Surely there can’t be a more unpredictable, chaotic and formless franchise than the series of movies released under the yule tide banner of Silent Night Deadly Night. The first film was a standard killer Santa flick that went hard on the sleeze and subsequently got a ton of free publicity when a conclave of outraged parents were horrified to spot TV ads featuring a feral Father Christmas punishing the sexually promiscuous. Things got even weirder with Silent Night Deadly Night II when the brother of the original killer also loses his mind years later and goes on a flashback aided killing spree that’s so badly acted, it achieved meme immortality for a single line reading. However, while the saying goes that you can’t keep a good franchise down, it seems that bad ones have a habit of springing up too and in 1989, Silent Night Deadly Night came knocking once again with its weirdest entry yet.
That’s right: killer Santas are out, but experimental brain surgery and blind psychics are in – anytime else thinking that the Better Watch Out! part of the title is more a warning to the audience than a subheading?
It’s Christmas time (unsurprisingly) and while the big day is fast approaching, we find Laura Anderson indulging is some decidedly non-festive activities at the local hospital. You see, Laura is no ordinary girl as she is not only blind, but clairvoyant as well and has been working for the morally questionable Dr. Newbury in order to make contact with the mind of a comatose patient.
But who is this patient, I don’t hear you ask? Well it’s none other that Ricky Caldwell, the psycho who carried out a blood thirsty rampage like his bother did years before him, but who was stopped with a bullet to the brain six years ago. However, after having his grey matter “surgically repaired” and stabilised with a state of the art plastic dish that protects the innards of his exposed Noggin, he’s laid in a coma ever since. However, the repeated acts of having a pretty girl enter his mind and loiter around his memories like a slack-jawed tourist manages to wake Ricky from his bullet induced coma and before you know it, he’s shuffling round the hospital, killing at will on a path to catch up with the girl who’s been trespassing in his brain pan.
However, he’s going to have to get a move on, because Laura, her air-head brother, Chris and his girlfriend, Jerri are all on their way to Granny’s house to celebrate Christmas the way they’ve always done since Laura’s parents bought the farm in a plane crash. However, thanks to his superior hitchhiking skills (?), Ricky manages to get there before them and lay in wait for his next victims – can Dr. Newbury and the sarcastic Lieutenant Connely get there in time to save the trio of clueless kids, or will Ricky have another bloodstained Christmas, exposed brain and all?
Considering Silent Night Deadly Night 2 is often regularly named one of the worst movies of all time (using a staggering 30 minutes of flashback footage from the first film certainly didn’t help), the fact that the series got a third entry a mere two years later surely must be classed as some kind of fucked up Christmas miracle. However, I don’t think it’s much of a surprise to find that the third edition, while certainly more imaginative than what’s come before, it just as much of a colourless slog as the last film. However, like the last film, if you take a closer look past the plot, charactization and acting, SNDN 3 ends up being perversely entertaining purely on the many eccentric details that seem plonked in at random.
Firstly, the sporadic inclusion of clairvoyance into a slasher franchise is such a curveball, I’m still undecided as to whether it’s idiotic genius or the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen even though the seventh Friday The Thirteenth managed to get there first. It’s never explained why Laura is actually agreeing to glare into the void of Ricky’s subconcious like a psychic peeping tom, but the movie tales this as its cue to knock up some sub-Elm Street dream sequences that are neither scary or cool. Next up is the casting of notorious live wire Bill Moseley as Ricky which not only has him wear a ridiculous contraption on his head that looks like someone’s bolted tupperware onto his skull in order to shield his visible brain, by the man who was so memorable as the hyperverbal Chop Top in Texas Chainsaw Masacre 2 is reduced to shambling about the place in slippers while muttering “Laura” over and over again. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that he successfully hitchhikes in a hospital gown with his brain out for all to see and later tries to cover it with a gigantic woolley hat.
It’s around about this point that you strongly suspect that director Monte Hellman (once responsible for Two-Lane Blacktop and now reduced to this) is now just taking the piss but never bothered to tell anyone. Why else does Granny have a framed portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. next to photos of her grandkids? Why else does Newbury’s assistant keep saying “He sees what she sees” whenever anyone asks her anything in a flat tone? And why does Newbury himself look like an off brand Christopher Walken? The amusing questions soon being to pile up, which proves to be something of a relief when you find that the kills are fairly bland as the movie shifts from being vaguely reminiscent of Elm Street to being a plodding, festive Halloween clone – thankfully, some of the dialogue proves to be so brain melting awful, it proves to be something of a highlight beyond the before-they-were-famous casting of Mulholland Drive’s Laura Harring. “Who says you have to be the world champion blind orphan?” states our heroines therapist obviously convinced that he’s said something incredibly profound. Later, a drunken man dressed as Santa infiltrates Ricky’s room only to deliver the immortal burn, “Hey vegetable, who’s your favourite singer? Perry Coma?”. In fact, that line is so transcendently amazing, it almost makes you forgive Ricky not stealing the guy’s Santa suit in order to provide a smidge of connective tissue from the previous films beyond those overworked flashback clips.
Not as solid as the original and not as impressively and memorably awful as the sequel, Silent Night Deadly Night 3 floats in the limbo somewhere in between. However, it can’t even claim to be the weirdest sequel that the franchise had to endure (wait until you see the outlandish shit that 4 and 5 has to offer) which leaves the final ride of Ricky Caldwell and original, but flat ending that’s as transparently bad as that fucking bowl on his head. And as for that final shot where we get a vision of our villain in a tux (still with his brain out) wishing us a happy new year? Fuck me, your guess us as good as mine?
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