1984's Silent Night, Deadly Night isn't a great slasher movie, but it must have done something right: it beat out bona-fide classic Nightmare on Elm Street at the box office when they released on the same date, got four sequels (I only got to the second film, and that was bad enough to turn me off the franchise), provided the internet with an early meme (Garbage day!)... and eighteen years later, it got a cheap Canadian 'remake' of sorts.
Although calling it even a loose remake might be pushing it - the only scene I recognized from the original is a kill by antlers (the victim of which was OG scream queen Linnea Quigley). I haven't watched the original in more than twenty years, but looking it up they only share a very basic premise (Killer Santa rampages through town) and a couple other scenes that function more as nods than anything else. And yes, the garbage day line from part two also gets referenced.
This 2012 edition focuses more on the cops - mainly deputy Aubrey Bradmoore (Jaime King), an insecure but earnest second-generation police deputy - as they try and track down a mysterious, murderous psycho in a Santa suit who's going around punishing anyone who breaches his personal ethics code.
This all happens during the anual Santa parade, in which people from all around come over donning their best jolly Coca-Cola-inspired getup. The heavy emphasis on the police side of things is slightly distinctive, but both the cop drama and the investigation is murky and uninspired - basically, it's a bunch of red herrings passing for plot development until the mystery "solves" itself.
As for the slasher side of things, it's not very good either; Most of the victims are either portrayed as spectacular douchebags or sleazy sex workers - the only sympathetic one (at least until very late in the game) is a stripper who gets the cruelest and closest to inspired kill in the movie. She's also chased across half the town topless. It's pretty tasteless, but I have to say it's about the only time the movie shows a pulse.
What does that leave us with, then? Well, not much. Director Steven C. Miller (whose new werewolf movie I'm looking forwards to, giving me an excuse to watch this) does well by the material - it's a slick, slightly impersonal movie, and a little too reliant on the du jour desaturated '10s horror palette - but it looks a lot better than most VoD horror, and the production allows for a few expansive scenes with a lot of extras. The kills, as alluded to before, are pretty mediocre, but there's at least a couple good gore effects.
The veneer of competence on the visuals pushes to the fore the ugly emptiness in Jayson Rothwell's script, which keeps bringing up the 'dark side of Christmas' without really saying anything about it; Repeatedly mentioning a theme doesn't make it relevant to your story. The killer is a cypher until the very end, his code for killing very suspect - the only thing he's got going is a pretty cool mask and a couple of scenes with a flamethrower (including one pretty impressive stunt where he fires it close to an extra).
The Santa parade element is also underused; it provides a scene that's almost indistinguishable from any other there's-a-killer-at-a-parade bit (there's quite a few of those!) without indulging in the sort of madness that could make this movie memorable - say, getting a few innocent Santas gunned down by panicked cops, or Christmas-sweatered families trampled to death in the ensuing panic.
There's a little humour thrown in, mostly taken on by a tough-talking sheriff (played by Malcolm McDowell in full ham mode - his slumming goes a lot further back than I realised) who thinks he's the hero in a Clint Eastwood movie. It's marginally amusing. Other than that, I don't know what to tell you; It's a slightly off-putting but well-made nothing of a slasher movie. Better than the original, I think -it's been a while- but that's not a high bar to clear, and it's not enough to make this worthwhile unless you're a franchise completist.
Except: this is another one of those movies Amazon's subtitled with their high-tech AI thingamajig, and there were a couple of misfires which were funnier than the film's actual jokes. Case in point: When a person gets killed off-screen, his unintelligible last word is subtitled as "Triforce!"
Zelda fans represent.
 |
| Hey, turns out AI is good for a laugh, at least! |
No comments:
Post a Comment