SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT: PART 2
The now-adult Ricky talks to a psychiatrist about how he became a murderer after his brother Billy died, which leads back to Mother Superior.
Ricky Caldwell has had a pretty difficult life. His parents were brutally murdered by a psychopath dressed as Santa Claus when he was just a baby, landing Ricky and his older brother Billy at a Catholic orphanage run by a ruthless Mother Superior who doled out cruel punishment to her vulnerable charges with alarming frequency. When Billy turned 18 and was pushed out into the real world, he didn't last long, and the ending to his story was a tragic one, not only for poor Billy, but also for the eight unfortunate souls who crossed his blood-drenched path on that terrible Christmas holiday.
But what happened to Ricky after Billy was gunned down by the police before his eyes on Christmas Day?
A few years after Billy's Christmas rampage, young Ricky was adopted by a childless Jewish couple who were determined to give this boy a stable family life despite his numerous behavioral issues. And for a while, things were going great. Ricky stayed out of trouble, and since the Rosenbergs didn't celebrate Christmas, he managed to steer clear of many of the holiday trappings that might have otherwise triggered the boy's, let's say more violent tendencies. But Mr. Rosenberg died when Ricky was 15, and afterward he began to drift away from the straight and narrow path that had been laid out for him, and Ricky's dark side eventually surfaced in brutal fashion, landing him in an institution for the criminally insane where he's had his head examined by a dozen psychiatrists and counting, not that this intense therapy has done Ricky any good. Because Ricky doesn't really give a damn about the hows and whys regarding the murders he's committed. Ricky's not interested in "getting better", or anything else aside from finishing what his brother Billy started and finally punishing that wicked Mother Superior.
1984's Silent Night, Deadly Night was a very sober and bleak experience; not exactly what your average moviegoer would call "a good time". There's an undercurrent of cruelty that runs through the movie, with its unflinching depictions of sexual assault and child abuse, culminating in a series of murders presented in a blunt fashion that highlights the utter brutality of the broken soul who is committing them. There's no mirth to be found when you watch Billy Caldwell stalk the benighted streets of his hometown on Christmas Eve, butchering any "naughty" souls he happens to encounter.
And when the film ends, there's no catharsis for the audience. The killer is dead, but one could argue he's just as much a victim as the people he murdered, and Mother Superior, perhaps the true villain of the story, escapes unharmed. Silent Night, Deadly Night isn't the kind of movie most people could watch in a casual manner, unlike many of its slasher brethren, such as the Friday The 13th and Nightmare On Elm St. franchises, which feature more media-friendly lead villains who went on to become pop culture icons. There's a sense of fun in many of those movies, and the audience isn't meant to take the over-the-top killings depicted in them seriously.
Freddy Krueger transforming himself into a giant television with articulated arms, grabbing a screaming woman and croaking "welcome to prime time, bitch" before jamming her head through his CRT torso isn't exactly in the same horrific ballpark as a nameless thug disguised as Santa Claus attempting to rape a woman on a deserted street before simply slitting her throat when she tries to fight back, all while her terrified young son watches from behind a nearby bush. Silent Night, Deadly Night is telling a fundamentally different story with a different goal in mind, working to unsettle its intended audience rather than excite them with cheap thrills.
Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2, on the other hand...
Just to get this out of the way, Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 is not a good movie. It's not even in the same zip code as anything one would recognize as "a good movie". Most of the actors featured are less than polished (and that's being generous), the production had around a week to shoot everything in their script with an almost nonexistent budget to work with, resulting in a final product with a slapdash aesthetic, and about a third of the film's ninety-eight minute run time is made up of footage from the original Silent Night, Deadly Night, told as a flashback from adult Ricky as he's being questioned by his thirteenth shrink, Dr. Bloom. The movie's a bit of a mess.
It's also one of the most entertaining slasher movies I've ever seen.
