Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 - Archive

 One regret is that I don't have the original user comments (although the date on IMDb is March of 2007, I think I updated them a few years ago) for the Blog Archive. They were scathing and full of indignation. I have MELLOWED a lot over the years. It was only recently with "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" (2000), that some of those bad feelings towards movies returned. God, I was miserable during that. But I digress...

I watch this every year mainly because my uncle found it for me when it was out of print due to Anchor Bay's release of it (with the first film in a double feature) and provided it to me back around 2008 or 2009. He died in 2011, and I recall us having conversations about both SNDN films. He wondered just why in the world I'd even want a copy of this sequel, ha! While I do consider the sequel truly terrible, I can now watch it (well, I fast forward through the footage from the first film) and just take it for what it is: a director and minimal cast hired to add a bit to already existing footage and hopefully make a few bucks. I just don't think anyone could get any satisfaction at the end because it really wasn't the Mother Superior that was so loathsome in the first film. Freeman's lunacy made that ending what it was.
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Ricky(Eric Freeman), the brother of Billy(the killer from the first film)is the psycho donning the Santa outfit..well, for a moment or two..this time, explaining to a psychiatrist (James Newman, insisting rudely that the security guard get out of the cell, to leave him alone with a convicted killer!) what occurred to his brother years back.

The film can't escape the fact that is practically an hour of the first film, and then we get thirty or so minutes of Ricky killing people. The most inventive kill comes when he attacks an animated vicious thug bookie with an umbrella that opens after impaling him through the stomach! He provides us with little snippets of his past while chatting with Newman. We get a little understanding of a possible love-life with Elizabeth Kaitan's Jennifer. There's a confrontation with Jennifer's former boyfriend who is a smartass pig and his sexual slurs and untoward remarks of Kaitan set off Ricky's trigger leading to the use of jumper cables as a weapon!

The most memorable scene, involving "garbage day", had built this film towards a bad film reputation that became a YouTube sensation over 6 million to date have viewed. This is where Ricky goes on a shooting rampage down a suburban street killing as many innocent people as his gun allows him (taken from a dimbulb Barney Fife type he forces to shoot himself in the forehead while the gun is in his own hand!).

But his wielding an ax at a nun in a wheelchair (after taking off the head of a snowman and demolishing a Santa toy on the sidewalk) might be his most infamous attack. That she has the house number 666 and lasts as long as she does further recognize just how bonkers the film is. Freeman's face alone assures this film's status as a midnight cult item will remain intact.

Clearly the use of so much material from the first film, regardless of Lee Harry's handcuffed dilemma in wanting to make his own but not provided sufficient funding to do so, cannot be brushed aside. If the footage was from an abandoned project, that's one thing, but this is right from a whole film that was released into theaters (and did well for the limited time it was shown).

It's infamy cannot be denied, though, and Freeman's outrageous, manic expressions (as if a roid freak ready to explode at any moment, even going cross-eyed when choking a victim and snarling constantly) are indeed an irresistible riot. This will never--I repeat, never--be a critical darling. This series, quite frankly, isn't catering to critics. But to slasher fans accustomed and hungry for unconventional and crazed psycho fare, this sequel has its appeal. Even the new footage has plenty of questionable (putting it mildly) decisions like the use of another actor killing a boyfriend who nearly rapes his girlfriend by driving over him multiple times with a jeep. The psychiatrist interviewing Freeman doesn't have protections in place to make sure a very dangerous criminal was kept from harming him. There's never a reasonable explanation for how Freeman just waltzes out of the sanitarium either, besides commotion on an audio tape the psychiatrist was using to record the back story of the killer. Then the deformed face (stroke they tell us) of the nun supposedly representing Lilyan Chauvin, and how she looks absolutely nothing like her removes the satisfaction of seeing her hunted by Freeman is muted because the two actresses couldn't look or sound any different.

This isn't a good film by any stretch of the imagination, but I consider myself a genuine reviewer and to deny its entertainment value (its bad taste and lack of restraint in both the direction and performance) would be an error on my part. Not a 5/10 in quality but as a movie that tickles the funny bone and is just nuts, this qualifies.

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