Day 11. Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2

This is more like it.

I laughed out loud during Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987)

more than once, and I'm quite certain that was a desired response. Following the dreary initial film, this sequel is every bit as soul-sick, but it's self-aware. It knows how to flaunt its illness with pride.

This movie is remarkable in one way that won't possibly escape anyone who sees it. Almost its entire first half is recycled footage from the previous movie. Remember when the recap in Friday the 13th Part 2 lasted for ten minutes? Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2's lasts for forty!

Billy, the killer from the first film, had an infant brother in the back of his car when his parents were hijacked and slashed by a robber dressed as old St. Nick. Now that brother, Ricky (Eric Freeman, in what would still be regarded as the performance of his lifetime if he hadn't disappeared completely) is grown and manic. He recounts to a psychiatrist all of the events that transpired in part one--events that he could not possibly have known, and from the same camera angles, too.

This "highlight" reel supplants any need to see the original Silent Night, Deadly Night, and put me in mind of an idea I had when Jack Reacher opened. It would be maddening to audiences if the characters in that Tom Cruise film went to a cinema playing Top Gun, and the entirety of that movie played out, extending Jack Reacher's running time to four hours. The makers of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 were ahead of me, because in the last half of the film, Ricky goes on a movie date to see the first Silent Night, Deadly Night. 

I don't understand this at all. 

And that's okay. Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 should inspire as an example of making the most of a bad situation. The filmmakers were asked to re-edit the first film and pass it off as a sequel. I'm unsure how that could be expected to fool anyone, but to their credit director Lee Harry and his co-writer Joseph H. Earle have crafted a brand new, and thoroughly deranged last half. 

The film's "Garbage Day" scene became an Internet meme several years back due to Freeman's mega-acting, and the madness doesn't begin and end there. Campiness is not my preferred aesthetic (always play your jokes as drama), but it does a lot to palate the spiritual ugliness on display. Unlike his brother Billy, Ricky isn't simply set off by "Christmas triggers." He starts as a vigilante, avenging an attempted rape, and impaling a mobster with an umbrella, before he moves to firing at neighbours who step on their porches to investigate why he's firing at other neighbours. Freeman laughs maniacally after every kill. According to IMDb, he raises and lowers his eyebrows a total of 130 times in this film. It's a performance designed to keep Nicolas Cage, in his more adventurous phases, up at night, questioning the disappeared enigma known as Eric Freeman. 

Even though the next sequel is directed by arthouse auteur Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop), I've had my fill of the Silent Night, Deadly Night series now. There are other Christmas movies to cover--movies that are classics, animations, come from foreign lands, or involve Muppets. When you can't leave a series on a high note, leave on a very bizarre one.

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 and The Meaning of Christmas

It has absolutely no idea. Why would you ask?

Tomorrow: The Muppet Christmas Carol

Day 10. Silent Night, Deadly Night

In my Rare Exports write-up, I'd mentioned that it's a common bad idea in Christmas horror movies to make Santa Claus the killer. In discussing 1984's Silent Night, Deadly Night (probably the most recognized title from the Killer Santa file) that deserves some clarification. Primarily, I feel the concept is opportunistic and cheap. 

It's easy to subvert a totem of innocence. Carrying Christmas into the slasher movie calendar sweepstakes of Friday the 13th and Halloween seemed the obvious next move. The difference is that turning Santa Claus evil demands meaning but is by default disingenuous. At worst, its entailment of childhood corruption is played as a cheeky joke. Yet without a basis of credible traumatic experience (as when Ice Cube corrupts nursery rhymes to express stolen innocence in his "Gangsta's Fairytale" raps), it comes across as a gag played at kids' expense. Who was ever scared of Santa Claus?

Everything in Silent Night, Deadly Night falls predictably in line. It doesn't much think or care about its meaning, only passing as entertainment for the undemanding. 

Upon visiting him in an institute, young Billy's grandfather breaks from a catatonic state to warn that Santa Claus will punish the naughty. Driving back home with his parents, Billy observes, wide-eyed and frightened, as the car is stopped by a thief dressed in Santa gear who murders his father, and strips and murders his mother. By the age of 18, Billy (Robert Brian Wilson) reaches some level of stability, even finding work at a department store under the employ of Anthony Michael Hall's dad in Weird Science (Britt Leach). It's when he's asked to play store Santa that his Christmas trigger goes off, and people will be killed. 