At its core, Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 is a movie that really shouldn't exist at all. Producer Lawrence Appelbaum's original plan for the "sequel" was simply to hire somebody to re-edit Silent Night, Deadly Night and shoot quick bookend sequences featuring adult Ricky relating the events of the original film to his psychiatrist, also serving as omniscient narrator over the old footage. When Lee Harry was hired to shepherd the project, he eventually convinced Appelbaum to give him a little more time and money to expand the intended wraparound sequence into a larger story that would follow Ricky's life after the events of the original movie, showing the murders that landed him in the institution in the first place, as well as his eventual escape and final confrontation with the dreaded Mother Superior.
A first-time director with limited experience and resources, Lee Harry nevertheless tried his absolute best to make Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 as entertaining as possible as a rebuke of the original film, which he found to be a mean-spirited and miserable viewing experience. Contractually obligated to include a condensed version of this movie he disliked in his sequel, Harry toned down the nudity and violence as much as possible, trying to craft a slightly lighter story with his re-edit and softening numerous darker moments by inserting newly shot footage of Ricky glaring at his psychiatrist while barking insults at the arrogant middle-aged man who is in way over his head.
The film's story proper finally gets started around forty minutes in as we're introduced to the new child actor who plays young Ricky in an incredibly awkward manner: by cutting the final shot in the original film- the one that starts on Billy's corpse being cradled by Sister Margaret on the floor of the orphanage and pans up to show young Ricky glaring at Mother Superior with murder in his eyes as he says the word "naughty" -right at the moment when the camera begins its slow ascent past Ricky's feet, inserting a shot of the new actor who plays young Ricky in the pair of scenes that follow as he utters the word "naughty" but is overdubbed by actor Eric Freeman, who plays the story's adult version of Ricky.
This moment stands out like a sore thumb because the movie just showed the original actor who played young Ricky a few moments earlier in the very same scene, but now he's a completely different kid who has also aged a few years in the span of maybe thirty seconds. And the movie just expects the audience to roll with this, because director Lee Harry needed to introduce his new Ricky somehow. This new Ricky could have just been introduced in the next scene with no explanation, since it's implied that at least a year or more has passed between this moment and Ricky's eventual adoption, and as a result the movie would have been spared this maladroit editing choice.
But Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2's most bizarre casting choice has to be its new Mother Superior. Obviously the movie wasn't going to get Lilyan Chauvin to reprise her role, but the actor they hired to play her role in the sequel (Jean Miller) is so different in every respect, from her physical demeanor to her lack of icy screen presence, that she might as well be playing a completely different character. Jean Miller doesn't even attempt to approximate Chauvin's French accent. And the movie tries to explain away Mother Superior's altered appearance by stating that she's had a stroke in between films and is now retired and lives alone, but she also must have been exposed to toxic waste between films since the left side of Mother Superior's face has been horribly mutated, covered in festering boils and tumors.
There is literally no in-film justification for the ridiculous prosthetic makeup that's been slathered to the side of poor Jean Miller's head. It was just applied to try and hide part of the actor's appearance face in some misguided effort on the movie's part to help suspend the audience's disbelief that this is supposed to be the same character, even though the first third of the movie prominently featured actor Lilyan Chauvin's... superior performance in the same role. But Lee Harry had to use the original film's footage. He had no choice in that respect, and he knew that the only real satisfying hook he had for his story was to show Ricky finally giving Mother Superior her well-deserved comeuppance, so he did the best he could with the resources he had available.
There's a surprisingly creative kill involving a punchy bookie and an umbrella in Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 that, in my opinion, should probably be held in similar esteem to Linnea Quigley's infamous "antler impalement" in the original film. Ricky's 18 years old and working at some run-down diner, taking the trash out after hours when he finds a hulking bookie beating the holy hell out of some poor sap who owes him money in the alley. As the bookie whips out a red handkerchief to wipe the blood off his hands (Ricky has a thing about the color red that's never really explored to its fullest, but we're just supposed to understand that seeing something colored red sets him off because Santa killed his parents when he was a baby, and Santa wears a red suit, so fill in the blanks), Ricky confronts the asshole and starts beating the crap out of him because turnabout is fair play.
