To All a Goodnight

To All A Goodnight is a cheesy 80's schoolgirl slasher, in which a number of rich, overly promiscuous, youths (and a couple unlucky adults) are targeted by a killer in a Santa suit, at an all girls boarding school over Christmas holidays.

This all takes place after the accidental death of another young girl- who was in the process of being hazed- at the school.

So, you are kind of led to suspect that she somehow survived and has returned for vengeance, though, they do include other suspicious characters that might also be responsible.

There are a number of cheesy deaths in this. And, while, most of the killings are by rather traditional means, they do manage to keep things diverse enough to seem fresh.

But the gore is pretty lame.

In the end, all the hormone driven boys and girls end up dead...while the nerds and innocents manage to survive.

And it seems like they tried to set this up for a sequel too, though I don't think that ever came to fruition.

All in all, it's a pretty standard and all around average Christmas season slasher.

5 out of 10.

David Hess is better known for playing the evil Krug in Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, but in the 80's he decided to take the plunge into the world of film directing and the results are a bit mixed. Granted, it's nice to see this film cleaned up and on Blu-Ray since my first exposure to this film was on a truly awful, muddy, and dark Media VHS, but even a great remaster can't hide the flaws.

The plot is pretty much the exact same as Black Christmas with a group of girls staying at their sorority house over the Christmas break and being killed one by one by some psycho. It adds an insanely quick opening prologue (so quick that one wonders if it was the last thing they shot on wrap day and had 15 minutes to do it) that shows the girls accidentally pushing another sorority girl off a ledge (while chanting "sorority! sorority!" Huh?) so we know this is going to pay off later and probably be the killer's main motivation.

Some of the death scenes are inspired and some are cursory at best and the ending is bizarre to say the least, but the pacing doesn't lag too much and it's a fairly quick investment of your time. There are certainly worse slashers out there (or even Christmas slashers out there).

Sorority girls who haven't left for the holidays are targeted by a Santa suit wearing serial killer.

There's not much meat on the bones of To All A Goodnight. It's not much interested in standing out from the pack very much and seems more comfortable borrowing from other films like Black Christmas, but there's an offbeat low budget charm and bizarre choices that keep it from being a total waste of time and some of the death scenes have their inventive and gory moments.

I read all the bad reviews before watching but I already know going in that it's from the 80's. A lot of the charm of an 80's movie is it's cheese factor, and this movie is no exception. The acting is not as bad as all these reviews say, I thought it was decent. The story is typically of that time period. A gathering of young adults to party and get naked and have sex to get hunted by a crazy Santa. It gets five stars for me, nothing great but watchable if in an 80's slasher mood.

Forget the cheerful seasons greetings, as here's another nasty little holiday slasher that's only made more interesting for the fact it was directed by genre actor David A. Hess. However his presence might have been better suited in front of the camera than just behind it. "To All A Good Night" is another addition to the Christmas --- Santa Clause slasher cycle and probably one of the least known, despite coming out around the same time as "You Better Watch Out" and even before the likes of "Silent Night, Deadly Night" and "Don't Open till Christmas". Still with that on mind, it's your typically rancid and atmospherically moody slasher that amusingly passes the time but in the end there's not too much to write about.

Sticking to a formula that seems to be popular; it opens in the past showing a prank going horribly wrong then moves to the present time which has a group of horny rich girls at Calvin Finishing School for Girls waiting to secretly smuggle in their boyfriends for some late-night parting, but after doing so they start disappearing as someone in a Saint Nick costume is going around making ends meat of them. Does the past have something to do with it… I can't see it any other way.

It had its moments (death by propeller was a neat touch), an unhinged, if wonky sounding electronic score and a cast (mostly no-names) that weren't too bad either. There's colourful bunch of characters (with expected red herrings; like Ralph the creepy looking gardener who can pop out from anywhere) and gladly they stood out from each other. The angelic Jennifer Runyon (in her debut performance --- although that's pretty for all the young cast) brings a grounded reality to her lead character. Her cute character was more sympathetic, thanks to her forlorn naïve innocence, but even so not worthless for that. Linda Gentile and Judith Bridges have titillating fun with their buxom parts. While Forrest Swanson and William Lauer are tolerable.

The location (a large sorority house) for such butchery is ominously remote, but David Hess' glum direction was kind of clunky with many murky set-pieces with a real uneven focus on the deaths or a real lack of build up to them. Some happen off-screen, while others come off jarringly quick. Some passages are lethargic, like the long stretches of fooling around, bickering and then the waiting game for the killer to strike (oh there's numerous leg shots of our psychotic Santa killer walking stairs). The story kind of starts of plain (with some flat writing) but when it begins to open up to where its actually going, it brings out some rather amusing (though not all that intentional) and odd developments. Plenty of contrived instances make there way in and there's one scene that paints it perfectly. After discovering a dead body one of the characters run to the phone to call the police, but *drum roll* the phone is dead. But just before picking it up… the killer perfectly times it by cutting the phone line just before it reaches his ear. But in the end it's the sudden revelation… well more so the outrageous second one that's a groaner.

A so-so seasonal low-budget slasher.