The Silent Night, Deadly Night series has been generally fun, even if it's had more than its fair share of ups and downs. The first remake was more entertaining than your typical rehashes and I honestly thought that was going to be the final word on the franchise. Lo and behold, here’s another one, and just in time for Christmas, no less.
This new Silent Night Deadly Night, is kind of a good news, bad news scenario. For every thing the movie does right, it inevitably makes a misstep. However, it has enough highlights to appease horror fans. It’s not the merriest of Christmases to be sure, but no one should walk away feeling like they got coal in their stocking either.
The framework of the remake is the same as the original. When Billy (Halloween Ends’ Rohan Campbell) was a kid, he witnessed his parents murdered by a killer Santa Claus. He then grows up to be a Killer Santa butchering people he deems “naughty”.
This remake introduces an odd wrinkle into the proceedings. This Billy is more like a mix of Dexter and Venom. You see, in the original, he just “punished” those who were “naughty”. As in, people who fucked. In this one, he only murders out and out killers while being egged on by the gravelly voiced ghost of the Santa who also killed his parents.
Those wanting an honest to goodness Killer Santa movie may be disappointed as there’s a lot of extra rigmarole gumming up the works. That said, when the movie hits the sweet spot of gory carnage and inspired lunacy, it’s fun. I’m thinking specifically of the over-the-top scene where Billy crashes a Nazi Christmas party (“Here’s to a white power Christmas!”) and hacks up racists with an axe. It’s fun, silly, and honestly, I don’t think we’ve seen anything quite like it.
The rest of the movie is a tad frustrating. The scenes with Billy’s love interest, played by Ruby Modine (who incredibly enough, matches his crazy) isn’t bad, but you can see where their relationship is heading from a mile away. The stuff with Billy contending with the voice in his head are hit-and-miss too, and the way they try to make him sympathetic doesn’t always work either. (As fun as the aforementioned Nazi Christmas party is, it seems like much too easy of a way to have you side with Billy.)
The nods to the original series are fun. (The use of one of the Christmas songs from the first movie got a big smile from me.) It’s not great, but it’s ultimately no more uneven than the later sequels. I guess it just comes down to what you want from a Killer Santa movie and/or Silent Night, Deadly Night remake. If it wasn’t called Silent Night, Deadly Night or had it been a completely original film, I may have really dug it. However, when you hitch your star to the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise, comparisons are going to be inevitable. All that being said, this might be the case where I catch it on TV in a few years and, divorced from my expectations, I wind up enjoying it more the second time around.
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