Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) Dir: Charles E. Sellier Jr.
- Ridley Coote
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
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I like a slasher, even the cheesy ones, but I must confess, I was not all that keen on watching this Eighties Christmas horror film, directed by Charles E. Sellier Jr. - it seemed like it would be just another of the inevitably bad Christmas horrors that get churned out every year. My only real motivation for watching this film was because I saw the trailer for the remake, and it caught my eye.
Unfortunately, this one really didn't impress me much. The special effects were decent enough, I suppose, but didn't go far enough in some aspects - I always feel that if your film is going for the silly slasher style, you should go all-in on it. This did not. It did, however, feature a lot of random and needlessly nudity - it all felt a little misogynistic, certainly to my modern eyes.
The story was very silly in terms of its execution, but it's absurdity did at least make it somewhat entertaining, if a little uncreative. The concept of someone seeing something bad growing up to be a evil killer is not exactly a new idea in cinema, and this film offered up little else to justify its own existence. Naked women and a bloody axe murderer do not make a film good, and a good film, this was not.
Robert Brian Wilson gave an unimpressive, dull depiction of the film's antagonist, and never really felt like a killer I could take seriously. There was also a montage sequence in which his acting was woeful, which did not help his cause. The only other actors worth mentioning were the pair of Lilyan Chauvin and Gilmer McCormick, and that was mainly due to the substantial nature of their roles, rather than the quality of their performances.
Overall, I thought this was a tropy and dreary Christmas horror, which failed to either impress or standout from the ever-growing crowd of seasonal horror films. Films like this should at least try to do something unique, and this one definitely did not do that. On the contrary, this was as forgettable and samey as it gets. I can't say it has inspired me to watch the remake anytime soon either.
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