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.

Dead of Night (1945)

DEAD OF NIGHT (1945) ****
Back in 2005, I needed three credits to complete a master’s degree in history (lifetime underachievement) and I finished a three-week 120-hour internship that summer at the National Archives in Kansas City, Missouri.

Anyway, they let me loose on their free account on some genealogical site as reward for good behavior and a day-and-a-half later I came back with Sisney family history dating back to 1776.

On February 27, 1776, a few months before the Declaration of Independence, Steven Sisney fought at and was captured and imprisoned during the Battle of Moores Creek Bridge near Wilmington, North Carolina. Sisney was one of about 1600 loyalist-siding Highland Scots who marched from Cross Creek, North Carolina, toward the coast behind British Colonel Donald McLeod. The loyalists lost, the patriots received a morale boost, and North Carolina became the first colony to vote for independence, beating the official declaration by a couple months easy.

Every once in a while, I think about Steven Sisney and his loyalty to the British since I favor the Beatles and the Stones and the Who and the Kinks and Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin and the Clash and the Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks and Radiohead and Pink Floyd and Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and Sherlock Holmes and James Bond and Alec Guinness and Cary Grant and Ben Kingsley and Ian McKellen and Glenda Jackson and Hammer and Hitchcock and Monty Python and Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and on and so on and on some more again.

If nothing else, the 1945 horror anthology film Dead of Night made me think about Steven Sisney, the epic 1989 David Hackett Fischer history book Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (never forget the saga of the poor one-eyed servant George Spencer in New Haven, who was hanged for bestiality after a sow birthed a deformed pig with one eye and the two witnesses required for conviction were the deformed piglet and Spencer’s recanted confession), the late Pittsburg State history professor Judith Shaw (1931-2013) who taught many British History courses over the decades, and how much of an impact Dead of Night had on Richard Attenborough’s Magic.

Horror anthologies generally offer a mixed bag of success and failure.

Of course, Ray Davies outlined it in Celluloid Heroes, Success walks hand-in-hand with failure along Hollywood Boulevard. I always think about Twilight Zone: The Movie from 1983 to illustrate the mixed bag qualities of just about every anthology we’ve ever been expected to consume. The segments directed by John Landis and Steven Spielberg suck, the ones from Joe Dante and George Miller are dynamite, and the prologue and epilogue push the overall package into positive review terrain.

In Dead of Night, Alberto Cavalcanti directed Christmas Party and The Ventriloquist’s Dummy, Charles Crichton directed Golfing Story, Robert Hamer directed The Haunted Mirror, and Basil Dearden directed Hearse Driver and Linking Narrative.

It all starts when architect Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) tells host and potential client Eliot Foley (Roland Culver) and his guests at country estate Pilgrim’s Farm that he’s seen them all in a recurring dream. Craig feels like he’s been at Pilgrim’s Farm before and every guest rings a bell to him despite never having met any of them before. Each person (host and guests alike) rattles off a supernatural tale, inspired by Craig’s revelations. Craig wants to leave because he doesn’t want his dream to come true and the guests do their best to make him stay.

The Haunted Mirror and The Ventriloquist’s Dummy are especially brilliant and Golfing Story reminds one that Ealing Studios later brought us Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, and The Ladykillers, all of which feature a dark comedy that seems to have started with Hitchcock. Hamer directed Kind Hearts and Coronets and Crichton directed The Lavender Hill Mob (and later on in his career A Fish Called Wanda).

Basil Radford (1897-1952) and Naunton Wayne (1901-70) appear together in Dead of Night, but not as their characters Charters and Caldicott. Charters and Caldicott began in Hitchcock’s 1938 classic The Lady Vanishes and then the acting duo appeared together in a series of films from 1940 through 1949, including three more times playing Charters and Caldicott. They are very funny, both individually and collectively, in Dead of Night. They don’t seem particularly gay in Dead of Night.

During The Haunted Mirror, guest Joan Cortland (Googie Withers) relays to us what happened after she gifted an antique mirror to her future husband Peter (Ralph Michael). Peter sees another room in the mirror’s reflection, does not see Joan in the mirror when she confronts him, and for a spell he sees the room as normal. Joan finds out the history of the mirror and the wealthy man who owned it after she visits the antique shop from which she purchased the mirror. This wealthy man was crippled in a riding accident, then he grew so insanely jealous of his wife that he strangled her and he finally slit his own throat in front of the mirror. When Joan returns home, Peter accuses her of having an affair and then he attempts to strangle her. Joan smashes the mirror in sheer desperation and breaks the spell.

In The Ventriloquist’s Dummy, the absolute most effective segment, resident rational explanation seeker Dr. Van Straaten (Frederick Valk) tells us about the case of ventriloquist Maxwell Frere (Michael Redgrave) and his dummy Hugo Fitch. Maxwell develops a dual personality with Hugo becoming the dominant part. Poor, poor, poor Sylvester Kee (Hartley Power), who happens to catch and be impressed by the act.

In the long run, I was much impressed by Dead of Night and I recommend it to anyone.

Forced Vengeance (1982)

FORCED VENGEANCE (1982) **1/2
Slow motion’s absolutely vital to understanding the cinematic and TV work of the one and only Carlos Ray Norris.

Slow motion’s everywhere, in action movies, sporting events, movie musicals, etc. To the point that we don’t even realize how everywhere it’s become.

