\n\tThe ranks of Christmas-themed horror movies swell further every year, digested with relish by genre fans and cheerfully ignored by everyone else. But in 1984, a menace to Yuletide morality yea more dire than Starbucks holiday cups stirred vociferous objections. Charles E. Sellier Jr.\u2019s low-budget \u201cSilent Night, Deadly Night\u201d opened the same day as \u201cA Nightmare on Elm Street,\u201d initially outgrossing that now-classic. TV ads were decried for frightening innocent children; Siskel & Ebert demonstrated rare unity in condemning the whole enterprise; there were public protests. The backlash was such that soon it was withdrawn from theatrical release \u2014 though that didn\u2019t curb eventual popularity on home formats.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tSuch was this somewhat amateurish psycho chiller\u2019s impact that it sustained four mostly direct-to-video sequels over the next seven years, including one directed by cult auteur Monte Hellman and another starring Mickey Rooney. An official 2012 remake, \u201cSilent Night,\u201d had almost no connection to the original beyond a Santa-suited killer. Now we have a new reboot titled \u201cSilent Night, Deadly Night\u201d again. Hewing closer to the 1984 template, it\u2019s an improvement on that film \u2014 not a particular high bar to reach \u2014 though a somewhat mixed bag overall.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBilly Chapman is again introduced as a child (Logan Sawyer) visiting his senile grandpa in a rest home. This proves upsetting, though not nearly so much as the ride home, when Billy\u2019s parents are shot to death by a random Santa-costumed assailant who tailgates them. Years later, Billy is a disturbed young man (Rohan Campbell) who hears the voice of an \u201cimaginary friend\u201d and sees dead people \u2026 some of whom he\u2019s just killed, as per the voice\u2019s instructions. He\u2019s a transient loner drifting from town to town, one step ahead of police, steered by that inner guide (Mark Acheson). \u201cCharlie\u201d holds him to their annual task of filling an Advent calendar with bloody thumbprints after each murder in the 24 days leading up to Christmas.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThis particular Dec. 20th finds Billy fleeing the site of one slaughter, landing in Hackett, Minn. There, he gets a job at Ida\u2019s Trinket Tree, a festive knick-knack store whose namesake founder is deceased. It\u2019s now run by her amiable widower Dean Sims (David Laurence Brown) and his daughter Pamela (Ruby Modine). Billy is attracted to Pam, though she is volatile. Her outward temper flares as easily as his inner one, which often compels him to stalk and terminate supposed \u201cbad people.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe first unfortunate local he now chooses for that fate is an older customer (Tom Young) who incites jealousy by seeming to flirt with Pamela, though he otherwise doesn\u2019t seem \u201cbad\u201d at all. Never mind: Out comes Billy\u2019s ax. Later our hero dislikes a loud woman at a hockey rink, then greatly expands his kill count upon discovering she\u2019s an actual Nazi \u2014 tracked down among others of that ilk at a \u201c3rd Annual \u2018I\u2019m Dreaming of a White Power Christmas\u2019 Party.\u201d It\u2019s a busy night for that ax.<\/p>\n
\n\tThough Nelson departs from the original film\u2019s storyline after the prologue, this \u201cSilent Night, Deadly Night\u201d works well enough to a point. It sports an uptick in craftsmanship, and a welcome absence of the 1984 edition\u2019s dumb sexploitation, in which women inevitably found themselves running while topless. Also not missed are the crass laughs of the slicker 2012 film, which had an unpleasantly cynical, snide edge. Campbell\u2019s protagonist isn\u2019t so different from his misfit in \u201cHalloween Ends\u201d; fortunately, Billy does belong at the center of this story (in that abysmal franchise-snuffer, his character felt like an ill-advised distraction from the ones we really wanted to see, i.e. Jamie Lee Curtis\u2019 heroine and maniac Michael Myers).\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBut this latest incarnation of a series that\u2019s now spanned five decades gets a bit lost in the end, piling on too many ideas it hasn\u2019t developed. There\u2019s the basic one of Billy extinguishing lives to fulfill his pact with \u201cCharlie,\u201d whom we initially assume is a schizophrenic delusion. Then we realize \u201cCharlie\u201d knows things (like how to get to victims\u2019 houses) that Billy couldn\u2019t, and eventually it appears there is some kind of occult spirit-transference going on. Wholly separate is the issue of kids going missing in the region, taken by a \u201csnatcher\u201d whose lair Billy and Pamela uncover at the darkly lit climax. This is immediately preceded by a flashback-cluttered confession of prior wrongdoings between them, something so shoehorned-in it seems to exist just to provide more body-count violence for the trailer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWhen we find out who the \u201csnatcher\u201d perp is, it hardly registers. Likewise, \u201cCharlie\u2019s\u201d original identity is murky at best. Adding to the pileup of bad guys is Pamela\u2019s ex-boyfriend Max (David Tomlinson), a cop who skulks around suggesting more menace than he gets to deliver. How many serial killers is too many for a plot to bear? Nelson\u2019s screenplay might have had fun with that excess. Instead, it comes off as confused miscalculation, as if he had ideas for several \u201cSilent\u201d installments, then belatedly decided to cram them all into one awkward package.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tStill, it\u2019s all pacey and colorful enough, with sufficient gore to please genre fans after a couple of relatively restrained early deaths. (Each demise is preceded by a crimson onscreen chapter title, as in \u201cKill Foster Mom.\u201d) The Manitoba-shot production has nice widescreen photography by Nick Junkersfeld, resourceful design contributions and an effective score by the collaborative trio Blitz\/\/Berlin. In a welcome shift from the de rigueur inclusion of clips from the original \u201cNight of the Living Dead\u201d or \u201cCarnival of Souls,\u201d this horror exercise instead features another public-domain fave: 1964 camp classic \u201cSanta Claus Conquers the Martians,\u201d glimpsed on a TV screen in one sequence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The ranks of Christmas-themed horror movies swell further every year, digested with relish by genre fans and cheerfully…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":343256,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,31495,206,31496],"class_list":{"0":"post-343255","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-mike-p-nelson","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-silent-night-deadly-night"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/343256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}