Tag: Santa Claus

Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (1984) No stars
It should be stated right away that I found Silent Night, Deadly Night, the legendary killer Santa Claus picture, to be a shocking experience, though not anywhere near the same reason it created a firestorm of controversy in 1984 and 1985.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is a shockingly bad motion picture, so poorly acted, written, directed, and executed that it becomes laughable without being funny.

If you Google why is Silent Night, Deadly Night controversial, you’ll receive Most protests were generated by the feeling that the depiction of a killer in a Santa Claus suit would traumatize children and undermine their traditional trust in Santa Claus.

Poppycock!

Silent Night, Deadly Night is one of the worst horror movies ever made, but it didn’t traumatize this 44-year-old man or undermine his traditional trust in motion pictures, even low-budget exploitation films.

It must be said that Little Billy, definitely not the same one in the Who song, faces enough childhood trauma in the opening minutes of Silent Night, Deadly Night for a lifetime of bad movies. It should be played at dentist offices everywhere, and not only around Christmas.

He’s told by his otherwise catatonic Grandpa that Santa punishes all those who are naughty, he watches his parents get slaughtered by a killer dressed as Santa, he’s orphaned and introduced to the hateful Mother Superior, and he’s given a lethal mullet.

Little Billy was the fattest kid in his class / Always the last in line / All the other little kids would laugh at him / Said he’d die before his time / Ha ha ha ha / Ha ha ha ha / Little Billy didn’t mind / Most of the kids smoked cigarettes / Just to prove that they were cool / The teacher didn’t know about the children’s games / And Billy always followed the rules / Ha ha ha ha / Ha ha ha ha / Little Billy didn’t mind / Billy was big on the outside / But there’s an even bigger inside / Ten million cigarettes burning every day / And Billy’s doing fine.

The Billy in Silent Night, Deadly Night finally snaps from all that overacting. I mean, seriously, they start in with that shit from the first scene and never let up. Grandpa, Mother Superior, Billy’s boss at the toy store, on down the line, they all played it for the back row.

Now Billy and his classmates are middle-aged / With children of their own / Their smoking games are reality now / And cancer’s seed is sown / Ha ha ha ha / Ha ha ha ha / Little Billy didn’t mind / Most of them smoke maybe 40 a day / A habit Billy doesn’t share / One by one they’re passing away / Leaving orphans to Billy’s care / Ha ha ha ha / Ha ha ha ha / Ha ha ha ha / Little Billy doesn’t mind / Ha ha ha ha / Ha ha ha ha / Little Billy’s doing fine.

Little Billy could have punched out Mike Tyson. When he punches out Santa at the orphanage, you’d think maybe somebody could have introduced Little Billy to Cus D’Amato. Granted, it’s a long, long, long way from Utah to New York and a more uplifting boxing picture would not generate all that controversy and curiosity like a killer dressed up like Santa Claus.

Did you ever see the faces of children? They get so excited / Waking up on Christmas morning hours before the winter sun has ignited / They believe in dreams and all they mean, including heaven’s generosity / Peeping round the door to see what parcels are for free in curiosity.

We patiently wait for Billy to snap throughout Silent Night, Deadly Night, because isn’t that why we’re watching this tripe in the first place?

When he finally does snap and starts the slaughter, it’s every bit as bad and maybe even worse than what came before, believe it or not. This movie does not stop in the pursuit of just plain awful scenes.

Surrounding by his friends he sits / So silently and unaware of everything / Playing Poxy Pinball / Picks his nose and smiles and pokes his tongue at everything / I believe in love but how can men / Who’ve never seen light be enlightened? / Only if he’s cured will his spirits future level ever heighten.

Silent Night, Deadly Night lays it on thick with gratuitous nudity and sexual assault. It’s a very, very, very naughty movie!

Tara Buckman plays Billy’s mother and you might remember her or at least her cleavage from The Cannonball Run, where her and her race partner Adrienne Barbeau brandish their copious amounts of cleavage whenever they’re stopped by law enforcement. She’s not particularly convincing in her role as mother and her bad acting, as well as her sexual assault / death scene, set an early tone for Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Robert Brian Wilson made his motion picture debut as 18-year-old Billy and it easily could have been his only performance because he’s not very good in Silent Night, Deadly Night. Needless to say, for an IMDb biography that starts handsome and muscular actor, Wilson moved on to appearing in a number of soap operas and TV shows.

