**Blame it on the real Holidays, but here's a rewind post before I finish off the Holiday of Horrors.
In 1987 a sequel was put out entitled “Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2” and fans of the first film flocked to see it. Well, maybe not in theaters, but definitely on home video. I know I did, and boy were most people upset with this one. I personally credit this film to one of my earliest visions of sex on film as I was hitting puberty when I managed to get an old vhs copy of this film, and well, the rest is history.
Unlike many of the films that I review on this site, this one is really hard to review on the normal course of my reviews. I can’t really say that this film is all that great, and it’s hard to pin down whether or not it is legitimately scary, so I’m going to give it my best shot, but this is NOT my best work, nor is it the greatest horror movie ever made. Trust me…this thing is a stinker in most cases.
This film picks up where the original leaves off. Ricky is our main character and he is in a mental institute and is recounting all the events that happened in the previous film. This takes up most of the first half of the film, and we see things done in flashback format using the exact same footage that we saw in the first film! That’s right, the producers and director were so lazy that they simply played the older movie with a new voice over track in spots, and didn’t doctor it up at all, they just let it play. This made a grand majority of horror movie fans upset, and most didn’t get passed this.
If you managed to navigate your way to the second half of this film we start to see Ricky getting better and even finds himself a girlfriend, and in one of the most tame sex scene’s I have ever scene, the two seem to be headed towards long term bliss. This portion of the film is done terribly, and you barely believe that this film is a horror movie at all. Ricky and his girlfriend Jennifer stroll through a city and things get really bad, but at the same time the greatest piece of movie history for me happens.
Ricky is confronted by Jennifer’s ex boyfriend named “Chip” and he’s an over the top rich looking dude, and he delivers a line to the effect that he “banged Jennifer’s brains out” in the back of his car. I’m not sure why this line and its verbage and delivery gets me all riled up, but for whatever reasons it is engraved in me and man…I just love it. I know, it’s a bit weird, but I just do, it’s one of my greatest cinematic lines of all time. Those words enrage Ricky and we get to the best part of this film, the killing! Ricky shoves a jumper cable end into Chip’s mouth and BOOOM! He then proceeds to start firing away in one of the most comical sequences of serial murder in movie history. There hasn’t been a greater sequence of serial slashing in any other film, and this film nails comedy and precision with every bit of gorey stupidity that you can muster up for a christmas horror film.
He then proceeds to try and hunt down Mother Superior back at his old orphanage, where his brother was gunned down as Santa Claus. He finds her, and man oh man things get ugly. Eventually the movie goes into cliché when cops gun down Ricky, but not before the camera shows you that he’s still moving and then we go to credits!
Is Silent Night Deadly Night 2 Scary? Not really. The majority of the film suffers from terrible editing, and the use of original film footage from the first film really makes the first half sink like an anchor in the ocean. The second half of the film is mired by the sexual tension of Jennifer and Ricky’s relationship that is really plain and pale considering that this film is rated R. The best part of this film is almost satire in its effect and really hard to get scared at.
The only thing that I would be scared about in regards to this film is the fact that there are people in this world with deeply repressed memories and severe mental problems. These problems are often dormant for a long time and literally pop up out of nowhere and result in a maniacal turn of events. So in that regard yes this film can be scary, but overall it’s not really that good, and as a holiday film, it’s hard to match the good parts that made the first film worth owning and watching. Silent Night Deadly Night 2 is the weakest of the five part series, and is a terrible excuse for a sequel, seriously terrible. If you were lucky enough to pick up this film when it came packaged with the first, I salute you, it's now out of print and rightfully so, this thing is a stinker.
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