Producers: Scott Schneid, Dennis Whitehead, Jamie R. Thompson, Erik Bernard, Jeremy Torrie and Tanya Brunel Director: Mike P. Nelson Screenplay: Mike P. Nelson Cast: Rohan Campbell, Ruby Modine, David Lawrence Brown, David Tomlinson, Mark Acheson, Logan Sawyer, Erik Athavale, Rick Skene, James Durham, Sharon Bajer, Tom Young, Krystle Snow Darren Felbel, Kowan Cadorath and Kristen Sawatzky Distributor: Cineverse
Grade: C
Mike P. Nelson’s movie retains the title of the notorious 1984 slasher flick by Charles E. Sellier Jr. that started an utterly terrible franchise, but the new “Silent Night, Deadly Night” isn’t merely a remake of the original: it actually adds new twists to the basic plot about a fellow in a Santa suit going around killing people. It’s not surprising that as in most horror movies the convolutions don’t add up, but the real trouble is that they’re not clever enough to overcome their absurdity.
It starts, as did Sellier’s, with little Billy (Logan Sawyer) visiting his grandpa (Darren Feibel) in a nursing home at Christmastime with his parents (Erik Athavale and Krystie Snow). Grandpa suffers a seizure while he’s with the kid and falls dead. On the way home, his mother and father are attacked by a man in a Santa costume and killed; before dying his mother manages to kill the Santa too. But in this telling, something very strange happens between Billy and the dying Kringle, who turns out to be Charlie (Mark Acheson), the janitor at grandpa’s nursing home.
Precisely what happened isn’t revealed until later—Nelson doles that out in flashbacks that interrupt Billy’s dreams—but the event has affected the boy ever since, turning him not only into a mass murderer but a red-suited avenger who began his career of exterminating the “naughty,” we eventually learn, as a teen (Kowan Cadorath), when he first put on the suit to kill—rather clumsily—his cruel, greedy foster mother (Kristen Sawatzky). And doing so wasn’t really his idea.
Years later Billy (Rohan Campbell) is a solitary young man wandering aimlessly, it seems, through small towns as Christmas approaches. But his wandering is not aimless, nor is he alone; he’s accompanied by a ghostly mentor, the voice of Charlie, which guides him in his mission to terminate the wicked in the days leading up to the holiday. Wearing the Santa suit, he’s just disposed of a man at a motel and moves on after dabbing some of the dead man’s blood in the boxes of a sanguinary Advent calendar that, from the looks of it, has seen many years of use. And we learn, later on, that he’s driven by the belief that if he doesn’t continue to fill the calendar up, innocents will die in place of the guilty his negligence has allowed to live.
Billy’s next stop is Hackett, which proves fertile ground for his work. After making the acquaintance of Pam Sims (Ruby Modine), a girl with an explosive temper who oversees the Christmas-themed trinket shop owned by her father (David Lawrence Brown) and getting a job there as the stock boy, he’s directed by Charlie to dispose of a wide assortment of villains he’s identified—a murderer, a group of neo-Nazis celebrating a White Supremacist Christmas and, most incredibly, a child abductor known as The Snatcher. But his attention is distracted by his romantic interest in Pam, which attracts the hostile notice of her ex-boyfriend, intense cop Max Benedict (David Tomlinson). The three of them are involved in the climax, which offers a final twist suggesting that if a sequel is planned, it will be a rather different sort of holiday party.
The picture looks pretty good for a low-budget horror movie, with Oscar Fenoglio’s production design set off nicely by Nick Junkersfeld’s cinematography. Geoff Klein’s editing could sometime use a shove, but the score by Blitz//Berlin provides oomph when called for. The effects are mostly of a practical kind, and more nostalgic than frightening, though lots of fake blood is spilled not only in Billy’s present-day expeditions but in flashbacks to his earlier kills. Campbell tries to invest some emotion into Billy; otherwise the acting is pedestrian, often veering into camp.
This “Silent Night, Deadly Night” is a cut above its predecessors in the franchise, but hatchet-swinging Santas are not the rarity they once were, and despite some new wrinkles Nelson’s version is barely passable.