As Ricky has the bookie pinned to a wall with one hand (he's a brutish figure with superhuman strength), he yanks an old umbrella from a nearby garbage can and just shoves it right through this guy's torso with very little effort, even opening the damned thing after it protrudes from the guy's back. The bookie collapses to the ground dead as the dilapidated umbrella flaps behind him and Ricky just goes back to work while a hard rain begins to fall, as if to wash away the evidence of Ricky's sins. In a movie that up to this point had been weird but not too weird, this preposterous killing of an oafish bookie with an umbrella of all things just ramps the absurdity level up to eleven with no apologies. It's a very effective onscreen gag, with the bloodied umbrella flapping behind the actor as he makes the kind of face you imagine you'd normally see on Wyle E. Coyote after he's just been run blown up in an old Merry Melodies cartoon.
Obviously the antler kill in Silent Night, Deadly Night isn't played for laughs, and this umbrella kill pretty clearly is, but it's just as memorable if for entirely different reasons. You never hear anybody talk about this moment from Part 2, because all anybody ever seems to know regarding the sequel is the "garbage day" nonsense, because that's the only moment from the movie most people have ever seen. All they hear about Part 2 is that half of the movie is just recycled footage from the first movie and the rest of it is pointless crap, so they chuckle as they watch Eric Freeman shoot a guy who's taking out his trash on YouTube and move on with their lives. The "garbage day" meme has given Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 a sort of second life as an out-of-context punchline, but there's so much more to the sequel than that one brief, silly clip.
There's a sequence in the film featuring Ricky at age 15 (played by actor Daniel Gilbeau, who is actually two years older than adult Ricky actor Eric Freeman) as he's just wandering though the woods with a tree limb slung over his shoulder for no reason, and he stumbles upon some uncouth good ole' boy who has no sense of boundaries and his girlfriend having a picnic out in the middle of nowhere. This asshole wants to get laid and he doesn't care that his lady isn't in the mood, so he abruptly tries to rape her, and witnessing this horrific act triggers memories of his mother's attempted rape by "Santa Claus" when he was just a baby, and after the attempted rapist is finally rebuffed by his now-ex-girlfriend, he saunters off back to his very red Jeep to grab another beer only to be run over several times by an incensed Ricky, who has climbed into the driver's seat and just couldn't bear to let this scumbag get away with his misdeeds.
That's all well and good, but the problem here is that the memories Ricky relives while he watches the attempted rape unfold are memories that Ricky can't have, since he was, ya know, a baby at the time, not to mention he was stuck in the car when this nightmare was occurring, meaning he literally couldn't have seen the moments he's flashing back to during this sequence. Thematically I understand what director and editor Lee Harry was attempting with this scene, and I suppose it works if you don't really think about it too much, but I could really say the same thing about anything relating to Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2.
The real brilliant moment in this scene occurs at its end, after Ricky climbs out of the bloodied Jeep and finds the yokel's shaken girlfriend standing close by. She stares at him for a long moment before finally saying "thank you" and walking away. Ricky stands and watches her leave, and he even takes a few tentative steps forward, as though considering killing her as well, before finally turning and walking in the opposite direction, confident that she won't tell anybody what really happened out there in the woods. That moment of hesitation on Ricky's part as he wonders if he can afford to let this witness go is so subtle and clever, and it was actually an improvisation on the part of actor Daniel Gilbeau, who came up with the character bit during the scene, knowing that the production couldn't generally afford multiple takes and hoping director Harry liked the personal touch he brought to the moment to leave it in the final film.
