Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2
One can say what they will about Troll 2 and similar bad films, but after watching Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2, you can at least say that those movies tried in some way to have an original story throughout the entire film. Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 however, the first 45 minutes or so consists of clips of the first Silent Night Deadly Night film. So in all actuality, you could just skip the first SNDN movie and just rent this one if you can find it. The first one is better paced when smooshed into 45 minutes anyway.
Billy’s little brother Ricky is all grown up and is in prison talking to a psychiatrist. It is Christmas Eve and he has decided to tell the umpteenth psychiatrist that has visited him the story of his life, including bits that weren’t in his files. He starts off with the murder of his parents – an event that happened when he had to have been no more than 9 months old, and big brother Billy’s experiences at the Catholic orphanage as well as his killing spree. Somehow Ricky was even privy to private conversations that were not within earshot of Billy.
Then we finally get to Ricky’s childhood. The orphanage was shut down after Billy’s killing spree, and all the children were adopted out. Does it really take a horrific set of murders, two of which the children were present for, to get orphans adopted? Sister Margaret made sure that Ricky was adopted out to a non-Christmas-celebrating couple (they never really say what religion this couple was). Everything is okay for Ricky other than he freaks out when he either sees nuns or the color red. While the couple still doesn’t get him therapy, they do spend more time with him, which is nice. But his adoptive father dies when Ricky is about 15, and it kind of goes downhill from there. His adoptive mother is sad, Ricky is sad. He goes on frequent solitary walks, and comes across a man in a Red Jeep who is trying to force himself on a girl in a field. Ricky kills him, and unlike the woman in the first movie, this lady thanks him for killing her attacker.
When Ricky turns 18, he becomes a buff guy in his mid-20s. He has rage issues, even more so when it involves the color red. He kills a bookie, then an annoying guy in the movie theater (where, haha, the movie showing is Silent Night Deadly Night – choke on the meta, bitches!) He meets a girl, but it doesn’t turn out well once her ex-boyfriend comes around. His eventual killing spree basically involves walking around a neighborhood and shooting innocent people, such as a guy who is just taking out his trash.
The guy who plays Ricky, Eric Freeman is the worst actor ever. I think he was hired because the makers of this film confused his eyebrow gymnastics with acting, and possibly his willingness to appear naked on camera as a second reason. During his killing spree, I kept thinking that back in the day, this would make a really good character that Bruce McCulloch could’ve played on Kids in the Hall. It was his type of deranged, over-the-top madness that was hilarious. I don’t how he’s looking now in his middle-age, but if the Kids in the Hall are still going to make another movie, maybe they should just remake this one.
Another weird thing about both movies is that while they show both Billy and Ricky as various ages, most of the actors look nothing alike. I guess having actors who at least look alike is also a luxury when you make these sorts of films.
I’m not sure whether I should tag these entries under “Catholic Horror”. Ricky blames Mother Superior from the orphanage as the cause for him and his brother snapping. While I can’t deny that she probably hurt these boys more than helped, I think Ricky may be a bit off, at least with his case – but if he’s just out to avenge his brother, then he’s right. Both these movies reek of Catholic guilt and the virgin/whore complex when it comes to the females that get involved or even just cross paths with Billy and Ricky.
There are at least two other Silent Night Deadly Night sequels that I know of. One was directed by Monte Hellman, and I’m a little sad that my boyfriend and I didn’t buy the VHS copy when our local video store was selling it off a few months ago. And I believe another was directed by Brian Yuzna. I’d like to assume that both of these sequels are better than the first two movies, but that’s a little dangerous.
Silent Night Deadly Night
This past Saturday night I got back at my boyfriend for Troll and Troll 2 with Silent Night Deadly Night and Silent Night Deadly Night 2. Sadly though, I think my boyfriend liked these movies, or was at least unfazed by them. He has a really sunny disposition. Having seen both of these movies a couple of years ago, I mostly sat and knitted through them while watching.
Silent Night Deadly Night starts with a family visiting their Grandpa who resides in a mental institution in Utah, which should tell you something right there. Grandpa is mostly catatonic, but when Mom and Dad leave the room to speak with the doctor and oldest son Billy is left alone with Grandpa, he snaps out of it and warns Billy that if he has been bad, Santa Claus will punish him tonight instead of bringing him presents, and that he better run if he sees Santa. Poor kid is reasonably frightened. On the way home, he questions his parents about Santa Claus’ motives, and scolds his mom when she calls Grandpa a “fool”. It is then and there they spot a guy in a Santa suit on the side of the road with a broken down station wagon. Santa approaches the car, and tries to steal it. The dad tries to drive off, but is shot. The mom is dragged out the car, sort of sexually assaulted, and killed. Billy has run off into the bushes to hide, and his baby brother Ricky I guess is still in the car. The guy in the Santa suit just robbed a convenience store and killed a clerk.
