Silent Night, Deadly Night

Crude slasher movie that impromptu director Charles E. Sellier Jr. (he was far better known as a producer) apparently assembled with a meat cleaver. The (not new) idea of a killer Santa Claus definitely could’ve been better exploited than in this movie which is little more than a pointless, repetitive series of savage murders that quickly becomes tiresome and ridiculous.

To be fair, the scene where (an obviously naked) Linnea Quigley gets impaled on the antlers of a trophy deer mounted on a wall is imbued with a sort of tawdry efficacy, but beyond that, there’s honestly little of interest here. In fact, the movie comes across as a cheap knockoff of “Halloween” (1978), featuring another serial killer victimized by childhood trauma and with a sex phobia to boot, who runs around massacring people a couple of months later in the year than Michael Myers did.

Sub-par cast (Robert B. Wilson is a wax statue), forced, unbelievable script, half-hearted pacing throughout. Among the scenes vying for a gold medal in bad taste, we would nominate:

1. The catatonic grandfather who wakes up just long enough to scare the bejesus out of his grandson;
2. The Santa Claus robber who sexually assaults the boy’s mother before slitting her throat;
3. Billy, dressed as Santa Claus, giving a little girl a blood-stained box-cutter.

The ridiculous ending makes it clear we’ll have to put up with further developments in a story that was already stillborn in the first film. Result? Four sequels and a remake! This stuff makes even the most pessimistic predictions pale by comparison.