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Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987)

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> Holiday: Christmas
Overall Rating 46%
Overall Rating
Ranked #4,752
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Genres / Traits: Horror Slasher Film Christmas


The now-adult Ricky talks to a psychiatrist about how he became a murderer after his brother, Billy, died, which leads back to Mother Superior. --IMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: December 12, 2010
Silent Night, Deadly Night was a damned fine slasher flick. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a perfect movie, but it's definitely one that deserves to be dragged out on a yearly basis. It's a movie that perfectly defines the eighties slasher: centered with an over-the-top premise, coupled with plenty of blood and boobs, surrounded by a bit of controversy, and sprinkled off with an atmosphere that actually gets kind of creepy at times. It does have its problems, but on the whole, it's an enjoyable slice of horror fare. Considering that it did indeed have that real-life controversy surrounding it and combined with the fact that it was the eighties (a time when every movie that managed to sell at least a bag of popcorn got a sequel), it was only a couple of years before part two was birthed. Unfortunately, the series went downhill and quick.

The first half of the movie is a recap of the original film, so if you've already seen that one, you're in for a short movie when you pop this disc in. The idea here is that Ricky (Eric Freeman), the brother of the killer from the first film, is in an insane asylum and is recounting his brother's deeds and how they affected him. That's the idea, anyway, but the real reason for this is to pad out a short film. Thus, we get to relive every kill, every sex scene, and every memorable quote from the first film for the first forty-five minutes of the running time.

After that nonsense is mercifully over, we finally get to the meat of this movie: we see a few of Ricky's deeds in flashback form, he kills the doctor who was talking to him, escapes, and proceeds to rack up a few more kills before heading out in search of the Mother Superior who tormented him and his brother in the first movie.

I wish I could say that the brief sentence I wrote above was just the setup for the film, but alas, that takes us right up to the credits. I realize that slasher films generally don't have much in the way of deep storylines, but this is just ridiculous: half of the freaking movie is a rehash of another movie, and a quarter of it is just flashback sequences that serve no purpose in the grand scheme of things other than to show us a few kills. I suppose that this wouldn't be quite so bad if you decided to skip the first movie and start with this sequel, but seriously, who gets interested in a series and decides to start with part two?

Eric Freeman is the other major problem with the movie, and his casting here shows one of the fundamental problems with Hollywood then and now. Freeman, to be polite, can not act. There is bad acting, but Mr. Freeman does not suffer from that: the man simply can't act, period. However, he got the role instead of a more established actor due to his looks, and thus, we're treated to one of the worst performances in film history. The man can not deliver a line to save his life and every scene of his is peppered with the phoniest laugh this side of a sitcom, but I will give him credit for delivering some memorable scenes; they were memorable because of how bad they were, but they were memorable none the less (the "Garbage day!" scene springs to mind).

The only positive here is that a few of the kills are decent - not great and not particularly memorable, but decent. Again, all of the ones from the first film were recycled here and you probably already know about those, but in addition, we also get an umbrella kill that is pretty neat and a death by car battery scene that is... well, it's unusual, I'll give it that. The final showdown between Ricky and Mother Superior is also done rather well, and the closing moments of the movie almost seem out of place here due to how good they were; I mean, what business does a good horror scene have in a shitty movie like this? It didn't do much to salvage my opinion of the overall product, but it was a nice touch.

Overall though, I can't recommend this one. I don't generally have a problem with movies getting new viewers up to speed with what happened in the previous film(s), but dedicating an entire half of the running time to doing such is just going overboard. I could have overlooked that to an extent if the other half was particularly memorable, but no, there's just a few decent kills and a whole lot of terrible acting. I plan on finishing the series to celebrate the holidays, but if the next movie is as bad as this one was, I may have to abort that idea. 3/10.
streblo666 #1: streblo666 - added January 11, 2007 at 2:48am
GARBAGE DAY!!!
bluemeanie #2: bluemeanie - added December 13, 2010 at 5:05pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdJF0amk7B8
I am the one with the gun. We recorded this as a promo for our "Silent Night Deadly Night" screening last year.
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