After Condemning the Original, Mickey Rooney (who was the biggest movie star in the world for two decades) Starred in Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy-Maker For Undoubtedly Ethical Reasons

The script just SPOKE to him.

In 1984, Mickey Rooney was so outraged by the existence of Silent Night, Deadly Night, and the idea of a killer Santa that he wrote an open letter condemning it.

“How dare they!” it began indignantly before asserting that while Rooney believed in the First Amendment and Free Speech, he didn’t want a “Santa Claus with a gun going to kill someone.”

The letter closed with a dramatic flourish. The diminutive show business veteran ended by asserting, “The scum who made that movie should be run out of town.”

Yes, the idea of a horror movie in which Santa Claus, that timeless icon of wholesome, All-American goodness, or at least someone in a Santa suit, became a crazed killer out for blood sickened Rooney to his very core.

For him and other tradition-minded souls, Silent Night, Deadly Night crossed a line that should never be crossed. For Mickey Rooney in 1984, at least Silent Night, Deadly Night wasn’t just sleazy, amoral, and opportunistic: it was downright immoral. It was going to traumatize children and take away their precious innocence.

It had to be stopped. It wasn’t enough for Rooney to choose not to see the movie or express his concerns privately to friends and family. No, Rooney felt so strongly about the immorality of Silent Night, Deadly Night that he published a letter publicly condemning the people who made it as “scum” who should “be run out of town.”

Less than a decade later, Rooney once again made a public statement about cheap, sordid horror movies about Yuletide killers and murderers in Santa suits by agreeing to star in the fourth sequel to Silent Night, Deadly Night, 1991’s Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toymaker.

To be fair, Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker was not made by the scum who made the first film. I assume that that’s because they were run out of town immediately after Rooney’s letter was published.

You can’t piss off the top box-office attraction of 1939 and 1940 without facing serious consequences.

It would be easy to see Rooney as a hypocrite and fraud whose principled opposition to horror movies involving evil men in Santa suits evaporated the moment the makers of Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy-Maker offered him money in exchange for his acting services.

I like to think instead that reading the screenplay for Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy-Maker was a revelatory experience for Rooney. I prefer to imagine that he had a Road to Damascus moment and realized that he’d gotten horror movies all wrong all his life. The transcendent script for Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy-Maker made him realize horror movies' incredible cultural and creative value.

He suddenly understood their appeal and became an instant super-fan. He undoubtedly subscribed to Fangoria, immersed himself in classic horror films and contemporary slashers, and started hanging out with Stuart Gordon, John Carpenter, Elvira, and Svengoolie.

The role of Joe Petto, a traumatized and rage-filled toy store proprietor and a sort of evil Gepetto, undoubtedly spoke to Rooney as an artist and man the same way playing a racist caricature of a Chinese man in Breakfast at Tiffany’s once did. Rooney chose to use his art to breathe life into this tortured figure.

The direct-to-video sequel begins with a little boy named Derek Quinn (William Thorne) finding a mysterious present addressed to him on his front porch on Christmas night.

When his father, Tom (Van Quattro), sees Derek awake, he flies into a rage and sends him to bed. He then opens up the cryptic package and is first amused and then horrified to discover that it’s a round metal Santa Claus figure with chords that strangle the horrified man. He loses his balance and is fatally impaled on a fireplace poker.

The problem with this opening and the rest of the film is that it is very hard to be scared of something so small. That extends to both the toys created by Rooney’s demented toy-maker and Rooney himself.

Quattro spends a solid minute holding a toy to his head while pretending it’s killing him, a full-grown man. It is neither convincing nor scary, but Derek is so horrified that it instantly renders him mute.

Derek’s mom, Jane Higginson, who looks so much like disgraced Youtuber Colleen “Miranda Sings” Ballinger that I could think of nothing else when she’s onscreen, then takes her son to a pet shop run by Rooney’s Joe Petto.

Stop reading now if you do not want this godawful 22-year-old movie spoiled. The moment Joe’s ostensible son Pino (Brian Bremer) appears onscreen, I thought, “Oh, he’s a robot. I bet the Toy-Maker created him.” I was right!

Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy-Maker is consequently science-fiction, but its horror is not supernatural. Incidentally, as a teenager and video store clerk, I was freaked out by a poster with Derek glaring menacingly into the camera while surrounded by big stuffed animals whose eyes glow ominously and threateningly.

Here’s the fun part: there are no stuffed animals in Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy-Maker. The Toy-maker's creations are metal or plastic, not soft or furry, but whoever made that extremely effective poster realized that what they made was far scarier than anything in the film.

On paper, there is promise in the idea of the living embodiment of an idyllic past playing a deranged monster whose elfin, kindly exterior hides a brain full of trauma, hate, and worms.

If I might give Rooney the faintest of praise, he is easily the best part of Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy-Maker. That’s right: a Hollywood legend with nearly a century of acting experience delivered a more memorable performance than the no-names in the cast who went on to do nothing.

I’m talking about people like Tracy Fraim as Noah Adams. He’s a veteran who comes to town to warn his ex-girlfriend Sarah about Joe and his demonic toys.

Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy-Maker ekes an iota of mystery by not revealing Joe's secret until the third act, at which point it spills out artlessly from Noah.

Joe, it seems, was a typical toy maker until his pregnant wife and what would have been his child died in a car accident. Joe turned misanthropic and hateful and punished the world for his misfortune.

So he began disseminating booby-trapped toys designed to maim and kill rather than entertain young people. Noah mentions that Joe was arrested for injuring and killing tots with his toys.

Joe got a slap on the wrist for all of his sinister misdeeds and was selling his homemade toys of death to kids in another school.

Also, we learn Joe’s other dark secret late in the third act. He was so angry about his unborn child’s death that he made like God and created life in the form of Pino, an android child who is forever disappointing his papa by being a creepy robot and not a real boy.

Joe wages such a savage assault on Pino that it breaks him, and we’re forced to pretend that a three-foot-tall old man who looks like a Keebler elf can throw around someone larger than himself like a rag doll.

Things go from nutty to bonkers to WTF in a climax where Pino kills Joe and then pretends to be him by putting on a mask of his face and explains that he’s angry about Joe’s physical abuse and drunken rages and wants Sarah to be his mother.

That’s why he sent the deadly toys to Derek. He wanted him to die so that he could take his place in the household.

Pino wants Sarah to be his mommy. He also wants to violate her sexually despite not having a penis, robotic or otherwise.

Noah, who, incidentally, is secretly Derek's father, ends Pino’s reign of terror but we end by teasing a sequel that would ostensibly find Pino rising from the robo-grave to wreak more mechanical evil.

It was not to be, however. Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy-Maker ended this rancid franchise. In 2012, the series was rebooted with Silent Night, the best-reviewed and most star-studded entry, but that represented a new beginning rather than a continuation of what was to come.

Rooney was there at the start, not as a star but as a critic. Somewhere along the way, he stopped hating and started participating, and this woeful, impressively crazy series is better for his familiar and moderately unexpected presence.