In short: Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Little Billy (Danny Wagner) is a magnet for Christmas trauma. First his institutionalized grandpa horrifies him with a traditionally dark interpretation of Santa Claus, then his mother and father are murdered – the mother nearly raped as well – by a robber dressed as Santa Claus. The nun-run orphanage he ends up in afterwards offers the kid no peace either, for the Mother Superior (Lilyan Chauvin) has no patience with his not exactly surprising Christmas trauma and abuses him quite efficiently.

Ten years later, when he’s 18 (and now played by Robert Brian Wilson), Billy gets a job in a large toy store, because that’s exactly the place where you want a guy who loses it every December to work at. Not surprisingly, once his boss passes the job of the store Santa onto the kid, it takes only one little additional thing to make him crack completely. And wouldn’t you know it, seeing his secret store crush (Toni Nero) pair up with the work asshole is just the push Billy needed. Thus, he goes on a Santa Claus rampage, finding reasons to put quite a few people on the naughty list with whatever axe he’s got to hand.

If Charles E. Sellier Jr.’s Silent Night, Deadly Night demonstrates one thing, it’s that there’s a reason why most slashers don’t spend their first half on the exact way their killers become psychologically damaged: once you’ve spent so much time with a character – even if he’s as badly acted as Billy – and seen so much of the trauma that destroys him as a person, he simply doesn’t work as the kind of monstrous, inhuman killing machine a killer in a slasher needs to be to function. Sure, there’s the possibility of a really good or intelligent filmmaker to do exactly this and make something very interesting and meta out of it, but that certainly doesn’t apply to Sellier or this film (nor to Rob Zombie).

Instead, we get a film whose two halves have little tonal or emotional connection with one another. The first half is theoretically interesting as the beginning of a psychological thriller, but simply too awkwardly written, directed and acted to work as that; and the second is a pretty bland slasher that never makes as much out of the Christmas gimmick as you’d hope for. There are a couple of scenes where at least the contrast between 70s Christmas mood and slasher sleaze gets somewhat fun, and Linnea Quigley getting killed by antlers is a pretty great gag, but otherwise, there’s very little here to get me in the proper, murderous Christmas spirit.