Over the decades, for example, slow motion became a customary tool in violent scenes, from Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch to The Matrix and beyond. Sometimes, I think Gee whiz, that’s awesome and very artfully done, but mostly I just think That’s super lame. I take off points for the obligatory and cheap use of slow motion.

Let’s see, off the top of my head, I deducted from The Lion King and Teen Wolf and Young Guns for their abuse of slow motion late in their motion picture spreads, while Kickboxer 2 flogs viewers with slow motion until it’s like receiving a slow motion roundhouse upside the head. For crying out loud, though, it’s slow motion, super slow even, and that gives us a greater chance to duck out of the way and to see all the cheap audience manipulation at play. I mean, I ducked the Kickboxer 2 roundhouse and found the Siskel & Ebert review playing alongside the movie inside my head esp. Ebert imitating the sounds of slow motion. It was more entertaining that way.

That brings us full roundhouse back to Norris, one of the foremost slow motion abusers.

A former co-worker said that his ears were ringing for a long time after he watched the Who play one of the Day on the Green concerts at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. He talked about being whacked upside the head by their incredible Wall of Noise. I soaked up this conversation.

“In 1976, the Who entered the Guinness Book of World Records for performing the loudest concert in history at the time during their concert at England’s Charlton Athletic Grounds with 76,000 watts at 120 decibels. This record would stand for nearly a decade.”

You can bet they used the Rock-o-meter from Rock ‘N’ Roll High School.

Anyway, now I will make the case for something that’s louder than any rock concert or sporting event, any plane taking flight, any hyena’s laugh, and any howler monkey.

For a couple months, I visited my Grandma for her bingo dominance Tuesday and Thursday. After the bingo hour, we’d return to her room and she’d turn her TV back on. Naturally, it would be Walker, Texas Ranger on Hallmark. Of course. At 3 every day, every single TV in the nursing home would simultaneously be turned on full volume and tuned in to Walker, Texas Ranger. That’d be probably close to 100 TVs. Yeah, we’ll go with 100 for the sake of hyperbole.

I’ve never in my life heard anything louder than 100 full blast TVs simultaneously reverberating Walker slow motion roundhouse kicks.

Guinness, book it.

I deducted a half-star from Forced Vengeance because it broke through my pain threshold for slow motion consumption early on during the final act leading toward a grand finale.

You have been forewarned.

Once again, though, a poster for a Norris spectacular earns four stars.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (1974) **

Brian De Palma’s PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, a great big flop during its original release, is another cult film where I have to say, “I am glad you love this movie, but I don’t.” Big deal, it happens both ways on a regular basis.

It’s also one of those movies where I liked it less and less the more it was on, until I simply just wanted it to be over.

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE gets called a “rock opera” and compared with THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, which came out about one year later.

Now, we’re getting to the heart of the problem. Both PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE and ROCKY HORROR are limp-wristed rock if they are in fact rock at all. Paul Williams, the songwriter and star of PHANTOM, he’s best known for writing Three Dog Night’s “An Old Fashioned Love Song,” the Carpenters’ “Rainy Days and Mondays,” Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen” from A STAR IS BORN, and Kermit the Frog’s “Rainbow Connection” from THE MUPPET MOVIE. Not exactly the most rocking credentials.

Singer-songwriter and show tunes, with a little Sha Na Na and Meatloaf thrown in for extra measure, are not my idea of rock and that’s what PHANTOM and ROCKY HORROR offer listeners and viewers.

I already wrote a review comparing ROCKY HORROR against ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, a 1979 film that centers around the music of the Ramones.

This whole rock opera angle initiated my brilliantly engineered mind to recall Ken Russell’s TOMMY from 1975, another musical contemporaneous with both PHANTOM and ROCKY HORROR that’s far more deserving of being called a “rock opera.” That’s definitely true, because at one time The Who — the band responsible for the music for both the 1969 album and 1975 movie — owned the rights on “loudest rock band in the world.” They lived rock, long before they wrote a song like “Long Live Rock,” “Be it dead or alive.”

Russell, who’s every bit as good as De Palma at capturing wretched excess on celluloid, gives us non-singers Oliver Reed and Jack Nicholson, natural born entertainers Ann-Margret and Tina Turner, a Marilyn Monroe-themed cult led by “The Preacher” (Eric Clapton), and Elton John’s centerpiece “Pinball Wizard” number, taking advantage of a $5 million budget. Hell to the yes, I love me some pinball and Sir Elton’s melodramatic demise. Never mind what Ann-Margret does with champagne, beans, chocolates, and bubbles. What’s that Beach Boys line about excitation?

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (reportedly made for $1.3 million) takes on classic novels “Phantom of the Opera,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” and “Faust.” It also predates the Black Sabbath compilation album “We Sold Our Soul for Rock ‘N’ Roll.”

I prefer the 1925 silent PHANTOM OF THE OPERA because of Lon Chaney’s brilliant performance (his 1974 counterpart William Finley gives the best performance in the movie), the fact that melodrama works better in silent rather than sound films, and the fact that we do not hear the opera music. Yeah, that’s right, I do not particularly care for opera, rock or not. PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE does not rock enough.

I would have greatly preferred Robert Johnson’s music over Paul Williams’ tunes. Here I am and I can’t remember any of Williams’ songs from the film. Not a good sign.

I would not be surprised, though, to find out that Dario Argento cast Jessica Harper in SUSPIRIA (1977) because of her performance in PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE.

I’ll take SUSPIRIA.

TOMMY (1975) ***

TOMMY