But this subtle moment isn't what Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 is truly known for. No, this film has become infamous based on one particular line of dialogue that has attained meme immortality on the internet. Ladies and gentlemen, it's garbage day:
I still can't believe that clip has over seven million views and counting. This truly bizarre little slice of death is but one small part of a much larger and quite unhinged sequence of events that begins with Ricky and his new girlfriend Jennifer (Elizabeth Kaitan) taking a romantic stroll down a suburban street and coincidentally bumping into her douche bag ex-boyfriend Chip while he's working on his cherry red Ford Mustang, and ends with Ricky attempting to commit suicide in front of a bunch of cops only to find the pistol he lifted from a security guard a few blocks back is out of bullets. And Ricky's suburban rampage, from beginning to end, is easily the high point of the entire movie.
Chip was actually introduced in an earlier scene that takes place at what's supposed to be a commercial movie theater, although it's clearly shot in a private screening room, where Ricky and Jennifer are going out on a date. The young couple's good time keeps getting interrupted by a loudmouth off-brand Dana Ashbrook in the back row who appears to be sitting next to a sheepish-looking Jeff Foxworthy (actually director Lee Harry in a silent cameo). When Jennifer tells Ricky the movie they're getting ready to watch is about a guy who dresses up as Santa Claus and kills a bunch of people, Ricky just can't believe it, and as soon as footage from the original Silent Night, Deadly Night featuring the trigger-happy crook disguised as Kris Kringle murdering a convenience store clerk plays on the big screen, Ricky slips immediately into "punish" mode and goes to kill the loudmouth in the back row.
While her crazy new boyfriend is in the background strangling off-brand Dana Ashbrook, Jennifer's ex-boyfriend Chip just shows up seemingly at random to try and slither back into her panties in the middle of this cramped movie theater. Jennifer tells Chip to get bent, but he thinks he's God's gift to women, so instead of admitting defeat he just knows she'll come crawling back to his slimy ass eventually as he exits with another, visibly perturbed woman on his arm. The second Chip slinks away into the darkness, Ricky's just magically sitting next to Jennifer once again, having just casually committed a murder in a room full of people who somehow didn't see a thing, refusing to leave the theater despite Jennifer's protests since he thinks he's beginning to like the movie they're watching.
This leads into the next scene as Ricky and Jennifer just bump into Chip out on the street in the middle of the afternoon. I don't know if this is supposed to be the same day or not, and I don't know if Chip's supposed to live in the neighborhood they all find themselves in during the scene of not, because the movie never bothers to fill in any of these blanks, and it doesn't really matter anyway. Chip needed to be right here in Ricky's path so that he could incite the deranged young man's blood lust by bragging about his sexual adventures with Jennifer, setting off a truly unforgettable blitzkrieg of senseless violence. Ricky loses his cool pretty quickly, grasping Chip's throat and jamming a live jumper cable into his mouth, cranking up the juice on the attached portable charger and watching gleefully as the bottle blond's eyes pop with such force as to explode his sunglasses as well.
Jennifer understandably freaks out when she sees her current boyfriend dispatch her ex-boyfriend in such a bonkers fashion, so she starts calling dazed Ricky all sorts of names and slapping him around, which probably wasn't the best idea, as the young man has now become a carefree killing machine, and he easily strangles her to death with the aerial from Chip's Mustang, with Jennifer making sure to stare directly into the camera as Ricky chokes the life out of her. A neighborhood security guard immediately shows up since a pretty white lady was just murdered, and he tries to play the hardass in front of Ricky, but this backfires on the hapless rent-a-cop quite literally, as Ricky forces the moron to accidentally shoot himself in the face with his own gun.
Now that he's armed with a pistol, Ricky just starts striding down the middle of the street, laughing maniacally at nothing in particular and just waiting for random people to pop up like targets at a shooting range, which they conveniently happen to do. Some guy steps outside to check his mail and gets blasted into eternity. Another dude's just taking out the trash on a lazy afternoon and catches a bullet in the chest for his trouble. At this point, Ricky has abandoned any pretense of punishing the naughty and is just killing people for the hell of it. The man is having a blast.
