REVIEW: SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT is the Hallmark Movie from Hell
By Fangoria.com
4 min readMike P. Nelson's imaginative update of the holiday slasher brings the naughty and nice proceedings to 2025 America.
Mike P. Nelson's imaginative update of the holiday slasher brings the naughty and nice proceedings to 2025 America.
He gets off the bus at the town of Hackett (“I like the sound of that,” his inner voice coos.) There he meets Pam (Ruby Modine, Satanic Panic), a “sugar-coated onion” and self-proclaimed true crime junkie who is only nominally based on a similar character in the original film. If you can’t tell already, this remake is sometimes wildly different than its 1984 counterpart. The religious subtext and subplot have both been stripped out (there is nary a nun to be seen) and the Santa Claus trauma is instead more like a supernatural curse (more akin to Tim Allen killing Santa on his roof, and then going through a body horror transformation to become the new Kris Kringle).
And, for the most part, those changes are welcome. They provide Billy with more motivation than just “the image of Coca Cola Santa Claus triggers me,” and attempt to lend him a more sympathetic angle. As Billy, Campbell has gotten his second chance at slasher immortality, now strapping on the white beard in the role originated by Robert Brian Wilson. Campbell flips pretty well between mopey Christmas store stocker and deranged Santa Claus killer, believably slicing the axe through quite a few Nazis (another welcome departure).
The flick is shot, for good and for bad, like a Hallmark holiday movie between two psychopaths; Pam has something called “Explosive Personality Disorder” and Billy has a closet full of newly-delivered generic Santa Claus costumes. Modine in particular lends an edge to her romantic lead that is not at all present in the original. She gets in fights at hockey rinks, she curses like a sailor, she is quite a match for the brooding killer that has come to her town for the holidays. The plot can get complicated, though, with a new tangent surrounding another local serial killer of sorts. As the movie turns into killer vs. killer, it moves away from the steady rhythm of the slasher tropes, but also loses a bit of momentum moving into the final act.
But when viewing it in that larger lens — a Hallmark movie for horror fans — the magical elements, the copious gore, and the tongue-in-cheek humor actually gel pretty well. Its biggest strength is when it charts its own path, allowing it to be a brand new telling of the Santa sicko. Time will tell if it remains a holiday tradition.
