How the fuck was I supposed to know this was a remake? Even though it’s a “loose” remake, it’s still a goddamned remake. Do you know how many movies there are that have “Silent Night” and then some other phrase after it in the horror movie world? A SHIT TON. This was a loose remake of the 1984 movie Silent Night, Deadly Night, which was about a little boy who saw his parents get murdered by someone in a Santa Clause outfit and he grew up and eventually went crazy. The cast for this film had me excited, because the last ensemble movie I saw that had Malcolm McDowell was Excision, which I enjoyed, and the last remake I saw Jaime King in was Mother’s Day, which I also enjoyed. Throw in some Lisa Marie, who doesn’t really do much anymore, and Donal Logue, who can sometimes sort of be funny sometimes (?) and it looked like maybe this Silent Night could have something to it!
Thanks to all you LIBERALS out there, cops can’t even use guns anymore! They have to take pictures and just hope the criminals become YouTube sensations!
Santa wastes absolutely no time in this movie killing people, and his first victim is someone getting wrapped in Christmas lights and getting electrocuted. The story then starts following Aubrey Bradimore (Jaime King), who is involved in the local law enforcement and is helping the town get ready for the Santa Clause competition, where there are over 500 people dressed up as Santa. As her and her supervisor, played by Malcolm McDowell, here about the crimes someone in a Santa Clause outfit are committing, that’s when they start hypothesizing about who the killer could be. They try locking up the one Santa who lives in town who is known for being somewhat of a pervert (Donal Logue) but find out it’s not him, and they investigate another Santa for some reason that I can’t really remember, but when that Santa tries to fight Aubrey, she assumes this is obviously the guy known for his violence, and kills him to prevent further death. All these killings also remind the town of a guy who went crazy a few decades earlier with a flamethrower in a Santa costume, so they even think it might be that guy and he didn’t really die, which would also explain why a masked Santa Clause killer shows up with a flamethrower, but when they finally kill the one responsible, they still don’t really know who he is. Through a flashback, we see the original flame-throwing Santa getting gunned down by the police, and through a helpful zoom onto the nametag of one of the officers to see that it was Aubrey’s father, and through another helpful zoom, we see that there was a little boy in flamethrowing Santa’s truck, which is who the killer of this movie grew up to be. It just goes to show: don’t let your kids see you getting murdered!
The costume department at least succeeding in making Santa LOOK creepy, but, then again, when doesn’t Santa look creepy?
As far as the connections to the original film, the only similarities I’d say were the idea of a little kid growing up and becoming a serial killer after something traumatic he witnessed as a child, a scene where a woman gets killed by antlers in a similar way to the original, and all of this stuff happening at Christmas. If it wasn’t for that scene at the end that revealed the identity of the murdered, this would’ve just been another boring slasher film that happens to take place at Christmas. The cast was fine, but really nothing memorable from anybody involved. From a more technical standpoint all of the kill sequences weren’t bad, there just wasn’t really anything all that special about them. Oh, okay, a guy gets electrocuted, or a lady gets tossed in a woodchipper. It’s all stuff that we’ve seen before, so even if those effects were done competently, they still weren’t very original. I’d say that this movie was so bland, that it really wasn’t much more entertaining than that other “horror” movie from the holidays that I recently reviewed, Jack Frost. Sure, this movie took itself more seriously, but it was just…blech. Is that a word? It’s supposed to be more of a sound effect kind of thing, but I think you get the idea. And before I forget, I’m not really one to complain about women being naked in movies, especially horror movies, and especially good looking women, but the scene leading up to the woodchipper scene had the woman running around topless for SOOOOOOOOOOO long, it was kind of irritating. A lot of time with female nudity in the horror genre, you understand that the director is doing it to appeal to the male-dominated audiences, but with Silent Night, there was just something about it that made you feel like the director was doing it for himself, rather than for the audience. Again, this might sound surprising from the old Wolfman, but did we really need to have her running around topless for THAT long? The only thing interesting was the justification of who the killer was, and that’s something you probably could have predicted if you were familiar with the original movie. You can watch this to try to get into the spirit of Christmas, maybe just the one time, and that will be more than enough viewings.
Wolfman Moon Scale
Related articles
The Wolfman Cometh 
Pingback: Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) [REVIEW] | The Wolfman Cometh·
Why would you grow up to avenge your psycho flamin throwin father who just killed your mother on the pavement. What a shitty twist. You should be thanking the cop that killed him