Right, now that that's out of the way I'm going to review the infamous source of this ceaselessly hilarious line and try and justify why I bothered watching it all the way through. A difficult task? Well, yes and no. On the face of it I went in and got exactly what I was expecting, an awful 1980s 'festive' serial killer romp. The only reason I even bothered with it is because I thought I'd be getting an hour and fifteen minutes of badly acted quips that were all as funny as GARBAGE DAY was when I first stumbled across it on Youtube. Once again, this was exactly the case but I'll get to that later. What suprised me was how full of itself and ambitious the film turned out to be. It wasn't just a crappy 80s horror about a nutcase dressed as santa clause running around maiming people, it was a whole character exploration and history trying to tell the story of a highly disturbed man and how he came to be so.
The above question is never really answered. The whole film is a series of flashbacks being recounted by Ricky, the brother of the killer from Silent Night, Deadly Night 1 from something that's either a prison or a mental institution, it's never made clear. Actually, 'It's never made clear' could more or less summarise the whole plot, it's never made clear why Ricky is just as retarded and homicidal as his brother in spite of having an alright childhood, it's never made clear just exactly how he managed to lead a normal life while being tardicidal and it's most definitely never made clear why this, the second film feels the need to spend the first 30 minutes or so recapping the first one.
However, when you're watching a film purely on the basis of laughing at how bad it is, you're not really too bothered by this, the plotholes (and there are many) are just another point of amusement, much like the film's inflated sense of grandeur (the motorcycle riding sequence was particularly funny because it made me think of Benjamin Button, a film better than this but actually less entertaining). The one liners were rather brilliant though, the actor, Eric Freeman (yeah, him, right?) is clearly some moronic slab of beef with dreams of becoming a big name contemporary with similar status to Kevin Spacey, John Malkovitch and pre-fuck up Mickey Rourke. This is why he milks the serial killer role for all it's worth lacing every line with ill advised sarcasm that makes him sound like he's watched the film once and is doing a parodied impression of his own character. Take note of his opening line, the doctor interviewing him says that he may call him 'doc' if it makes him feel more comfortable, to which Ricky responds: "Fuck off. 'doc'". This had me laughing hard enough to render a collapsed lung in itself and I was only 2 minutes in. The wonderful thing was Freeman didn't even have to speak (though lord knows he's a talkative one) to be funny, somewhere between being more sarcastic that Chandler Bing's evil twin and jutting his bottom jaw out like the vatican balconey of the smug pope Freeman decided that the key to serial killer acting is eyebrows, the opening close up is about the only time they ever sit still and he takes to moving them in sync with the syllables every word he says. No human being has ever done this before and it probably won't ever happen again, part of the reason the film is so worth watching. The plot movement in between this character brilliance is easy to follow but due to aformentioned plot holes, very difficult to get one's head around.
Ricky's brother goes completely apeshit at a given point and goes on one killing spree, this, for the most part, makes sense, all the motivation is there from the flashbacks before it (a rather brilliant moment comes when a 12 year old Billy floors a full grown man dressed as Santa with one punch). Granted there are some things that don't add up, just like EVERY OTHER SERIAL KILLER EVER Billy punishes the promiscuous (while unenthusiastically groaning the word 'punish' like a bear learning to talk), at one point he breaks into a random household and slaughters a young couple who were happily boning on a pool table, but how did Billy know this? A sex radar? Anyway, he goes on a spree, goes after the evil nun, gets shot about 8 million times in the back, dies, job done.
Ricky is a different affair all together. As a child he sees two nuns and then heaven forbid, something red and has a mild attack of the chokes (in the Mighty Boosh sense of the word) but is fine from then on. His foster dad randomly dies when he's 17 and he decides to silently wander around a forest for a while, only to discover a hillbilly trying to rape his woman. Now, there's two kinds of character representation, righteous and psychotic, but rarely both at the same time. The man goes back to his jeep to fetch some beer (oddly able to quell his animal lust in the wake of thirst), only to be run over about 12 times by Ricky until he's little more than a pile of red mush (well, to be fair you don't see all of him, but the excessive brutality of the murder implies this). Regardless of what the man had been doing, this is a horrifically gory murder, yet when his girlfriend turns up and sees his mangled body with Ricky standing next to it, she is not in the least bit shocked or disturbed, instead she turns to him and says 'thank you'. Now, I'm all for poetic justice but it would be nice to have some conflict mixed in as well, given this film is supposed to reflect the real world, most people are pretty taken back to say the least when they see their significant other reduced to tire-mush, even if he was an inbred would-be rapist. This weird trend continues throughout Ricky's story, he turns 18 (and suddenly becomes Eric Freeman, who's a brick shithouse by comparison to the skinny 17 year old Ricky) and gets a job, only to once again dole out justice by shoving an umbrella through some loan shark type, but perhaps the strangest of all the the casual, ramification free homicide comes far later when Ricky implausibly gets a girlfriend.
She backs into his bike with her car, flooring him, then laughs at his pain, that's all the backstory about their budding romance we get before being cross faded into a sex scene so stylised that you can almost see the director behind the camera softly purring things like 'yes, just like that, yes, that's good, yes, that's perfect, yes, yes...'. Shortly hereafter we get a scene of them in a cinema watching a movie about a psycho dressed as Jolly Saint Nick (conveniently enough), Ricky has a crazyness relapse and decides direct his murder pangs towards some obnoxious twat in the back row, well, he's meant to be an obnoxious twat, but he just comes across as some sort of retard. Nobody else in the small theatre seems to notice that he's been dragged to the floor and is being implicitly murdered while screaming in agony and when Ricky's done with him he just buggers off to sit back down. It's not until the infamous scene near the end that we even so much as smell a police officer, though he doesn't last very long.
At the climax of the film Ricky escapes his cell with relative ease after strangling the innocent but palpably dull doctor during one of the flashbacks (I like to think that he did this at the exact point when he recounted yelling GARBAGE DAY). He finally justifies the films title and dons a santa outfit, then goes after the evil nun that drove his brother (BUT NOT HIM) insane. Cue a shameless rip off of The Shining in which he puts an axe through not one but two different doors, peeking his head through both and providing one liners. The old, wheelchair bound, pacifist stroke victim lasts a suprisingly long time, during which the police arrive (a lieutant is touted as a main character in spite of this being the first time we've seen him) Ricky beheads Mother Superior (yeah, I know) and props her up ready to spook whoever comes in first, in this case the nicer, younger nun from the old orphanage. Not inkeeping with his 'kill people who deserve it' quota, Ricky jumps out and knocks the woman over preparing to axe her in the back only to be shot to death much like his brother was. The End.
Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 is an awful film that's funny without intending to be, largely because it's not entirely sure exactly what it's intending to be, Silence of the Lambs (though it predates it) or The Shining or Halloween, though it contains elements of all three no one of them is done well. It comes across as a poorly executed abstract black comedy thanks to all the undeniably silly deaths and characters that are meant to be normal but are so strange you wonder if Ricky was the only one who busted out of the crazy house. I recommend watching it purely based on how funny it is, you'd spend money on a real comedy film, why not do the same for a film that will almost definitely make you laugh more?
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