The Curator of Schlock #165 by Jeff Shuster

Silent Night, Bloody Night

It ain’t exactly silent when people are screaming as they’re hacked to pieces!

Merry Christmas everybody! We’re almost through 2016! 2017 has to be luckier. It has a 7 in it. 7 is a good number. Lucky 7. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. 7-Up. Cherry 7-Up. 7 Golden Vampires! It two weeks, I’ll be reviewing a movie from 2016, one that’s supposed to tap into 1980s nostalgia. If it succeeds, my ban on post-1979 movies will end. If I watch another Pixels, though…

Tonight’s movie is another Yuletide favorite, Silent Night, Bloody Night. And I don’t want hear any complaints about my choice of a Christmas movie. Not all Christmases are merry and bright. Some Christmases end with people getting murdered! MURDERED! That’s reality!

Sigh.

This is not a good movie.

Okay. Silent Night, Bloody Night starts out with a man named Wilfred Butler burning to death. Yeah, he accidentally set himself on fire or someone set him on fire. So he’s running around on fire right outside his palatial estate.  The ground is covered with snow. Ummmm. Why doesn’t he just stop, drop and roll? There’s snow everywhere! He could put that fire out in jiffy. Instead, he just dies. Spooky!

Fast-forward about twenty years. The Butler estate is up for sale. A man named John Carter (Patrick O’Neal) is trying to sell the house to some prominent citizens like the mayor and the sheriff. The buyer wants $50,000 in cash for the house to be delivered to Mr. Carter the following morning. I think the mayor decides to buy the house or they pitch in as a group. They offer to put him up in a hotel, but John insists on staying in the Butler house overnight. Oh, and John has a beautiful assistant with him named Ingrid (Astrid Heeren). John is a happily married man, but that isn’t stopping him from having an affair with Ingrid.

I guess Patrick O’Neal is the major star of this motion picture. I have to confess that I had never heard of the man until I watched this movie. It seems he got much critical praise for starring in the original Broadway run of Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana. He also starred in The Way We Were, a film your curator of schlock has never seen due to religious reasons.

 Oh, there’s also an escaped lunatic on the loose. We don’t see what the lunatic looks like, only his or her point of view. It’s a mystery waiting to be solved!

The lunatic stabs a dog to death. Not cool.

Later, the lunatic hides out in the Butler mansion, waiting for some fresh victims. The lunatic hacks up John and Ingrid with an axe while they’re having sex in the master bedroom. It’s pretty gross. The lunatic hacks up John and Ingrid with an axe. Do you know what’s really depressing? John’s last meal was a bologna sandwich from the local delicatesse.

More twists and turns ensue.

John Carradine shows up in some point.

That’s all I have to say. The movie is available on Amazon Prime. So is Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse. I could have been watching that!

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Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.