Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out!

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.

I consider Silent Night, Deadly Night 1 & 2 to be underwhelming but passable slasher flicks, this third part however is a different creature altogether.

So Ricky Caldwell found himself in a coma after the final events of the last film, somehow he's formed a psychic connection with a blind girl and when he predictably awakens and goes on a killing spree she is his target.

This time he's mute, no more yelling "Naughty" or "Punish" in fact he's near enough braindead. He resembles more of a Frankensteins monster rather than the serial killer we're used to seeing.

This could have worked but alas doesn't. The story is a mess, the whole thing is incredibly boring, the kills are uninspired and not one part of it works.

To make matters worse Ricky has been recast! Taking the role is horror legend Bill Moseley which you'd think would be a great thing but a mute role like this is one he could do little with. This is certainly not Moseleys finest hour.

Not on par with the first two, this is a mindless cash grab.

The Good:

Not a sausage

The Bad:

Recasting

Incredibly boring

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

"She'll come back and she'll let me go as deep as I want, she likes it, loves it" The writer was horny when he was writing this film, this above line was not even remotely meant to be sexual.

You know things aren't going so well, when you start to think that you rather be watching 'Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2' again and this indeed was running through my head during the very plodding part 3. Sure it's competently produced and slicker than the first two (way ahead in those stakes), but what a total snooze fest with a bunch of niggling characters. I know the shoddy second film has a bad wrap, but at least it was brainlessly cheesy fun, which this entry completely fumbled. Gone is the wicked dark humor (well it does try with less than flattering results) and forcefully graphic carnage, replaced with a leadenly talkative script (which does on to meander in many scenes), uninterestedly indifferent performances (does Robert Culp know what the movie's about?) and plenty of flat build-ups that lead to off-screen kills with a spurt of blood. Lame!

This straight to video effort (which the next two would follow path) pretty much continues on from 'Part 2', but trying to get away from the randomly standard stalk and slash angle where it adds another idea involving the unusual connection between the comatose Ricky (who survived the head shot with his exposed brain being protected by a Plexiglas cap) and a clairvoyant blind girl Laura, which her doctor was using those physic abilities to get into the mind of Ricky (although unknown to her). However in doing so she gets nightmarish images she rather no talk about, but through these experiments Ricky actually awakens from the coma and because of that attachment he heads after Laura.

Credit for trying some different, but it got completely daft and spineless leading to something routine. At the beginning it started using scenes from the first film in what Laura's character was seeing in her visions and I was thinking… "Here we go again?". Gladly it wasn't the case. The only thing that achieved some sort of energy was the hysterical screaming by Samantha Scully as the stubbornly unlikeable blind heroine, but again that wasn't entirely convincing. Moments within the plot actually reminded me of John Carl Buechler's 'Friday the 13th Part 7: New Blood' (1988). Now that one was better. Popping up as the maniac Ricky is Bill Moseley as his robotic manner goes through it with that plastic bowl on top of his head getting most of the attention. Robert Culp gives a batty performance, while Richard Beymer goes for stiltedly serious temperament. Laura Harring and Eric DaRe also appear. The busily echoing score punches out the electronic cues. The man in the director's chair Monte Hellman ('The Shooting', 'Cockfighter' and 'Two-lane Blacktop') does a stylish, but lethargic job which lacked a sinister bite. Bit of atmosphere in some dreamy parts and camera placement showed some inventiveness, but it triggers no tension, no jolts and no fun.

Compared to the first two a very slow and boring sequel. With a blind girl as the lead role it was very boring seeing her slowly adjust to the sittuation not realizing the killer was standing next to her. Now to the killer by now the killer is a very slow and frail man, unlike in previous one. The chase scene are hard to watch, your sitting there saying hurry up, or he's just there. It's not a bad movie but I definately enjoyed the first two much more. but do watch it, it's okay.

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.