so gone is all the stuff concerning fucked up Billy Chapman and his concerning childhood trauma snd instead we focus more on Jaime King’s put upon cop as she tries to solve these murders with the added handicap of her superior being a bull headed twat.
The cast all seem to be having fun, with Malcolm McDowell happily chewing the scenery as a below par Sheriff who likes to use confusing food metaphors when trying to give advice about law enforcement (“Don’t put avocado on the burger!”) and Donal Logue spewing bitter conspiracy theories as a washed out, boozed up Claus.
However, while the plot doesn’t exactly scan in the way you think it might – it’s sort of a whodunit where the identity of the killer actually doesn’t matter – the movie manages to hold the interest thanks to some well thought out and extremely spiteful kills. We have the usual stabbings and skull splittings of course, but Miller really pushes the boat out with an extended kill that sees a victim (played by the frequently nude Courtney Palm) spend an awfully long time being chased by the maniac with her boobs out before being fed, screaming, into a wood chipper. Elsewhere, the movie shows that it has no problems playing rough by having the masked killer zap a fourteen year old girl to death with a cattle prod and it even manages to create an iconic image or two of its own when the tooled up psycho brings a flamethrower to the party.

However, for all the hearty kills, surprisingly slick production values and likable cast, Silent Night ultimately prove to be a largely forgettable entry into the remake pantheon despite being rather a superior entry of its own, famously inconsistent franchise. Still, as modern killer Santa movies go, it’s certainly worth a watch if you want your Christmas movies to have sleigh bells that actually slay.
🌟🌟🌟