Silent Night Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out!
After the twisted masterpiece that was the original and the mishmash of Part 2, comes this third chapter in the saga of the Chapman / Caldwell brothers, formerly orphans now grown up to be serial killers who do their dirty work at Christmastime in a Santa suit. The surviving brother Ricky (now played by House Of 1000 Corpses star Bill Moseley, replacing the near-epic campy theatrics of Eric Freeman) is in a deep coma after being blown away previously and has had his brain reconstructed and contained in a plexiglass dome by a New Age doctor (Richard Beymer of Twin Peaks and West Side Story fame), who is now using a blind psychic girl to enter his mind and hopefully revive him. Now, while this admittedly eccentric doctor is obviously looking to better humanity, why he would try to apply his skills to a psychotic killer as opposed to someone who’s at least a decent person is beyond me, which leads to his character trying to “protect” Ricky for the rest of the film. The psychic soon taps into his memories (footage from the first film) and eventually Ricky wakes up to continue his killing spree on Christmas Eve, tracking the psychic to where she’s spending Christmas with her family. In the key role of the psychic, Samantha Scully is at times the saving grace of the whole enterprise: beautiful and charismatic, she makes the viewer at least somewhat care for her, which is a shame the actress went on to have to have a smaller resume in films than yours truly. Of course, the ridiculous absurdity of the whole affair kicks in quickly, as Ricky kills a couple of people and lumbers out of the hospital in his johnnycoat, catatonic and with his brain exposed under the plexiglass(!), and proceeds to hitchhike out to the home of his intended target’s grandma (and of course no one takes notice of his gruesome appearance), and even somehow miraculously arrives there before the main characters do. The biggest issue here is perhaps just how DULL the whole affair is, as there’s only so much suspense in watching a blind girl sitting in the house waiting for the killer to show up, and even then not being aware of his presence due to her handicap (at least Part 2 had the legendary “Garbage Day!” killing spree). The rest of the cast includes Eric DaRe (Leo from Twin Peaks) as the idiot rock star-looking brother (who doesn’t even seem alarmed when they arrive at the house and Grandma is nowhere to be found), Laura Herring (from The Punisher and Mulholland Drive) as his sexy girlfriend who at least can be counted on to give us a nude scene in the bathtub, and Robert (ISpy) Culp as the veteran cop who drives with Beymer to Grandma’s house to try and stop Ricky, even as we’re subjected to their conversation during the trip, which has to qualify as some of the most inane banter ever written. Reportedly director Monte Hellman threw out the original script and rewrote it himself, with little benefit to the finished product (which makes one wonder just how bad the original script was). The climax, which features the frail Ricky showing amazing athletic agility and brushing off shotgun blasts in a way that would give Jason and Michael pause, is utterly horrid, and the final confrontation in a dark, cramped basement (where two characters actually seem to come back from the dead), has all the excitement of an Olympic curling competition, following up with the paramedics feverishly trying to save the killer’s life while barely checking on the dead and / or wounded victims, setting up for a sequel that thankfully would never happen (though the series would continue). Overall, a horror film so bad it makes Silent Night 2 seem good, and that’s saying a lot…
4/10