Partially artistically salvaged in its edit and score, which bring some personalized idiosyncrasy to dead body and teamwork montages, the bulk of Silent Night, Deadly Night is creatively drained. Billy isn't a tragic outsider (like Jason Voorhees, Frankenstein's monster and others) because he's an inevitability of fate rather than an ugly product of the status quo. Fatalism and nihilism are the only messages here. Billy isn't allowed even the option to cope with his trauma. His tragedy must make him a remorseless killer, because apparently the world order (unlike the best teen slashers) does not believe in youth survival and empowerment. In Silent Night, Deadly Night, it isn't just the usual protocol where sex is punished. All joy is punished. Director Charles E. Sellier must have felt some remorse for this, as he quickly abandoned the slasher genre for a lucrative career producing Bible films. 

Which is fine because Silent Night, Deadly Night has only the most cynical understanding of slasher movies anyway. Sorry folks. This one just seems hateful.

Silent Night, Deadly Night and the Meaning of Christmas

Christmas sucks because it will cause those traumatized by the holiday to kill you. 

Tomorrow: Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2

Day 7. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Rare Exports (2010) takes an overused bad idea (the Christmas movie where Santa Claus is a killer) and transforms it into a good one. It's not explicitly a horror film, but fits the mould of the literary "weird tale." It hints at intriguing big concepts that are never indulged, while the actual narrative is pared down, efficient and odd.

Near the beginning of the movie, pre-teen Pietari (Onni Tommila) is teased by his friend Juuso (Ilmari Jarvenpa) for believing in Santa. There's an American scientific excavation happening near the two kids' Finland village. It's to retrieve something that's been buried for centuries within Korvatunturi Mountain. Pietari is convinced it's to unearth the body of Santa Claus. He reads about the true Santa Claus later that night, and discovers that he wasn't a kind man at all. He punished the naughty without rewarding the nice. 

Indeed, after the corpse is excavated, the other children of the village are stolen in their sleep, their bodies replaced with life-size dolls. I guess that makes Santa like a malevolent Tooth Fairy who ain't gonna settle for one stupid tooth. 

Filmmaker Jalmari Helander, who expanded the story from his popular online short films, creates a fascinating inversion of the Santa Claus Lie. It's not an issue whether Santa Claus exists. It's whether he's even on your side. The people of this village don't have much beyond each other. The men work as reindeer-herders, and their business suffers drastically from the environmental mess caused by the scientists. They don't have wives, because who can afford such luxuries, and because this is also a cheeky statement on men and war. There isn't a single female in this entire film. Pietari leaves behind childish things, joins the battle against an elderly army of frontally nude Santa's Helpers, and becomes a man. It's the only way his father (played by Onni's real-life dad, Jorma Tomilla) will stop looking at him with such disappointment. 

(This movie probably has the most running-crowd-of-old-men-nudity since EuroTrip, which is not a value judgement. I just haven't yet heard that point made by Leonard Maltin or other film historians.) 

On its simple bizarre level, Rare Exports plays as shallow, albeit clever, fun. On another, it's about Finland reclaiming the Santa Claus myth from popular co-option, a commentary on American Imperialism that sneakily switches the object of parody from hordes of interchangeable commercialized Santas to torturing Gitmo heroes. 

A hockey helmet. Why wasn't this in every Canadian multiplex?

Again, these issues are not addressed to satisfaction, and attentive viewers might like the film to explain itself. It just doesn't care to. It's better and stranger for that, and if you want an alien-action film to force feed messages on global relations, there's always District 9. In the best weird tale tradition, Rare Exports plays as a process of discovery, gradually revealing itself, when most movies have laid out their entire game plan within thirty minutes. Rare Exports gets away with a lot because its tone is off-kilter and funny.

The attraction here is a fantastical enactment of a cultural war on Santa Claus told through the personal prism of a father-son story. It's been described as an '80s Spielberg throwback by people who obviously haven't studied Spielberg. Or possibly Helander actually was trying to counter his dark elements with childhood dreaming and missed that target completely. Figuring out what Rare Exports isn't leads nowhere. Take it for what it is: an alternative Christmas ornament for those who wish holiday entertainment would dare to be less traditional.

The Meaning of Christmas

This movie is about a literal War on Christmas, which is something certain Republican politicians complain about, but I think they mean it in a more figurative sense.  

Rare Exports wants to give Finland its props for Santa Claus, and in a way it deserves them. In Finnish folklore, the fell of Korvatunturi is the home of Father Christmas. From high up on it, he can hear all the children of the world. Letters sent to his listed postal code are actually taken to Finland's Santa Claus amusement park called Santa Claus Village. That calls his true existence into question, but does mean that Finland is really hardcore about its Santa Claus myth. 

Tomorrow: Prancer