Silent and Deadly

Monte Hellman died last week at 91. He was an interesting guy who taught for a little while at CalArts while I was there; I took a class from him. He’s most well-known for a cool road movie he made in the 70s called Two-Lane Blacktop. He directed a few more features—a couple of scrappy Westerns with Jack Nicholson when they were young and some other oddball things. One of those was a horror sequel called Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out. I decided to check it out but thought I’d better see the two previous movies so I knew what was happening.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is a notorious 1984 holiday slasher. The movie was pulled from release after a week due to alarm that a horror movie would be so trashy and scary for children, which took the form of complaints about Santa Claus being depicted as a killer and actual picketing. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert also famously hated the movie and named the companies and individuals responsible on air, to shame them, Siskel calling any profits “blood money.” Those were the days when people actually gave a shit about this kind of thing and popular film critics with a TV show felt it was their job to point out the moral failings of filmmakers and studios.

They were not wrong to hate this movie, however. It’s pretty bad, though some parts are enjoyably campy, including some of the ludicrous kills. I wrote a little about slasher motives recently; this movie is a textbook example of childhood trauma triggering a very specific rampage under just the right circumstances. Billy, you see, witnessed his parents getting killed by a man dressed as Santa Claus, who also tried to rape his mother, and he subsequently grew up in an orphanage run by abusive nuns. He grows up, the plot contrives to get him dressed up as Santa, then, oh boy, you better watch out! All must be punished, including the audience.

The worst sin of the first movie is that it’s mostly rote and dull, with few thrills. Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2, from 1987, on the other hand, is a zany, ridiculous badfilm. First of all, it renders the first movie obsolete. The new movie team was told to simply re-edit the first film and release it as a sequel; the director didn’t want to do that, however, so, on a shoestring budget he did the next best thing. Namely, he shot an absurdly protracted, illogical frame story—an interview with Billy’s younger brother, Ricky, now grown up and institutionalized in which he “remembers” the entire first movie, but edited much faster, as a thirty minute flashback, then brings us up to speed on Ricky’s subsequent life with a foster family and his activities on one very special garbage day.

Secondly, Part 2 then gets Ricky in on the family business since, owing to his own traumatic childhood, he’s triggered by, not Santa alone, but even just the color red. He’s got a score to settle with an old nun and he settles her good. The movie is an origami nuthouse, folded in on itself—first by its recitation of most of the first movie, second by Ricky and his girlfriend going to a movie theater and seeing the first movie again—centered on one of the great wildly terrible badfilm performances, by Eric Freeman as Ricky.

Two years later, Monte Hellman was hired to make the direct-to-video sequel, Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! He apparently rewrote it over a few days then shot and edited the film in a couple months. Hellman channels his Roger Corman roots and his 1970s grindhouse existentialism into this strange continuation that (along with, for example, The Hidden) also joins the small genre of proto-Twin Peaks movies with some of that show’s cast members doing weirdly Peaks-like things. Richard Beymer and Eric Da Re, who play Ben Horne and Leo on Peaks, play doctor and brother to a girl named Laura; for good measure, Mulholland Drive’s Laura Elena Harding is here, too.

In this movie, Ricky (played by a new actor) is institutionalized in a coma, his brain exposed under a dome that’s bolted to his head, gloriously. The doctor is trying to make contact with him by hooking him up, somehow, to a blind, clairvoyant teenager (Laura). When she “sees” his thoughts, she actually watches scenes from the first movie, now being repurposed for the nth time. Things go badly; Ricky awakes and trails Laura to her grandmother’s house, where Granny has set out a Christmas feast, somehow getting there first. When Laura, her brother and his girlfriend finally arrive, it takes them a long, long time to really get worried about granny’s whereabouts. First, a remarkable amount of time is spent getting to know our characters better. The best parts of this are the sweet brother and girlfriend relationship and the uneasy camaraderie between the doctor and the cop—a manic Robert Culp—who are hot on Ricky’s trail. The character development is both surprising and unnecessary in a movie like this—that is, this weird horror sequel is the first movie in the series that feels like an actual movie about actual people, however nutty their circumstances might be. Must be the Hellman touch!