The Curator of Schlock #301 by Jeff Shuster
Silent Night, Deadly Nigh Part 2
It’s not the most wonderful time of the year!
When you’re written three hundred blogs about movies, you tend to forget what you’ve covered. For instance, you would think in the six years I’ve been doing this that I would have curated 1984’s Silent Night, Deadly Night from director Charles E. Sellier Jr. at some point. But it looks like I never did. And it’s not streaming on any services, but the sequel is, so we’re moving on ahead. Deal with it.
1987’s Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 from director Lee Harry is half the movie that Silent Night, Deadly Night is. I mean it’s literally half of Silent Night, Deadly Night cobbled together with scenes from two other movies. That’s what it feels like, a Frankenstein monster of a movie. And I had to sit through it for your reading pleasure, so let’s get this over with.
Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 begins in a mental hospital with a deranged young man named Ricky Caldwell (Robert Brian Wilson) being interviewed by Dr. Harry Bloom, a psychiatrist. Seems that Ricky Caldwell is the younger brother of Billy Chapman, the maniac Santa Claus who got shot to death at the end of the first movie. Didn’t see it? That’s okay since Ricky gives us the highlights of the first movie with flashback scenes that seem to take up half of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2’s running time. Granted, I can’t get enough of the scene of Billy decapitating an eager sledder on Christmas Eve.
We learn that even though Ricky was an infant at the time, he witnessed the murder of his parents by a gun toting Santa Claus just like his older brother did.
Ricky was raised in the same orphanage as his brother, raised by the same overzealous Mother Superior as his brother. Eventually, a nice Jewish couple adopts Ricky. The hope is their lack of Yuletide cheer won’t trigger Ricky and transform him into a psychotic Santa Claus.
Doesn’t work.
As a teenager, Ricky repeatedly runs over a drunken redneck that was getting too fresh with a date. The woman thanks Ricky and saunters off. It’s odd that a different actor plays the teenage Ricky considering adult Ricky is eighteen-years-old! It’s like they started making a sequel to Silent Night, Deadly Night, abandoned the production, and shoved the footage in the new sequel.
Now we get flashbacks of adult Ricky murdering a bookie with an umbrella outside of the restaurant he works at. He falls in love with a girl, but gets triggered into murdering more people when she suggests they go to the movies and watch a film about a killer Santa Claus. Ricky kills people in the theater, kills his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend, kills his girlfriend, and starts shooting random people in a suburban neighborhood before getting arrested.
ater, Ricky murders Dr. Bloom, busts out of the mental hospital, murders a sidewalk Santa, dons the Santa suit, tracks down the abusive Mother Superior, decapitates her, and is shot to death by police just like his older brother. Okay, that was exhausting.
Oh, I just realized. I didn’t review Silent Night, Deadly Night all those years ago. It was Silent Night, Bloody Night, a completely different movie.
Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
