By Jerry Roberts
December 24, 2002

Common wisdom says that no good deed goes unpunished. Apparently that logic extends to good deed-doers especially in horror films. It seems inevitable that someone would eventually make a movie about an axe murderer in a Santa Claus suit who punishes the naughty but did it have to punish the audience this badly? Even those who routinely park themselves in front of movies like Silent Night, Deadly Night might struggle with that question even though the audience for a movie like Silent Night, Deadly Night rarely question the movies that they attend.

Silent Night, Deadly Night begins on a pleasant note (pleasant in a Dr. Kovorkian sort of way). It is Christmas Eve and Mom, Dad and little Billy are driving to the nursing home for their annual visit to grandpa. Seeing Grandpa is apparently the only plan here because Gramps is catatonic in a rocking chair and staring out the window. That is, until Billy's mom and dad leave the room and the old man becomes animated, grabs Billy by the collar and warns him: "Christmas is the scariest damn night of the whole year!!! You see Santy Claus tonight you better run boy, you better run for ya life!" and then he goes back to his staring contest with the window.

No points for guessing that on the way home, the family will run afoul of a psychotic in a Santa suit. Well, jolly old Saint Nick shoots dad, carves mom up like a Christmas ham and leaves little Billy for dead. Nice, huh?

Now traumatized and an orphan, the state sends Billy to a place that can help him: A prison-like Catholic orphanage run by a sadistic Mother Superior seven centuries too late for the inquisition (Funny that people protested this movie over Psycho-Santa but no one said anything about the Neo-Nazi Nuns). Here, Billy's trauma can be fueled by dirty mattresses, cold gruel and hours and hours of humiliating medieval discipline (I'm not talking about real Catholic schools, just the one portrayed in this movie).

Feeding the fire of Billy's festering insanity, Mother Superior forces the child to draw pictures of Santa and to sit on the big guys lap. The results: The kid cleans Santa's clock and draws pictures of Christmas icons in various forms of chalk drawing poses. This happens over and over again and everytime it does, Mother Superior gleefully gives Billy what for.

Shoot forward about a decade and we find strapping young Billy working in a toy store and starting to get the sinister urge as the holiday approaches. His boss (not the sharpest knife in the drawer) assigns Billy to be the store Santa (ulp!) despite the fact that the kid weighs about 115 pounds.

Well, apparently Billy works in the only store in the country that still has a fire axe on the premisis and he proceeds to put out his fellow employees including the dimwit who gave him the job in the first place.

This begins a violent and rather disturbing rampage as Billy stalks about punishing those who have been naughty. His evening killing spree is ended when, at dawn, he is turned into swiss cheese by an over-zealous police officer who empties his gun into Billy jolly feux pot belly.

Even more bizarre then the film itself is the strange journey that the film took getting to the screen. It was filmed two years before it's release while the studio was losing money on a string of flops and had no money to release it. Then it was about to get a major campaign before parents groups got together and picketed the movie causing it's release to be severly limited (not a bad thing). I'm usually against such protests but I'm starting to realize that movies that draw controversy (Showgirls, Basic Instinct) turn out to junk anyway so why bother?

I find myself asking questions like that. I find that movies like Silent Night, Deadly Night give me a lot of time to think. I ask questions like Who thought this movie was a good idea? Who greenlighted it? Who passed over a hundred scripts and landed on this one to turn into a movie? How did someone convince actors to give up their reputations for junk like this? Why do I waste my time watching movies like this? Why do I waste my time asking these questions? Who cares? Who am I talking to? Shut up!