The movie jumps 3 years later to Christmas time at a Catholic orphanage, where Billy and Ricky now reside. Billy is about 10 years old and has a bit of a mullet now and kind of looks like that kid from A Christmas Story who later became a porn star (not Ralphie, his friend who got his tongue stuck on a freezing flagpole…no pun intended). His class is drawing Christmas drawings, and he seems to have drawn one where Santa is getting killed. He is sent to Mother Superior, who looks to be in extreme denial over how sad and troubled this boy may be, since Sister Margaret tells him that his aversion to Santa Claus gets worse each passing Christmas. He is sent to his room, but Sister Margaret allows him to come out and play with the other children. She goes on, and Billy hears noises – it’s the obligatory naked teens having sex scene. He looks through the key hole of their room and has a flashback to his mom being killed. He doesn’t hear Mother Superior coming up behind him. She shoves him out of the way, busts into the room, and beats the teens with a belt. She later grills Billy about what he saw, and if he understood what they were doing, and he says no. Then he gets beaten with a paddle. Mother Superior also decides that this will be the year that he will get over his fear of Santa Claus. She drags Billy to sit in his lap when Santa Claus comes to visit the orphanage on Christmas Day. Billy serves Santa an uppercut. It’s pretty impressive. He then runs to his room and cowers in the corner and cries about not wanting to be punished. Seriously, it’s hard not to feel sorry for this kid, especially since they’re not being subtle about all the complexes he’s getting courtesy of Mother Superior.
Jump forward again to 7 or 8 years later. Billy is now 18 and Mother Superior has gotten him a job at a local toy store. Billy is now somehow blond, buff, and vaguely both River Phoenix-ish looking and in his mid-20s. Everything is cool for awhile in montage land, despite the fact that he is making the mistake of having a crush on a co-worker, then Christmastime rolls around and Billy is a crankypants. He’s not doing such a good job as a stockboy anymore. But then again, working retail during Christmas sucks no matter what sort of store you’re working for. Or maybe, he had to listen to the same Christmas songs over and over again over the loudspeakers and two of those songs were that “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time” by Paul McCartney and “Hey Santa” by The Bangles – I know that made me crankier the last time I worked in retail over the holidays. Then the regular guy who dons the Santa suit calls in sick and the store owner decides that Billy would be a good Santa. Raise your hand if you think this is a good idea and have no idea where this film is going.
If you know where this is going, well, the only odd thing I can point out is that when Linnea Quigley’s obligatory horny teen character gets up to answer the door, she is topless and puts on a pair of shorts that is maybe two notches below a pair of Daisy Dukes on the short-meter, over a pair of underwear. Seriously, why bother if you’re not going to put a shirt on? And if there is snow outside, it’s too fucking cold to wear anything that revealing or to answer the door topless, even for a minute. That and the soundtrack her boyfriend decides to put on for their makeout/sex time is yacht rock Christmas music. I’d ask who would get turned on by that music, but I don’t want to know the answer.
But yeah, murder spree, of course. The whole movie begs the question, “What would’ve happened if Billy and Ricky were placed with a nice Jewish or Jehovah’s Witness family?” or, “What if they had gotten therapy, or at least were hugged every once in awhile?” or, “Seriously, I’d be grateful if some guy beat up or killed some other guy that was trying to rape me.”
The first time I saw this movie, my general reaction was, “it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.” This time though, I actually found it more sad than anything. This isn’t exactly a fun movie, not even in a “so bad it’s good” sort of way, since you’re basically seeing how a mean nun fucks up a sad little boy that’s been through some rough times. It’s pretty depressing, actually, sort of in the way that Rob Zombie’s Halloween re-make is also depressing. If you seen the documentary Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, it briefly discusses the controversy around this movie when it came out. The fact that the advertising and the movie itself featured killers in Santa suits angered parents, and protests caused this movie to be removed from theaters for awhile.
If you are in L.A., there is going to be a double-feature movie night with this movie and Black Christmas soon. Check out the Final Girl blog for details. Anchor Bay also just released this movie on remastered DVD last week. But alas, I watched both movies on VHS from the local video store, so I can’t say how the DVD looks. Netflix doesn’t have it yet.
And I just checked Wikipedia. This movie is up for a re-make now too, and may be coming out next year. I really can’t say I’m looking forward to it.
Killer Nun
This review originally appeared at The Bloody Italiana Blog.
I think my period of Catholic horror is over.
The title kind of explains it all, doesn’t it?
