Review #318: Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2

The Twelve Slays of Christmas #4 - Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987)

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I'm going to be perfectly honest: the entire reason I watched this movie (and, by extension, the first one) was because I wanted to get some context for the infamous "Garbage Day!" scene that's been circulating on the internet for years and years. After having watched the entire movie I can cut to the chase and say: that scene isn't any less random in-context (in fact the rest of that scene is even MORE random, in the best and worst ways) and as great as that terrible scene might be, it's not worth watching this entire movie to get it.

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 is barely even a movie, and I have a strong suspicion that it went through some extensive rewrites and reshoots and reimaginings before we got what we got. It (ostensibly) follows Ricky, the young brother from the first movie, who is grown up and has been arrested and is being interviewed by a psychiatrist to find out why he is (spoilers) evil. But in order to explain why he is the way he is, apparently Ricky needs to recount the entire previous movie (made up of a whopping FORTY MINUTES of footage we've already scene!) and then follow it up with a bunch of disconnected scenes showing Ricky's various kills over the following few years, leading up to the rampage that got him locked up. Then in the last few minutes of the film, Ricky breaks out of prison (offscreen of course) and sets out to kill the Mother Superior of the first movie, and then he gets gunned down and the movie ends.

I really need to stress the fact that they used FORTY MINUTES of footage from the previous film- basically the entire movie is shown on-screen, trimmed down only minimally- and it's all presented to show us why Ricky is the way that he is, except it doesn't do that. It shows us why BILLY was the way that he was. Ricky did not suffer the same trauma, he did not receive the same punishments, he in no way was shaped by Billy's experiences in the same way that Billy was, and Billy's backstory is not an explanation for why Ricky turned out the way that he did. Ricky is a lazily-written and poorly-acted villain that has basically no motivation for what he does; someone is mean to him or acts in a way he doesn't like, so he kills them. That's basically it. There's a couple scenes where they imply that he's triggered by the color red and/or red clothing (because he has so much trauma attached to Santa Claus) but that gets dropped almost immediately in favor of him wanting to "punish" people who are "naughty" (despite the filmmakers not doing the legwork to justify this motivation for Ricky).

This movie is a MESS (and I've just now seen something in the IMDB trivia that explains this; I'll get to that in a bit) and I can really tell that nobody knew what exactly they were making when this film was being shot. They use three different actors to play Ricky at varying ages, including one that's only three years younger than "adult" Ricky, and when we see this "teenage" Ricky, it's during a scene that feels like it has no business being in this film. When we eventually see Mother Superior, she's clearly been made up to have half of her face all scarred or burned, as if there was some violent event that happened to her; such an event does not occur in the film. The psychiatrist interviewing Ricky is implied to have some sort of relevant backstory (there's a pointed moment where he dries his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief as if the handkerchief is supposed to be noteworthy, but it isn't) but then he gets killed and it goes nowhere. The movie then makes a specific point of saying that Ricky won't be able to kill Mother Superior because he has no way of knowing where she is, and then the immediate next scene is him calling her on the phone. I just can't overstate how disjointed and incomplete this movie feels.

That being said, the "Garbage Day!" scene is hilarious and bonkers and had me laughing harder than I've laughed in a long time. (Also, there's a bit where Ricky shoots a guy driving a car, and the car flips over- narrowly missing the stuntman standing in the street by mere inches. I cannot imagine that stunt went as planned, but I assume since nobody died they went ahead and threw it into the film anyway.)

Now, looking at the IMDB trivia, it seems I've found an explanation for how wacky and bizarre this storytelling is. Apparently, the producers wanted to essentially re-cut the previous film after-the-fact and add in some scenes showing that the story was being told by a mental patient, so that the movie would seem like the ravings of a lunatic instead of a straightforward story. (I don't know if this has anything to do with the public backlash against the previous film for portraying Santa Claus, a beloved figure, as a homicidal maniac. But it could have.) Instead of recutting the first film, though, they ended up writing a handful of vignettes for this mental patient, and then reworking those vignettes into a sequel instead (renaming the mental patient as Ricky, the younger brother from the first movie- though they didn't change his last name, so the last names are different between the two films). However, they didn't have enough material to reach 90 minutes, so they just tossed in a bunch of old footage in there (along with ten minutes of credits) to make up the difference.

So, yeah. This movie really sucks. Do yourself a favor and just watch the "Garbage Day!" sequence and call it a day. Alternatively, if you haven't seen the first movie, you can watch this one and it'll be like watching two movies in one. (Well, one and a half.)

Overall Rating: 2/10 Brightly-Lit Movie Theaters

The Credits Go On: I mentioned that the film's original release had ten minutes of credits; this was partly due to the fact that, because of the extensive use of footage from the first movie (which, to reiterate, covered every single scene and nearly every single character), the credits needed to include the entire cast and crew of the first movie.