All of the actors are on the level of a bad soap opera, and the project feels like Amateur Night all the way.

The director Charles E. Sellier Jr. (1943-2011) produced The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, In Search of Noah’s Ark, The Lincoln Conspiracy, Beyond and Back, The Bermuda Triangle, In Search of Historic Jesus, Hangar 18, Earthbound, The Boogens, and The President Must Die before Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Sellier Jr.’s mini-bio on IMDb starts something like this: Sellier skillfully pioneered market testing and ‘four-walling’ – renting a theater to show his films, thereby enabling him to keep all the profits for himself – garnered him the distinction of having more pictures in the top 50 independent grossers than any other independent producer in the 1970s.

In other words, he was a skilled con artist.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is a big con, and the people responsible for it all knew exactly what they were doing when they marketed the picture with TV spots like the one that intones The most talked-about film of the decade … the movie that shocked America, outraged Hollywood, and frightened the government … the movie that they tried to ban … you’ve read about it, heard about it, and now you can see it in all its terrifying aura.

Their first TV spot played on the killer Santa angle — Santa with an ax, Santa with a gun — and capped it with the tagline You’ve made it through Halloween, now try and survive Christmas! Also, he knows when you’ve been naughty!

Were Silent Night, Deadly Night not so bloody inept it could be a terrifying experience.

Rather, it’s just terrible, and I am thankful for a running time under 90 minutes because any longer I might not have survived Christmas.

Rollercoaster (1977)

ROLLERCOASTER (1977) *
Rollercoaster, a thriller that combines Peter Bogdanovich’s vastly superior Targets, a disaster movie, and a mad bomber movie, marked the first time I returned to an amusement park since that fateful day on family vacation this past summer at Holiday World in Santa Claus, Indiana.

Everything was fine and dandy, we even maintained social distance and wore our masks as often as possible, until 16-year-old Emily wanted 12-year-old Isaac to ride on a roller coaster. She said he promised that he would try at least one roller coaster with her, he said that he made no such promise, she won’t ride on a roller coaster by her lonesome, he did not budge and refused to ride, and they eventually broke into hysterics and went their separate ways. Emily followed my wife Lynn and I back into the main body of the park and she frequently groused about her younger brother, while Isaac stayed behind and wept for the state of the world or something on a bench.

Two hours later, Emily decided to go to the car and she found Isaac sleeping on a bench just outside the park en route to the parking lot. No big deal, he said, he was tired, so he walked off, walked out, and took a nap. He did look a little refreshed.

I virtually walked the entire length of Holiday World twice over looking for Isaac to no avail and I lost count of every Beatles, every Beach Boys song the park blasted that day over the loud speakers. I had precise numbers, and they were gone. Lynn and I were obviously not pleased with either Emily or Isaac, and this is the first time I have spoken publicly about that Sunday afternoon in a place seven hours away from home.

The best thing about Rollercoaster, aside from the fact that it finally ended, is that it put that day in Santa Claus in perspective. I mean, yeah, at least we didn’t have happen to us what happened to the characters in Rollercoaster, especially at the 10-minute mark in the movie when our resident mad bomber (just call him The Mad Bomber with No Name who apparently represents something about our fears) played by Timothy Bottoms blows up a section of track and spectacularly derails a roller coaster. Needless to say, Universal Studios released Rollercoaster — in Sensurround, which Universal head Sidney Sheinberg called as big as any star in the movies — in June ’77 and a little release named Star Wars blew it away. Universal made just one more film in Sensurround. Big star?

Bottoms’ bomber presents one fundamental problem, because we never learn even his name or his motivation or much of anything ’bout him or even see that he enjoys being a mad bomber. He’s a cipher who’s not even mad enough in either way to justify being called a mad bomber. So when he meets his inevitable demise in the film’s grand finale, I felt no joy and only relief because it finally put this two-hour movie to pasture where it can rest in manure for eternity.

Here’s that perspective: Rollercoaster and that ordeal in Holiday World both lasted about two hours in real time, and both felt much longer. Yeah, I don’t much care for roller coasters in real life or captured on celluloid.

In closing, I should mention that Helen Hunt and Steve Guttenberg make their feature film debuts, iconic actors Henry Fonda and Richard Widmark appear here strictly for the money, and the eccentric rock band Sparks reportedly calls their cameo appearance in Rollercoaster — where they perform two songs from their 1976 LP Big Beat — the biggest regret of their career.