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Wednesday, October 11, 2023

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2

 


Watched December 23, 2022

1987
Director: Lee Harry
Starring: Eric Freeman (Ricky), Elizabeth Kaitan (Jennifer),  Darrel Guilbeau


It's awful! Garbage day indeed.

Ricky (Eric Freeman) is a dead eyed dude in a white room where a psychiatrist comes to interview him and record it on a reel to reel. Ricky tells the story of Silent Night, Deadly Night the movie. Billy is Ricky's older brother who witnessed Santa kill his parents. Ricky was a baby at the time but he seems to have all of Billy's memories. We re-watch Santa killing the family when they stop their car to help him. When Billy acts out about Santa fear he is punished by Mother Superior, the nun at the orphanage where both boys ended up after the murders of their parents. Billy sees two adults, who are supposed to be teen orphans according to the credits, having sex. Mother Superior belts them and Billy too. The younger, nicer nun had told Billy to go outside to play. Mother Superior gives a speech about what the older orphans did was naughty so they must be punished.
 
 It keeps cutting back to Ricky in the white room, it's awful. Then Ricky tells that Billy got hired at the toy store. Around Christmas time, they made young Billy be Santa. At the Christmas Eve party at the toy store, Billy sees a co-worker sexually assaulting another co-worker. He rescues the woman, strangles the man but then kills the woman too. Billy kills the husband and wife toy store owners too. He's on full naughty Santa kill rampage. We get a 'best of' of all the kills from the first movie. Billy kills a couple that were about the have sex, he hangs the woman on a rack of antlers, then kills the dude. He kills some bullies who were night sledding. The cops are now on Billy's tail, but since he's dressed as Santa they keep running into other people dressed as Santa. They think Billy is headed for the orphanage, it's Christmas morning now. At first a deaf Santa shows up and is killed by a cop, but it's not Billy. Then Billy does show up and kills that cop in the basement. Billy makes it into the building but is shot by the detective before he can kill Mother Superior in front of all the kids. 
 
Now that's we've watched the best of the first movie, we get back to Ricky. After Billy died, Ricky was adopted and it was mostly good. He freaked out at some nuns, but his adoptive parents were trying to make it work.Then his adopted dad died, he's supposed to be 15 at this point but he is played by Darrel Guilbeau who was 25 at the time. 
 
While wandering the woods, Ricky sees a picnicking couple. The get romantic, but the woman stops it stating that the guy is getting too aggressive. The guy gets the point, stops and goes over to his jeep, he turns around to suddenly see Ricky in the driver's seat. Ricky drives over the guy about 6 times. 
 
Later Ricky gets a job cleaning up at a restaurant, while taking out the trash he notices a guy beating up another guy, loan shark style. Ricky takes the extorter and stabs him with a closed umbrella, which he then opens. The rain starts to wash the blood away.
 
The doctor interviewer shows Ricky a photo/headshot of a woman and asks "What about her?" "Jennifer was my love" Ricky replies. It shows how Ricky met Jennifer (Elizabeth Kaitan), she ran her car into his motorcycle. They said nothing to each other but she got on the back of his motorcycle and they were dating. They have sex, holding each other and not moving at all. At a movie date, some heckler is making Ricky nuts. He leaves Jennifer seated, but the she is accosted by her ex-boyfriend, Chip who wants to get back together with her. She's not interested. Ricky kills the popcorn heckler and his embarrassed friend. 
 
Taking a suburban neighborhood walk, Jennifer and Ricky run into Chip, who's car has broken down. Ricky gets mad and electrocutes Chip with a car something. Jennifer tries to stop him, but he strangles her with a car antenna. Ricky is on a tear now. He grabs a gun from Chip? He walks the neighborhood in broad daylight, and the infamous garbage day scene happens here. No real context, I guess it could be that Ricky is taking out the garbage but he shoots someone taking out their garbage for now apparent reason. The cops do try to stop him, but he gets away? He steals a Santa suit from a Salvation army bell ringer. Goes to the 666 address that is Mother Superior's house. The younger nun is back in the mix. Mother Superior is wheelchair bound now and apparently had a stroke, but also has bunch of facial boils. Ricky attacks her, she falls down the stairs. The cops shoot Ricky and he falls out a window. The End.  

No fun.

Ricky is a bad actor there's no arc to his character. Ricky is bad, he does bad things and dies. He's killed a lot of people but doesn't care or get punished himself. The Santa trauma is still hard to explain especially for Ricky over Billy. There isn't a naughty/nice determination to killing. I do not recommend, this movie bummed me out a lot. The garbage day clip is it's own thing because even within the context of the movie it's nuts. I have seen the first one, and I knew this one had a lot of clips from the first movie, or most of the the footage from the first movie. It takes a lot of what is fun in a horror movie and cuts it out, it thinks you just want to see the kills but you need to have context to have the kills be interesting. It doesn't work and is a chore.

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