Then in the most ridiculous moment in a sequence filled to bursting with ridiculous moments, Ricky spies a car driving down the road in his direction and just starts taking shots at the engine. The car begins spewing steam and strikes a ramp not-so-cleverly-disguised as a clutter of construction detritus, winds up on two wheels as it brushes past Ricky, flips over behind him and then just blows up spectacularly for no apparent reason. Check it out:
Did you see how close that car came to Ricky in the shot and how calmly he just stepped out of its way? "Ricky" was played by stunt coordinator Spiro Razatos in the sequence, and the man had nerves of absolute steel as that moment clearly demonstrates. A car on two wheels is barreling toward him, and he nonchalantly steps out of its way like he's avoiding a minor collision with a careless pedestrian on the sidewalk. Tell me again why there's no Academy Award category for stunt performers?
After this fantabulous climax, Ricky walks right into a police roadblock that just set itself up at some point in the last two minutes. The cops are all pointing their guns at Ricky, telling him to drop his weapon and surrender, but instead Ricky slowly raises the pistol to his head as he continues to laugh like fucking Dr. Evil. In a really bizarre twist, the cops all now lower their weapons and plead with Ricky not to commit suicide, because apparently he's got so much left to live for. But Ricky figures he's had a good run, so he just pulls the trigger only to find he's already used up all six of the revolver's bullets.
This entire sequence only lasts a handful of minutes, but it's just packed with entertaining madness from beginning to end. Chip's eyeballs pop like grapes in a microwave, and Ricky's positively thrilled when he witnesses this unexpected delight. When Ricky turns his attention to Jennifer and she realizes she's doomed, she squeaks out a quick "uh-oh" as she turns to make a run for it, and when he wraps the car antenna around Jennifer's throat, she's facing the camera with her eyes bugging and tongue lolling out of her mouth in a comical fashion, and we're suddenly watching a violent cartoon.
Then this idiot security guard materializes out of thin air and shoves his gun in Ricky's personal bubble, making it all too easy for the psychotic killer to just shove the gun back in the guard's face as he instinctively pulls the trigger, shooting himself in the head. As the guard slowly slips out of frame, blood pouring out of the shiny new hole in his forehead, the expression frozen on his face is pure "fuck me" gold. And as soon as Ricky realizes he's now got a gun, he's suddenly mad with power as he saunters down the street like the king of the entire fucking world, blasting anybody he catches outside while laughing heartliy because he's just so happy to finally be his true self that he can't hold it in anymore. From beginning to end, this sequence is just a magical five minutes of nihilistic glee that I find myself enjoying more and more every single time I watch it.
And after he recounts this sequence of events to his psychiatrist, Ricky strangles the dick with the reel-to-reel tape he'd been using to record their conversation and quickly murders his way out of the institution because he feels he's wasted enough time sitting on his ass in a padded cell, and since it's already Christmas Eve he might as well track down that bitch Mother Superior and deliver a long-overdue Christmas gift. He does this quite easily, I might add, just looking her up in the phone book (I guess she was listed) after killing some random dude who was collecting for charity while dressed up as Santa Claus. Donning the ragged costume, Ricky calls Mother Superior from a phone booth and just tells her that Santa's back before hanging up and making his way to her home.
Perhaps you're asking yourself a few questions around now regarding how Ricky could just look the retired Mother Superior up in the white pages, or how he even knew her given name in order to look her up in the first place, but none of that matters. Just push all of your perfectly logical questions aside and accept the insistent absurdity, otherwise you're just going to hate watching this entire movie. Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 is not about logic or making sense. If the movie actually made any sense, Ricky would only be around fourteen years old, since this sequel was only released three years after the original Silent Night, Deadly Night, and we were never given any indication that the contemporary scenes in that film were meant to take place in any year other than 1984. In fact, based on the toys on the shelves in Ira's shop, the film definitively takes place in its year of release, unless there were somehow Jabba The Hutt toys from Return Of The Jedi on store shelves in the late 1970's. So unless Part 2 takes place in the future, the timeline completely falls apart if you stop to scrutinize it even for a brief moment. So don't stop to scrutinize the timeline, or anything else for that matter. Just tune in to this movie's fractured wavelength and let the madness wash over you.
