1989's SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 3: BETTER WATCH OUT Was Directed by the Man Who Made Two Lane Blacktop But It Is Not Quite as Good

Not Monte Hellman's best work!

It would not be accurate to say that the Silent Night, Deadly Night movies got classy in their third outing. This most disreputable of franchises kept it sleazy but something curious nevertheless happened with the second sequel to arguably the most notorious film of the 1980s. 

A series so shameless and mercenary that it at one point planned to re-edit Silent Night, Deadly Night, add a few new scenes and pass off the results as a proper sequel unexpectedly attracted impressive names in front of the camera and behind it. 

Richard Beymer, the Golden Globe-winning lead actor in West Side Story, who grew so disillusioned with show business that he retired and lived on a commune in Sweden for two years returns righteously to the big screen as Dr. Newbury, a scientist of the mad variety. 

It was only Beymer’s second film since 1973’s The Innerview, which he wrote, directed, edited, produced and shot. Beymer was disgusted by Hollywood and the star-making machinery but appearing in the low-budget, direct-to-video second sequel to a reviled slasher movie was an opportunity too good to pass up. 

Beymer reportedly ran around his house singing, “Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! I just read a script for a movie named Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out, and suddenly that title will never be the same to me! Say it loud and there's music playing, Say it soft and it's almost like praying, I'll never stop saying “Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out.”

Something about Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out and the role of Dr. Newbury spoke to him as an artist and a man. Legend has it that Beymer wept like a baby reading the script for Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out but that might have been because he was chopping onions at the same time. 

Acting in a movie he undoubtedly found superior to West Side Story in every way must have reignited Beymer’s lost passion for acting because just a year later he scored what turned out to be his second signature role as Dr. Benjamin Horne in Twin Peaks. 

Is it a coincidence that Beymer played a doctor here and in Twin Peaks? Not it is not. David Lynch clearly loved Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out so much that he had to cast Beymer in his next project. He was also obviously impressed by a beauty pageant winner named Laura Harring making her film debut in Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out because a mere twelve years he cast her in a lead role in 2001’s Mulholland Drive opposite Naomi Watts.

Watts scored a career-making role in Mulholland Drive despite the considerable disadvantage of never having appeared in even a single Silent Night, Deadly Night sequel. 

Beymer wasn’t the only big name in the cast. Robert Culp, of I Spy and Bob & Carol &Ted & Alice fame plays wisecracking Lieutenant Connely while Bill Moseley, a horror icon due to his work in Texas Chainsaw Massacre II and Rob Zombie’s films, takes over the role of Ricky Caldwell. 

For cinephiles at least the film’s most impressive names is its director and co-writer, Monte Hellman. That’s right: the preeminent New Hollywood auteur behind Two Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter also directed Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out. 

Hellman has called Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out his best work, if not his best film, because he had so little time and so little money yet still delivered what can generously be deemed a motion picture all the same. 

To give Hellman credit, in the film’s first fifteen minutes or so Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out feels like the work of someone who knows what they’re doing. 

Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out gets off to a deceptively strong start with a series of dream-like sequences involving new protagonist Laura Anderson (Samantha Scully), a blind girl who lost her sight and her parents in a plane crash but picked up nifty psychic powers. 

These powers intrigue Beymer’s Dr. Newbury, who has been closely guarding the comatose body of Ricky Caldwell (Bill Mosely) since being shot several thousand times at the end of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2.

Anyone in their right mind would let the giggling, Santa-hating mass murderer die on account of all of the horrible crimes he has committed, and also all of the horrible crimes that he will commit if given an opportunity. 

That’s not Beymer’s daffy doc, unfortunately. He fixes Ricky’s broken brain by Crazy Glueing it back together and protecting it with a plastic dome. This allows the nearly dead murder maniac to have basic motor functions, like being able to breathe, eat walk and kill everyone he encounters. 

The mad scientist even restores some of Ricky’s memories. Namely, he resurrects the part of Ricky brain that remembers that he hates the sum of humanity and has an insatiable appetite for murder.

This, honestly, strikes me as deeply irresponsible. It's like those horror movies where they make nature’s most vicious predators super-intelligent without ever considering the possibility that they’ll use that intelligence to kill them. 

Dr. Newbury is fascinated by Laura’s psychic gifts, particularly her psychic bond with Ricky, who may be hovering near death to the rest of the world but whose mind is still filled with murder. 

Laura sees into Ricky’s mind and into his memories, which affords the franchise an opportunity to prominently feature the utterly gratuitous sexual assault of Ricky and Billy’s mother a third time in three consecutive film. The franchise went in a deeply uninteresting new direction with its fourth entry, possibly so they could avoid recycling the same sexual assault all over again. Instead Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation features a different gratuitous sexual assault, this time featuring Clint Howard with a penis-nose like A Clockwork Orange or Nothing But Trouble. 

The Dr. Frankenstein wannabe thinks that if he can only extract the Crazy Murder Juice inside Ricky’s brain he can use it to create a vaccine that will prevent people from becoming Santa Claus-hating mass murderers. The only downside is that Ricky might somehow emerge from his coma with an insatiable desire to slaughter. 

But what are the odds of that happening? 

Ricky then emerges from his extended slumber when a drunk man dressed as Santa calls me a vegetable one too many time. Also, he does not have a sense of humor about the bogus Father Christmas asking him if his favorite singer is “Perry Coma” because he kills him and then resumes his reign of terror from six years earlier. 

The Resurrected Ricky is seemingly mute and lurches about in a zombie-like haze. Also, he’s wearing the skimpy gown from the hospital and his brain is in a little dome at the top of his head. 

That would seem to limit Ricky’s ability to kill the way he’d like to but he’s not about to let anything keep him from murder, particularly logic, reason and reality. 

So the recently awakened maniac decides to follow Laura to her grandma’s house, where she will be celebrating Christmas with her hair metal brother and his standoffish girlfriend. 

Of course it would be silly if a dead-eyed hospital escapee with a dome atop his head containing his brain were to drive to his destination or take public transportation. 

So Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out has Ricky, who just recently emerged from a six year coma, grunts rather than speaks, and has his brain in a dome on top of his skull hitchhikes to his destination. 

This is not played for laughs or for camp. The filmmakers figure he’s got to get to get to grandma’s house, Big Bad Wolf style, so he might as well thumb a ride. 

Yes, hitchhikes. He’s a sociopath consumed only with killing and he probably still has an easier time finding a ride than a well-dressed African American probably would. 

Ricky goes back to killing everyone he meets, whether they’re naughty or nice but Hellman cheats outrageously by almost always skipping immediately to the aftermath of the killing.

That spares him the trouble of actually having to show this recently comatose patient, whose muscles have ostensibly been atrophying over the half decade he spent in a coma murdering people in perfect health. 

Monte Hellman is a real director so Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out feels more like an actual movie than its predecessor, particularly Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2. 

The scenes of Beymer and Culp bantering offers the slick pleasure of watching two old pros make their ridiculous roles in a preposterous movie as palatable and professional as possible. 

But Hellman and his over-qualified cast are ultimately hamstrung by the fact that they are in a Silent Night, Deadly Night sequel with a premise even more insultingly idiotic and ridiculous than all of the others. 

Despite the talent involved Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out is weaker than the films that preceded it yet slightly better than the films that followed. 

Hellman was justifiably proud that he somehow managed to make a movie under seemingly impossibly circumstances but even he couldn’t make a good movie out of this hateful hogwash.