Killer Nun is a film about a morphine-addicted nun named Sister Gertrude (Anita Ekberg) who works at a psychiatric hospital. Sister Gertrude is addicted to morphine after having surgery for a brain tumor. The funny thing is, whenever Sister Gertrude shoots up, patients end up dying. She tries to get herself taken off duty and put on observation, but the doctors and Mother Superior (Alida Valli), do not believe her claims of “going crazy.” Either way, Sister Gertrude isn’t the nicest or most caring nun in the world – if this movie were made today, she’d be addicted to Vicodin and be the nun version of Dr. House. She reads to the patients during their dinner time, and what she is reading sounds like a script to a possible future Hostel sequel. Gertrude lets one elderly patient die after the patient pulls out her dentures during dinner, which causes Gertrude to become angry and she smashes the dentures on the floor, scaring the other patients. She then pawns off the patient’s jewelry to score more morphine in the city, where she changes out of her nun’s habit into something way more fashionable, and also picks up a man that she has sex with in a hallway. So you’re probably thinking “does she have a lesbian roommate at the convent who is also a nun and is often nude?” Why yes, yes she does. Her name is Sister Mathilde (Paola Morra). Sister Mathilde loves Sister Gertrude and will do anything to protect her, but it’s never really clear whether they’re having sex or not.
There are murders in the film, but the majority of them aren’t too shocking, except for the one where a patient gets acupuncture needles to the face and eyes and her mouth slit with a scalpel. This is a trashy movie to be sure, what with all the drugs, murders, and horny nuns, but it’s not as extreme as say, an Ilsa film. Five of the last 10-15 minutes of the movie concern the youngest male patient trying to get back up the stairs to get his crutches since Sister Gertrude put them up there until he’ll tell her the truth about why he thinks she killed the other patients. So it can be a pretty slow-moving film at times for a nun slasher-nunsploitation film, which tends to zap the enjoyment a bit.
And yes, it does have a twist ending concerning who the real killer is. But it’s obvious who the real killer is the moment the character is introduced. So it makes the movie a little less fun.
Alucarda
I didn’t set out for some Catholic theme this week or this month. Really. It’s just turned out this way.
Alucarda is a Mexican horror film from the 1970s that takes place at a convent-slash-orphanage for girls in the mid-to-late 1800s. The film opens with the birth of Alucarda –she is born at what looks like an abandoned church or worship site. Her mother has someone take her to the convent, and after looking at some of the scary statues in the room, she dies. Fifteen years later, Justine arrives at the convent after the death of her parents and is Alucarda’s roommate. They become fast and weird friends. On an outing to the woods with the other girls, Alucarda and Justine come across a fortune teller and a pan or Torgo-like man. Of course, Justine’s fortune isn’t good, and the pan-man tells Alucarda that she is very important and sells her a dagger. Upset, the girl run away and come across the same abandoned worship site that unbeknownst to them, was Alucarda’s birthplace. They go inside, profess their love for one another, and nearly make a blood pact. They end up opening a coffin, presumably of Alucarda’s mother, and they become possessed. Since this film did not have a very large budget, possession in this film mainly consists of weird sound design and Alucarda spinning and screaming. It can be a tad confusing at times. They return to the orphanage, and that night form their blood pact, with the help of the pan-man, who appears out of nowhere and makes it rain blood outside. Sister Angelica, the nice nun, sensing something wrong, performs a prayer that makes her face bleed and Justine fall ill. A day or so later, Alucarda and Justine proclaim their love of Satan in front of their class and the other nuns. Justine more or less repents, but Alucarda tries to seduce a priest.
This film is only 74 minutes long, but it doesn’t get really crazy, bloody, or gory until the last 20 minutes. If I remember correctly, it is while the priests and nuns who botched Alucarda and Justine’s discipline for their outburst in class are flogging themselves and each other that they decide that Justine is possessed and needs an exorcism. Yes, they were flogging themselves. Justine’s exorcism isn’t fun to watch, particularly if you’re afraid of being poked or stabbed with sharp objects. The local doctor is called by Sister Angelica and he stops the exorcism and takes Alucarda to his home. He is called back to the convent after Justine’s body goes missing, as well as one of the nuns. After the doctor realizes that he’s not dealing with something that can be cured with medicine, he runs back home because he left his daughter alone with Alucarda. The final minutes of the film is basically a nun and monk massacre.
Juan Lopez Moctezuma, the director of Alucarda, considered this to be a vampire film of sorts, it’s just that Alucarda and Justine did not have to drink blood to be powerful. So this is sort of a vampire-possession film with an odd zombie bit thrown in towards the end. The nuns in this film do not wear traditional black and white habits or robes. They’re almost like mummies, and their skirts always look like they’ve just had their period all over it. And while Alucarda and Justine do have a lesbian relationship, it’s not very exploited either, except for one scene. Of course, like most horror movie lesbians, they do not have a happy ending. Nonetheless, Alucarda is a pretty interesting and somewhat haunting film. While I haven’t seen it in about 5 years, a direct descendent of Alucarda would be Guillermo Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, which is a creepy ghost story that takes place at a boy’s orphanage.