After Ricky bashes in the front door to Mother Superior's house with an axe he just happened to find at some point along his journey, he stands in the foyer, confident smirk crossing his face as he loudly announces his presence. Mother Superior's street address as helpfully marked on her front door is 666, which no God-fearing person would ever accept as their home address, especially not a fucking nun, retired or not, but whatever. Don't think about it; just let it happen.
During a rather protracted game of cat and mouse, considering how physically diminished poor Mother Superior happens to be at this stage of her life, Ricky has a moment where he just completely snaps and begins trashing her bedroom even though he knows she's no longer in it, and she in fact is using this noisy distraction as a chance to slip away. He's just yelling incoherently and swinging his axe indiscriminately in this cramped room, wrecking everything in sight in some sort of primal, therapeutic ritual.
Well, I say he's wrecking everything, but in the scene you just see actor Eric Freeman's shadow swinging the axe back and forth reflected on a wall while you hear sounds of glass breaking and furniture being flung around, because he actually couldn't trash anything in the house and had to just awkwardly mime the actions on camera so that foley artists could add the sounds of the character's rampage in post-production.
This is because the production didn't have permission from the owners of the house in which they were shooting to damage anything inside, and the owners were in fact home the entire time the crew was filming because they didn't trust these "professionals" to keep their word and leave their home unspoiled. So while Eric Freeman and the film crew were upstairs shooting a series of very loud scenes featuring a wheelchair-bound old woman dressed up as a nun screaming bloody murder, producer Lawrence Appelbaum was sitting downstairs with the owners making small talk and just generally attempting to convince them that everything was fine and there was no reason for them to be at all alarmed.
This is also the reason why, after Mother Superior finally gets hers after a stand-off in which she brandishes a large knife and dares her attacker to come and take his medicine like a hardcore motherfucker because this old battleaxe is determined to go down swinging, the aftermath is suspiciously bloodless. Ricky cuts off Mother Superior's fucking head in her own dining room and stages her body so that when the police enter they think she's still alive and just sitting perfectly still and refusing to blink. When Sister Mary (some new nun that this movie treats like a real character when she was only introduced because the crew couldn't get Glimer McCormick to return as Sister Margaret) approaches Mother Superior, the old broad's head falls off and rolls bloodlessly around on the floor.
There's no blood at all in this scene, either on Mother Superior's habit or on the dining room carpet, because the owners weren't going to let these chuckleheads stain up their house with a bunch of fake blood, and the production didn't have the time or budget for any stage-bound pick-up shots, so they just had to make due with what they had.
At this point, Ricky pops up from out of nowhere to hack up Sister Mary, so the cops blow him away and he pulls a reverse Kool-Aid Man and crashes through the house's back door. Sister Mary faints as the action pops off, and as she comes to on the floor she's confronted with the disembodied head of Mother Superior staring into her soul, so she starts screaming bloody murder (as one does), and Ricky's supposedly lifeless body stirs back to life as he looks into the camera and smiles.
Eric Freeman's inspired performance as Ricky Caldwell is the glue that holds this slipshod endeavor together, and he doesn't get nearly enough praise for his work in this movie. Freeman's instincts told him to play Ricky as a dark and serious character, channeling the work of Michael Rooker in the classic Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer, but director Lee Harry knew that kind of performance was exactly the opposite of what he was looking for, so he encouraged Freeman to go as broad as possible as often as possible, since he wanted Part 2's Ricky to be a wisecracking, wild-eyed madman that he hoped would make a similar impact on popular culture as the iconic Freddy Krueger. That didn't come to pass, but Harry's insistence on "bigger, broader" was the right call, as I can't imagine enjoying Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 without Freeman's manic and outrageous performance.
