Review #364: Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990)


Twelve More Slays of Christmas #6 - Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990)

Watch it here on Tubi!

At some point I feel like I need to sit down and have a good long think about "What is a sequel?" I already complained a few days ago about how Black Christmas (2019) is not actually a remake of Black Christmas, and in the same vein this movie really isn't a Silent Night, Deadly Night sequel. I know that there's already a tradition of various franchises having one entry that just randomly veers off in a new direction (Halloween 3: Season of the Witch being the common example) but this one needs to be right up there too.

Unlike the previous entries in this series which are at least somewhat centered around one of two brothers that act out their trauma by murdering people around Christmas, Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation is a movie about Kim, an aspiring journalist who investigates a bizarre death (an apparent self-immolation regarded as a suicide) and ends up getting pulled ("initiated") into a cult of witches intent on sacrificing men to their weird bug-centric religion. I guess the story takes place around Christmastime- one brief scene is at an office Christmas party and a couple small scenes involve minor characters talking about Christmas- but nothing about the plot is specifically motivated by Christmas and none of the characters have any connection to any of the other movies (maybe; see the trivia at the end of the review). So this strikes me as a very odd entry in this series, but considering there's still like four more Silent Night, Deadly Night movies (including TWO of them that claim to be #6) I might some day discover that the first two or three were the outliers.

This movie isn't great. It's not offensively bad or anything, but nothing about it really makes it stand out. The characters are... fine, I guess, and there's a few really interesting bits of cinematography in here (one that caught my eye is a couple spots of the film where Kim has been drugged and is having a sort of seeing-beyond-the-barriers-of-reality moment, and she reaches out and embraces the camera) but aside from that this looks and feels like a made-for-TV movie. I really thought the film was setting up some sort of a twist where Kim realizes at the end that she has been under the effects of a witch spell all along (considering how her life is down in the dumps until she meets with the witches at a picnic, she gets drugged, and then suddenly everything seems to be working out for her) but I don't think that is the case. There were a few spots where it seemed like the movie was trying to set something up, but looking back after the movie is over I don't think any of them are supposed to be taken as anything beyond face value.

I don't really have much else to say about this one. It was definitely better than Part 2 but definitely worse than Better Watch Out. If I end up doing more of these Christmas reviews next year we'll see how 5 and VI stack up.

Overall Rating: 5/10 Spaghetti Spirals

Potential Nonsense: Clint Howard plays a homeless man that works for the cult in this film. His character is, apparently, named Ricky. According to IMDB, "it is unclear whether he is playing the same character from the first two films". I have several problems with this statement: first, Ricky was in THREE films, not two- he was a child in the first, a grown man in the second, and (despite using the wrong footage) a comatose maniac with a reconstructed brain in the third. My second issue is that it damn well shouldn't be clear that Clint Howard is playing the same Ricky, considering Ricky had the top of his head missing for the entirety of the previous film, and also, HE WAS KILLED TWICE. And my third issue: there is a scene in this film where Clint Howard is watching the previous film on TV, so again, he damn well better not be the same character!

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