31 days of horror Year 3 day 26

Silent Night Deadly Night
1984
Anchor Bay Double Feature DVD Out of print

Since about the late 80’s I kept hearing about this little film. It was a slasher film that had Santa Claus as the killer. Well sadly none of the video stores in my area had it for rent. Well back in 2004 I saw that Anchor Bay put out a DVD that had Silent Night Deadly Night and the sequel on one disc. I put it on my wish list and that year got it from one of my aunts as a X-mas gift. Turns out I was lucky. This DVD went out of print pretty quickly. And since then only the first film has been released again to DVD. But that DVD also quickly went out of print. And now it has become an X-mas tradition with my cousin. Every X-mas eve or X-mas night we watch one of the 5 films in this series.

We start off on X-mas eve, and Billy is traveling to go see his grandfather. On the way back his dad pulls over to help someone that seems to have broken down on the side of the road. Well this is actually a robber who is dressed up as Santa Claus. And he proceeds to kill Billy’s dad. Then rape Billy’s mom.

We flash forward a few years and Billy and his younger brother are being raised in an orphanage. This orphanage is run by a group of nuns. And the head nun seems to hate Billy. She beats the hell out of him for minor stuff. We jump ahead a few more years and Billy is a young adult. So the head nun gets him a job at a local store. Billy seems to be doing pretty good, but his boss wants him to be Santa Claus at the store. This and the shitty behavior of his co-workers triggers something in Billy’s mind. Billy snaps and goes on a killing spree.

We get plenty of great kills. Like one where Billy spears a young Linnea Quigley on some deer horns that are on a wall. Another great one is when Billy sees some bullies stealing a sled from some kids. So while one of the bullies is riding the sled down a hill Billy jumps out and chops the bully’s head off.

The cops realize what is going on and realize that Billy is heading back to the orphanage to kill the bitchy head nun. But Billy manages to actually get into the orphanage on X-mas day. He is about to kill off the head nun  when the police show up and gun him down in front of all the orphans. The film ends with a close up on Billy’s lil brother’s face.

Now this DVD is the uncut version. And we get a warning before the film about how some scenes were taken from a print that isn’t as good as the main one used. So for some of the gore scenes the picture quality isn’t as good. But it is still pretty damn good looking. For extras we get a long ass audio interview with the director. Plus lots of press clippings from all the people that freaked out cause the film was about a killer Santa Claus. See when this film was in theaters some stupid ass women got so mad about it they started picketing the film. And it caused so much bad press that the releasing company pulled it from theaters. So very very few people got a chance to see it on the big screen. This is the reason that the second film is mainly  made up of footage from the first film. Strangely I have never heard about people protesting the second or third film in the series. But the film was popular enough that there is now 5 films in the series. I think only the first 3 got theatrical releases, the other two went direct to video. I would recommend for anyone that is a fan of 80’s slashers  to track down the movie. But both region 1 DVD releases are quite pricey and hard to come by. And I have heard that most of the VHS releases are cut. Silent Night Deadly Night gets a B+.