If Eric Freeman hadn't been told to devour the scenery around him at all times, this movie would have been absolutely dreadful. A few creative gags in the murder sequences and a coterie of bad actors alone weren't nearly enough to make Part 2 a memorable experience. The film's script isn't terribly good, and the "wisecracks" Ricky spouts while butchering random people aren't exactly noteworthy. If Eric Freeman hadn't screeched "garbage day" in that special way that only he could have done, nobody would have given that clip a second look on YouTube. It's Freeman's delivery that makes the line special, not the line itself, and the man deserves all the credit in the world for that.
Freeman's interactions with Dr. Bloom during the first half of the movie are the only things that hold my attention as the story just rehashes the entire plot of the original film to pad its run time. The way Ricky just dismissively treats the arrogant doctor since he's clearly sick of having to tell the same story one more time to one more shrink who thinks he knows everything is hilarious. After Ricky recounts his murder of the attempted rapist with his own red Jeep, Dr. Bloom take note of the car's color in his notes with the simplistic words "red car" scribbled on his notepad with a big exclamation point. Ricky gets right in the doctor's face and sees his notation, sarcastically bellowing "Red Car! Good Point!" while hovering uncomfortably close to the man's ear. In one memorable moment, Dr. Bloom asks Ricky if he dreams, and Ricky turns from the window and spits out "I. Don't. Sleep." stonefaced, without a hint of irony.
Nobody else could have brought these minor interactions to such vivid life as Eric Freeman, and he's only now beginning to garner any real recognition from the horror community for what truly is an iconic performance. Ricky Caldwell may not be a household name like Freddy Krueger, but maybe he should be, because what has been captured on film in Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 is lightning in a bottle, and Eric Freeman deserves to be celebrated for taking a leap of faith and throwing himself so joyfully into this absurd role that he single-handedly elevates the entire movie with his presence. If Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 represents the heavens above, then Eric Freeman is powerful Atlas, supporting the burdensome sky on his broad shoulders.
Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 is not a good movie. It's not well-made, or even well-conceived. It looks woefully cheap, and recycles footage from its precursor to make up over a third of its length. But the movie is also something of a miracle, because despite everything that's wrong with it, or perhaps because of everything that's wrong with it, the movie actually transcends ineptitude and becomes something laudable, something deserving of adulation. Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 doesn't give a damn about continuity, or respectability, or even Christmas itself. Ricky Caldwell would be happy just to light a match and watch it all burn.
But he might settle for jamming an old umbrella through Santa Claus's rotund torso and popping it open, splattering the festive entrails of Christmas all over a filthy brick wall.
The wrathful winter, 'proaching on apace,
With blust'ring blasts had all ybared the treen:
And old Saturnus, with his frosty face,
With chilling cold had pierced the tender green,
The mantles rent, wherein enwrapped been
The gladsome groves that now lay overthrown,
The tapets torn, and every bloom blown down.
The soil, that erst so seemly was to seen,
Was all despoiled of her beauty's hue;
And soot fresh flowers, wherewith the summer's queen
Had clad the earth, now Boreas' blasts down blew:
And small fowls flocking, in their song did rue
The winter's wrath, wherewith each thing defaced
In woeful wise bewailed the summer past.
Hawthorn had lost his motley livery,
The naked twigs were shivering all for cold,
And dropping down the tears abundantly.
Each thing, methought, with weeping eye me told
The cruel season, bidding me withhold
Myself within; for I was gotten out
Into the fields, whereas I walked about...
And sorrowing I, to see the summer flowers,
The lively green, the lusty leas, forlorn;
The sturdy trees so shattered with the showers,
The fields so fade, that flourished so beforne:
It taught me well, all earthly things be born
To die the death; for nought long time may last:
The summer's beauty yields to winter's blast.
-Thomas Sackville, Earl Of Dorset
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| Merry Christmas. |
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