The Sentinel (1977)
The Netflix review for this movie claims that The Sentinel was “Universal Pictures answer to The Exorcist”, but it seems more like a cross between Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, taking the elements of the weird old NYC apartment with weird neighbors and a sketchy boyfriend from the former and the Catholic element from the latter.
Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) is a successful model who has attempted suicide twice in her life – once presumably as a teenager after she caught her elderly father having a threesome with two women and he berated her, and the other after her boyfriend’s wife threw herself off a bridge. She has been stable for the past couple of years and is living with her boyfriend, a lawyer (Chris Sarandon). She doesn’t quite feel up to marrying him just yet, and decides to find an apartment to live in on her own for awhile. After some searching, she finds a completely furnished apartment for $400 a month in Brooklyn on the river – a ridiculously good deal in the 1970s as well as now. A reclusive blind priest lives on the fifth floor and is always faced towards the window “looking” out, more or less giving everyone the creeps. Soon after she moves in, her father dies and she has to go back to Baltimore for his burial. Okay, so her childhood home in Baltimore looks more like an Italian or French villa. Granted, I haven’t been to Baltimore much, but it doesn’t seem likely a house like this is around there. It is at her childhood home that Alison begins to suffer from migraines and flashbacks to the day she first attempted suicide. When she gets back to NYC, she starts to collapse at photo and commercial shoots (Jeff Goldblum plays a photographer she often works with, and Jerry Orbach is a commercial director). She becomes friendly with a neighbor, an eccentric older gentleman (Burgess Meredith) who carries around his pet bird Mortimer and tuxedo cat Jezebel with him wherever he goes. She is charmed by him, but immediately weirded out when she meets her downstairs neighbors, a pair of lesbian dancers played by Sylvia Miles and Beverly D’Angelo. D’Angelo’s character pretty much masturbates in front of her over coffee. At least the people who live below me only eat two tons of McDonald’s food, as far as I know. Unfortunately for me, the McDonald’s smell seeps into the closets in my apartment. Alison is invited to a party in her building the next night, and it turns out to be a party for the cat Jezebel, which means that this film was 30 years ahead of its time. She has a good time, but comes out more weirded out by a senile-seeming woman who lives on the fifth floor across the hall from the recluse priest, and a couple who used to live in the apartment above hers until a year ago. The apartment remains empty. It is that night that Alison’s sleep is disturbed by a constant pacing and metal noise from upstairs. After a second night of that noise, she approaches the realtor who rented the apartment to her, played by Ava Gardner, who informs her that no one other than the Alison and the priest have lived there for over five years. Worried, her boyfriend hires a private detective to look after Alison and to look into the history of the building. After another night of noise, Alison goes to check the apartment above her and is attacked by her father, who she stabs several times. She runs out of the building in her bloody nightgown and collapses on the street, and passersby call an ambulance. The police have been called in now and they’re mighty suspicious of Alison’s lawyer boyfriend, and not too long after the body of his private investigator is found. After Alison is released from the hospital, she goes back to live with her boyfriend, and decides to start attending church again. Her boyfriend decides to take investigating Alison’s building into his own hands, and discovers, among other things, that all the people that Alison said lived in the building or attended the party are long-dead murderers.
This film features a large amount of what were then older actors and up-and-comers. Ava Gardner, Burgess Meredith, Jose Ferrer, John Carradine, and Eli Wallach all have prominent or fairly prominent roles. William Hickey and Jerry Orbach have hair that’s not gray and are in smaller roles. Christopher Walken has maybe two lines as Eli Wallach’s police partner. And I got it because Chris Sarandon and Jeff Goldblum were in it. Chris Sarandon has a stupid mustache though, one of the worst I’ve ever seen. He isn’t quite charismatic as he was in Fright Night, but he’s effectively caring, then later creepy as Alison’s boyfriend.
The Sentinel is a movie that features a long and somewhat slow build-up, and I was never quite sure where it was going. After the weird stuff began to happen at Alison’s apartment, I started to think that the movie was going to be some back-handed metaphor for choosing not to get married. Instead, it becomes what The Exorcist was somewhat intended to be, which is an advertisement for the Catholic Church. This is only sort of bashed into one’s head towards the end of the movie, where the dead tenants and their leper gang fight over Alison and her fate with the blind priest and the priest who takes care of him. Which isn’t to say that this film should be avoided for that reason. It works as an anti-suicide film in general. I’d probably be a bit more excited or less “meh” towards it if I saw it four or so years ago when I wasn’t in the best state of mind. I don’t think I would’ve gone running to join the Catholic Church of course, but it might have calmed me down a little.
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