Douce nuit, sanglante nuit: coma dépassé

I enjoyed the original Silent Night, Deadly Night. To the dismay of other internet film critics, i also enjoyed Silent Night, Deadly Night part 2. But when i sat down to watch the 3rd installment in the series, even at the age of 15 i knew the end was near.

My Biggest issue with this film has little to do with the low rent acting. It is the blatant disregard for the previous film that irritates me the most.

Ricky has no need for the science fictional fishbowl on his head in this film, other than to draw attention away from the lack of plot, and place all eyes on a sad gimmick. In the end of Silent Night, Deadly Night 2, Ricky is shot three times, yes – But he was never shot in the head – nor did he have his head blown off as another commentator included in his/her IMDb review of the film. There is No Need for the Fishbowl!

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.

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.

So to me right from the start this movie has a really flat and off putting tone that doesn't remotely have the feel of Silent Night Deadly Night, and it's just pretty much dead boring and not very fun at all. For one thing it takes itself too seriously, unlike the second 'movie' it doesn't even have a slight unintentionally hilarious charm going for it, it's way too po-faced to pull that off. They probably should have gone for laughs but it seems they actually thought that they could play a story with a man shuffling along like a snail in a hospital gown and slippers with his exposed brain in a salad bowl in place of his cranium, completely straight! Who the hell was the genius that decided to give him that look anyway? They never even get him in a Santa suit once, and there was a clear point in the story when he could have easily got one too, after Ricky kills the obnoxious drunk Santa who taunts him into waking up from his coma, but no he just inchworms his way out without anyone noticing and proceeds to hitchhike with his dumb fishbowl brain head, and somebody actually gives him a ride!!! It was a decent effort but with that thing stuck on his head the whole time with its antenna and little blinking light Bill Mosley just looked like a silly Frankenstein-esc zombie from a hokey 50s sci-fi B-movie that was more fun! Mosley had virtually nothing to work with here and that was too bad because everyone who knows about him knows that the guy can play manic crazy better than most in the horror movie business. He was stuck in a role that didn't even let him emote here though and he looks like he's ready to nod off in some shots, and for that reason he was nowhere near as much fun as Eric Freeman's version of the character was. I really found myself hating Samantha Scully's weird artsy performance as Laura, her look and how she spoke was so floaty and pretentious, timid or not she was horrible and I didn't give a hoot what happened to her character. She was such a ham when she was trying to act scared, and the Shining type thing between her and Ricky was stupid and completely unnecessary. It's such a listless little mess of a picture, like how they got to the sweet old granny's house who got bumped off earlier and they wonder where she is for about a minute but they never bother to go and look for her, they go and take romantic baths and watch old horror movies, and nothing interesting happens for a good forty minutes, it's a complete joke, and that little condescending "Happy new year" that tops off all the lousiness at the end from Mosley in a tuxedo was so bizarre, I just thought it was like they were going ha-ha you watched the whole movie you idiot! And how about those scenes with Ricky's doctor and the police detective or whatever he was meant to be, their scenes and ridiculous drawn out conversations about crap really drag an already slow as hell movie to a dead halt. They just talk and talk even though they're meant to be racing to stop a demented mass murderer! It's like they were ad-libbing it all and I couldn't stop focusing on the guy's freakishly protruding chin when he was talking.. If you watch them in order, the films in this series each seem to try and top the one that came before in terms of craziness, but at least all the others had they're good points, this is a boring dud with characters that are annoying and unlikeable, it thoroughly wasted Bill Mosley, the kills are pathetic, there's no goddamn Santa suit!! it's slow as f&@k and the absolute worst in the series, do not bother with it, total jingle balls x 👎

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.