Surprisingly, Silent Night, Deadly Night 2’s killer Ricky (now played by Bill Moseley) survived the fatal shooting at the end of a film that mostly consisted of flashbacks and retcons (and about which I just have nothing to say). He’s now comatose, has his brain encased in a plexiglass dome with a puddle of sloshing fluid inside, and is subject to various experiments conducted by Dr Newbury (Richard Beymer), the guy who reconstructed his brain.
For reasons, Newbury is trying to establish a psychic connection between Ricky and blind Laura (Samantha Scully). This turns out to be a very bad idea – who’d have thunk? – when either a rambunctious Santa Claus or the psychic connection awakens Ricky from his slumber and sends him on a killing spree towards Laura, her brother Chris (Eric DaRe) and his girlfriend Jerri (Laura Harring).
SNDN3: BWO, for reasons that I believe would blow everyone’s minds so badly, it is better not disclose them, directed by the great Monte Hellman, really suffers from a lack of Christmas mood. It’s all well and good having your killer wear a cake topper on his head, but when your film is part of a series that was until now all about the supposed shock value of dressing up your killer as Santa, it does miss the mark just a wee bit. If someone would at least have drawn a reindeer on the thing…
But I digress. On paper, this is actually a rather interesting movie. Hellman – who scrapped the original script for the film and wrote his own – clearly wants to make a slasher with a bit more character depth than is typical of the genre, adding more and deeper character interactions, showing actual interest in this aspect of the film. In this, he is thwarted by two things: first and foremost, the cast is completely unable to provide the nuance you’d need for this to work. Particularly Scully is dreadful, unable to even give the mildest movie interpretation of blindness, not to speak of convincingly suggesting emotional depth beyond a pouty rudeness that is probably supposed to be part of her reaction to trauma, but only comes over as unpleasantness in the performance.
Secondly, all those scenes of actors trying desperately to emote cut down on the slasher business at hand badly, and turn Ricky into the blandest killing machine alive.
That Hellman isn’t exactly the greatest suspense director on the planet is not of great help there, either, and so most of the killings and theoretical murder set pieces feel bland and uninvolving. As does the rest of the film, really.
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