Entry Eighteen: Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Dir: Charles E. Sellier, Jr.

"You've made it through Halloween, now try and survive Christmas."

Silent Night, Deadly Night is neither the first nor the best of the "killer Santa" sub-sub-genre, but it's surely the most widely-known.  Because they were bored with railing against drug users and metalheads that week, the moms of America decided to organize a protest against this film, a movement that gained national media attention and resulted in Siskel and Ebert publicly shaming the filmmakers on their television show and the movie getting removed from theatres.  That just resulted in it becoming an even bigger hit on home video!  

Young, oddly-lipsticked boy Billy takes a Christmas Eve trip with his parents to visit his grandfather in a mental hospital.  The demented old coot warns Billy that Santa Claus doesn't just bring presents to the good children, he severely punishes the naughty.  Later that night, Billy witnesses a criminal in a Santa suit shoot his dad and slit his mom's throat.  At this point, you'd be forgiven for expecting Billy to grow up and become Batman, but instead he gets shipped off to an orphanage and, when he comes of age, a kindly nun gets him a job stocking shelves at a toy store (why the clearly adult Billy is still living at the orphanage is never explained...but the kindly nun is somewhat young and attractive...maybe Billy's hitting that?).  Billy excels at his new job, and develops a crush on cute co-worker Pamela, but as Christmas approaches, he begins to grow irritable and short with his co-workers, and "naughty" behavior gives him flashbacks to his parents' murder.  Forced to fill-in as Santa on Christmas Eve, Billy snaps and begins offing his less-than-well-behaved co-workers in various novel ways: his supervisor get strangled by a strand of Christmas tree lights, Pamela get disemboweled with a box cutter, the drunken store owner get his brain bashed in with a hammer, the secretary get an arrow through her sternum.  After Billy escapes into the suburbs, Linnea Quigley shows up, gets topless and ends up impaled an the horns of a mounted elk head.  In the movie's best kill scene, a kid who'd stolen a sled gets decapitated going downhill!  In another great scene, cops after Billy shoot the wrong Santa to death in front of a bunch of kids!  In the end, Billy returns home to the orphanage and is blown away by the cops.  He dies in the arms of the kindly nun.

This is a pretty minor slasher that would have faded into total obscurity if not for the fervor and panic surrounding it's original release.  The performances are all pretty indifferent, director Sellier makes no attempt at creating atmosphere or suspense and the whole thing just feels perfunctory.  On the plus side, the gore effects are slightly better than average, as is the score by Perry Botkin.  The best thing about the whole movie, however, is all the toy porn in the toy store that Billy works at: rows and rows of vintage Star Wars, G.I. Joe and Masters of the Universe toys in beautiful original boxes!  I paused the move several times just to check out the shelves.  Anyway, merry fucking Christmas!