Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out!

There is a strange connection between some of the actors/actresses in this film; director David Lynch. How did such a typical slasher/B-movie happen to have 3 individuals who all went to work with the intriguing director David Lynch, on various projects. Eric DaRe from SNDN 3 portrayed shady brute "Leo Johnson" in Lynch's TV series "Twin Peaks". Richard Beymer also ended up in the strange town of "Twin Peaks", having played rich and devious "Benjamin Horne". And then certainly, the lovely and mysterious Laura Harring makes her appearance in David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive". Perhaps some of the supernatural entities that exist in Lynch's various works, seeped into the world of reality, and pulled these three actors/actresses into the world of David Lynch at an unforeseen future point in their careers... or, maybe David Lynch is just a really big fan of "Silent Night, Deadly Night 3". You be the judge.

This is a very bad movie - dry, boring, lame, technically inept. The script is very poor. I can't believe Monte Hellman actually directed it - or anyone, for that matter. The ONLY good thing about this film is Robert Culp, who rises far above everything else in his role as the detective. He's great.

Having been shot and severely wounded in the previous film, the psychotic killer named "Ricky" (Bill Moseley) lies in a comatose state and is being used for scientific research by a man by the name of "Dr. Newbury" (Richard Beymar). To that effect, his main interest consists of using a young woman named "Laura" (Samantha Scully) to attempt to make contact with him using her unique talent in the field of extra sensory perception. Unfortunately, although she does in fact make contact with Ricky, it isn't the positive breakthrough that Dr. Newbury had hoped for as Laura continues to experience nightmares each time she interacts with him. Likewise, Ricky is also affected--and this soon creates problems for all concerned. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this is one of those horror movies which lacked the suspense necessary for a film of this sort. Admittedly, it was slightly better than its immediate predecessor but, even so, that isn't saying much as that particular film was, for the most part, quite dreadful. Be that as it may, I wasn't too impressed with this film either and I have rated it accordingly. Below average.

My review was written in September 1989 after watching the film on TWE video cassette.

Direct-to-video sequel to the notorious "Santa Claus" horror series is a competently made but strictly standard fright pic bound to disappoint fans of helmer Monte Hellman.

Widely respected by cineastes, especially in Europe, Hellman has been out of the limelight of late, not getting top drawer assignments as he did back when "Two-Lane Balcktop" became a cult classic. He began his career three decades ago working on horror pics for Roger Coran (a film clip from Corman's "The Terror" is excerpted here as an homage) and now returns full circle.

Film tastefully avoids the objectionable material of its predecessors: there is just a brief setup clip from Part One. Heroine Samantha Scully is a blind girl linked up with the youngster (now grown-up Bill Moseley) responsible for the Santa Claus killings by scientist Richard Beymer. He experimented on Moseley, who's been in a coma for six years since being apprehended and nearly killed; sci-fi element here is mixed with psychic connection phenomena.

Despite this adventurous premise, pic quickly becomes a standard suspenser, as Moseley escapes ade on the rampage, threatening Scully, her brother (Eric Dea Re) and bro's pretty girlfriend (Laura Herring). Climax is out of "Wait Until Dark", with Scully evening up the ods in a darkened basement.

Interesting casting has Scully and Herring the same physical type (both earthy brunettes), and they team up in the final reels to combat the monster. Unfortunately, pic offers little novelty or thematic interest, analogous in underachievement within Hellman's output to Alan J. Pakula's similarly woebegone "Dream Lover".

Tech credits are good, with an eerie droning score by Steven Soles. Carlos Laszlo's script is filled with red herring suspense sequences and dumb dialog.

Hoping to rest for the holidays, a blind psychic woman and her friends' trip to a family gathering is interrupted by the reanimated killer that was part of her experiments with and tries to stop him before he kills off her friends.

This was a truly abysmal and near worthless slasher effort. About the only positive this one has is the finale stalking around the house, which is quite effective here at putting her in danger due to the use of her physical condition causing a lot of fumbling and stumbling around in the dark while trying to avoid the killer who's closing in, through several different floors of the house and down into the basement where the real stalking is used and the best bloodletting is all thrown together. By itself, it's a decent enough sequence but is just trapped all throughout here with the rest of the banal attributes that hold it down. Among the numerous flaws here, nothing is bigger than the utterly lame and unimposing killer, who looks so ridiculous with the coma-device still strapped to his head that he gets quite more laughs than scares by his appearance and really settles into this one quite weakly. It's hardly off to a good start when we find ourselves treating the killer as a joke, and the other flaws only enhance that since this one is just interminably boring and lifeless. There's hardly any action at all within this since the first half tends to run through her experiments at the hospital before finally just getting to the house at the forty-minute mark as the useless side-tangents of the killer's stops along the way and the detectives spouting pointless scientific jargon at each other make up the rest of the running time in the first half. This is naturally spurred on by the criminally-low body-count that never really gives this one a chance to let loose with the splatter that would've helped the running time along here and in the end there's just not enough action to really get this one going at all. The last flaw here is the overall cheap-ness of the film, both in regards to the locations and sets but also the overall quality of the rest of the special effects as the kills are all off-screen, the design is pretty bad and overall this one never really had a chance to do much good for itself.

Rated R: Graphic Violence, Nudity and Language.