My Journey Through the Silent Night, Deadly Night Series Continues with a Fond Look Back at the Wonderfully Ho Ho Horrible Silent Night, Deadly Night 2
Garbage day!
The money people behind Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 reportedly wanted director Lee Harry to create a “new” movie by re-editing more or less the entirety of Silent Night, Deadly Night, and adding two or three new scenes.
It’s as if the filmmakers were intent on proving to the world that held them in contempt that they were every bit the sleazy, greedy, selfish, amoral opportunists their critics accused them of being.
Harry’s background was in editing, but being sane, he realized that some problems couldn’t be fixed in the editing room.
The overwhelmed cutter told the financiers he did not want to trick the public into buying an old film with a new name. He had too much integrity to pull that kind of a stunt, so they found a compromise seemingly designed to satisfy no one.
Harry wouldn’t cynically try to pass off Silent Night, Deadly Night as its own sequel, but he would recycle an insane amount of footage from the most controversial film of 1984.
I experienced a distinct feeling of deja vu throughout the first half of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2, which is about eighty percent footage from the first film in a new context.
Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 unfolds largely in flashback as a story that Ricky Caldwell (Eric Freeman) tells terrified psychologist Dr. Henry Bloom. Ricky is the even more deranged younger sibling of Billy Freeman (Robert Brian Wilson), the villain from the first film. Thanks to the magic of recycling and stock footage, he is also the villain in this movie despite the character dying and the actor playing him, filming no new scenes.
The shrink is understandably scared shitless of a mass murderer who kills people as easily and reflexively as breathing or eating and looks like he could beat the average man to death with his bare hands.
Yet the police inexplicably don’t handcuff Ricky or put him in shackles or even have an armed police officer in the room while the worst, most psychotic criminal since Billy Chapman brags about all the people he’s killed and how proud he is to be punishing the naughty with extreme prejudice.
It’s like Silence of the Lambs if Hannibal Lecter was free to exit his prison cell at any time and didn’t even have to tell the guards he was leaving.
In quite possibly the most inevitable development in the history of film, Ricky takes advantage of the complete privacy law enforcement has provided for his chat with Dr. Bloom to brutally murder him and then resume his killing spree.
The cult of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 is largely the cult of Eric Freeman. I'm not sure whether Freeman gives the worst performance of all time or the best here, but it is one of the most unique starring turns in film history.
Like Billy, Ricky has experienced only trauma, violence, and rejection. His parents were brutally murdered by a man dressed like Santa Claus, and then his older brother decided that Christmas was the perfect time to slay as many people as possible. Oh, and also, he grew up in a Catholic orphanage where the Mother Superior viciously abused the residents physically and emotionally before he was adopted by a nice Jewish couple that eventually disappointed Ricky when the father died.
Ricky is consequently better off than orphans who are not adopted, but that still doesn’t explain why Ricky comes off like an impoverished man’s Patrick Bateman. How did this disturbed child of darkness and death end up a jock preppie with a weakness for Lacoste shirts and pretty yuppies?
Like his buff and bloodthirsty sibling, Ricky is fucking cut. He’s got an eight-pack and a pretty face that makes him seem like Homicidal Ken of Ken and Barbie fame.
The first half of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 consists of Ricky setting up recycled footage from the first movie chronicling things he could not have experienced firsthand or even second-hand.
So this wonderfully idiotic sequel cheats relentlessly by having him insist that his older brother told him a LOT of things, and he apparently remembered all of them.
Ricky tells the story of Silent Night, Deadly Night from multiple perspectives, including that of the comically incompetent police.
Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 mostly re-uses the original Silent Night, Deadly Night for flashbacks and backstory, but I was amused by the chutzpah of a scene where Ricky goes with his hot preppie girlfriend to the movies.
In a scene so crazy that it damn near rips a hole through the fabric of time and space, the movie that Ricky and his lady-friend are watching is about a guy in a Santa suit who goes around killing people.
The fictional film in Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2, is lazily cobbled together, like so much of the film before it, from footage from Silent Night, Deadly Night. That means that Ricky is watching a fictional narrative film about a crazed killer in a Santa suit who looks and acts exactly like the monster who murdered his parents because it’s the same character and the same actor.
It’s also curious that Ricky has ostensibly been dating this girl for a while and is ready to get serious with her but hasn’t gotten around to telling her that he’s got a lot of issues around Christmas and Santa Claus on account of his parents being brutally murdered by a man pretending to be Father Noel and consequently would be the worst possible audience for a movie about the formative trauma that made him a monster.
Ricky isn’t able to concentrate on the movie because some creeps are talking and making jokes and generally behaving like jackasses. Ricky predictably deems this movie theater misbehavior “naughty” and swiftly enacts the standard punishment: death.
His date is too busy to notice her beau’s casual murder because she's rejecting the advances of a creepy, bleached blonde ex-boyfriend. He’s an unpleasant horndog, but unlike her current boyfriend, he’s not a sociopathic murder machine. I think that’s a good thing.
When the ex-boyfriend is gross in front of Ricky and his girl, he snaps and decides to punish the ex and his girlfriend for not meeting his exacting standard of niceness through casual murder.
Then, a Barney Fife-like goober of a cop tries to stop Ricky by walking slowly up to him with his gun raised high and attempting to slap handcuffs on him. This gives Ricky enough time to grab the cop’s gun and kill him with it.
At this point, Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 becomes awesome in its transcendent awfulness. With a crazed gleam in his eyes, Ricky walks happily around suburbia with a gun in his hand, killing anyone and everyone because that’s just kind of his thing.
In the film’s single greatest moment, Ricky sees some poor schmuck putting out his trash and yells, “Garbage day!” in a singsong cadence for no discernible reason before killing yet another innocent person needlessly.
Freeman’s delivery of “garbage day!” is pure camp bliss. It’s transcendent kitsch, an unforgettable moment that has been transformed into a ubiquitous meme by online wisenheimers and lovers of bad movies done right.
It’s a testament to how crazy the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise is that Ricky behaves so strangely in it that I half assumed he was a space alien or a robot masquerading as a human being.
Ricky is not a robot man or a visitor from Mars, although those both feel like solid guesses as to his ultimate identity, but a few sequels from now, we learn that a villain is a robot masquerading as a human being.
How crazy is that? Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 takes seventy-five minutes to get Ricky into a Santa suit. It makes up for lost time by having him embark on a murder spree in honor of his dear departed brother.
Only Ricky succeeds where his brother fails in killing Mother Superior.
Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 is one of the sleaziest, laziest, most cynical, and opportunistic pieces of crap I’ve ever seen. That’s why it’s wonderful and everyone with even a passing interest in camp or pulp should see it.
It’s so epically, historically bad that it’s fucking great.
GARBAGE DAY! A HA HA HA
“If anyone wants to give me a Ricky Caldwell figure for Christmas I would totally be into it.”
I DID give you that figure a year or two ago!