Brilliant!  But first…

Ho ho hell, everybody!  Silent Night, Deadly Night caused a whole lot of controversy on account of its having a guy dressed like Santa Clause going around killing people.  It’s an absolute masterpiece that delivers on all of its promises, one of the few movies where, as you’re watching and you say, “get ‘im, yeah, get ‘im!”, he actually “gets ‘im.”  In that one we got to see a topless woman get impaled on a pair of antlers, a boy get decapitated while sledding down a hill and a woman get shot with an arrow.

So does the sequel live up to the first one?  That’s a tough question to answer.  As you can tell by the grade, I enjoyed the movie.  I would have given it four crosses but I think the first problem is the most glaringly obvious one.  Roughly 35 minutes of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 are recycled scenes from the first Silent Night, Deadly Night.  There clearly must be some sort of rule when it comes to giving director Lee Harry 100% of the directing credit when he only directed 55% of the movie.

And there is no second problem.  The rest of the film is totally awesome.  My friends and I have all gotten a hearty laugh from the classic clip of Ricky (Eric Freeman) walking around a happy suburban neighborhood casually dusting off its inhabitants with a revolver and hamming it up with over the top, maniacal laughter eventually leading to his bizarre exclamation of “GARBAGE DAY!!!”  Just like in this video:

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 is mostly told in flashback until the epic final scene.  The movie begins with an adult Ricky talking to his 13th shrink, Dr. Henry Bloom (James Newman), who speaks in a stern, authoritative manner – the type which we anticipate will result in his death – as he tries to suss Ricky’s life story.  Ricky precedes to tell the events, including the 35 minutes (and best scenes from) the first Silent Night, Deadly Night, culminating in little kid Ricky foreshadowing the events of the sequel by uttering, “naughty.”  Ricky’s own story is no less of a bloodbath, in which he saves a woman from a rapist by running him over several times and impales a bully with an umbrella.

I must say the scene where Ricky saves the woman from the rapist is a hoot.  The rapist appears to be her boyfriend who gets too pushy when trying to get his gal to put out and the situation turns into an attempted rape.  The girl fights back and the guy gets up and leaves, which should have been the end of it.  But instead Ricky gets in the guy’s car with the keys still in the ignition and runs him down, rolling back and forth over his corpse.  They even insert a shot of his bloody, twitching arm.  Instead of being frightened for having witnessed a homicide, the woman thanks Ricky.  Wow.

Regardless of his murdering a few people, Ricky keeps it together enough to get a girlfriend.  Even then he exhibits signs of insanity, particularly in the awesome movie theater scene, where the theater is showing a movie about a killer Santa!  I’m not going to say anything else about the rest of the movie because it’s a total riot.  If you’ve seen the entire “garbage day” clip, then you know how the girlfriend situation turns out but the rest of the movie is epic and needs to be seen.  There you go; you have my recommendation.