Review #363: Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (1989)
Twelve More Slays of Christmas #5 - Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (1989)
I watched both of the two previous Silent Night, Deadly Night movies for the first time last year, and to put it mildly I was... unimpressed, particularly with the second. So I hope I'm not giving too much of a spoiler for this review, but when I put on the third entry in this series, my extremely low expectations were greatly exceeded! Does that mean this movie is "good"? I don't know! Let's find out together.
(Note: While writing this review I just had to spend like five minutes cross-referencing a few things because something about this movie is confusing me. I'll explain what I mean in a moment.)
A brief recap of the previous two films: a boy named Billy witnesses a man in a Santa Claus costume rape his mother and murder both of his parents. Billy and his little brother Ricky get put in an orphanage, where Billy is disciplined for witnessing further sexual activity, and he develops a traumatic response to both sex and Christmastime. When he grows up he gets a job where they force him to dress up like Santa, some inappropriate stuff goes on in the back room during a work party, and bing bang boom he goes on a murder spree before he is gunned down in front of his little brother and all of the other children at the orphanage (surely creating a new generation of kids with traumatic memories of Christmas). The second movie ostensibly follows Ricky, who I guess is also traumatized by Christmas, so he also goes on a killing spree or something? I don't know man, the second movie was like 80% just footage of the first movie and none of it made sense. Go read my review for that one if you want more details.
Anyway, the third movie follows a girl named Laura, who was blinded in a plane crash that killed her parents and it seems she is starting to develop psychic powers. After the events of the previous films, a local doctor- Dr. Newbury- has been studying the comatose Ricky, his brain having been completely reconstructed after he was shot in the chest in the previous movie, and Dr. Newbury is using sleep therapy to try and get Laura to psychically communicate with Ricky through her dreams. (Now, I need to chime in here, because I was VERY confused about this detail: The entire movie they refer to this previously-fatally-shot man as Ricky, the main character of the second film. However, they repeatedly show footage of him being shot, and ALL of the footage they show of his past are clips from the FIRST movie. The problem being, Ricky wasn't shot in the first movie, Billy was. They are repeatedly conflating details of the two previous movies and apparently nobody during production ever noticed. Anyway...) Laura does manage to communicate with Ricky, but in doing so imprints some kind of a psychic link between them- and since it's Christmas Eve, this link manages to rouse Ricky from his coma, and he sets out to follow Laura to her grandma's house, leaving a trail of carnage in his wake.
So, the clear and obvious gaff aside, I was shocked at how much I enjoyed this movie. Yes the plot is kind of dumb and none of it really makes sense, but I'm amazed at how they managed to tie this movie (which, frankly, should have nothing to do with the last two films) in with the continuing story. The characters are all pretty well-realized, it really feels like everyone in here has more going on than just the words on the page, and the plotting is pretty steady and interesting throughout the film. I would never call this movie great, but there's way more to like in here than I expected!
It does need to be said though: this is 100% just a Halloween or Friday the 13th movie, painted over to look like a Christmas movie. The villain of Ricky is a silent, indefatigable slasher that just walks in a straight line to his target and breaks through doors when he gets to them. It almost literally feels like they just remade 1988's Friday the 13th: The New Blood (the one where Jason squares off against a girl with psychic powers) and set it at Christmastime- the plot isn't identical, but once you notice the similarities it's kind of impossible to ignore them. Maybe there is a discussion to be had about how this movie is just repeating the tropes and cliches of the popular films of the time, but whatever. I don't really care enough about this to get too far into all of that, I just need to point it out because otherwise I thought this movie was pretty good and so it's disappointing to realize the plot is a copy/paste of several other films that were already out.
Anywho, this movie was a breath of fresh air, but the bar was set pretty low. Watch it if you can't find anything better.
Overall Rating: 7/10 Unattended Scalpels on the Receptionist's Desk
Child Prodigy: The final script credit of this film is credited to Carlos Laszlo, despite Carlos Laszlo being an infant at the time the movie released. This is because it was actually written by his father, Max Weiner, who needed a pen name under which to do further rewrites and revisions, so he used the name of his then-newborn son.
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