Santa slasher quick, dirty, but also top-notch

A few decades back, the movie Silent Night, Deadly Night was a creature that stirred controversy all through December of 1984.

While somewhat nastier and sleazier than the usual ’80s slasher, its downfall — that is, being removed from theatres before it had even begun its wide release — was contained within its Christmas trimmings. The idea of a psycho Santa was too much for Reagan-era audiences in the U.S., even though an axe-wielding psycho Santa was highlighted some 12 years earlier in the 1972 holiday release Tales from the Crypt. But despite its abbreviated run, it would achieve cult status, spawning two sequels and two reboots.

The new iteration of Silent Night, shot in Manitoba earlier this year, redeems the source material with a fresh take that, uncomfortably, compels the audience to be more sympathetic to its designated psycho.

Billy Chapman (Rohan Campbell of Halloween Ends and The Hardy Boys) is an itinerant young man who arrives by bus into a small Midwestern town with apparently evil intent. Dream flashbacks tell the story of his early childhood trauma: As a little boy, he witnessed the brutal slaying of his parents by a shotgun-brandishing Santa.

He rents a room and finds a job with kindly gift-shop owner Mr. Sims (Winnipeg’s David Lawrence Brown). He also meets Sims’ daughter Pamela (Ruby Modine of the series Shameless) and finds the two share common ground when it comes to a certain volatility of temper.

Even as star-crossed romance is blooming, Billy will not be put off by his compulsion to kill seemingly random people and take Dexter-esque mementos of his crimes to preserve in the world’s gnarliest advent calendar.

Most of those elements were in the original 1984 film. But director-screenwriter Mike P. Nelson (who likewise reinvented an existing franchise with his 2021 film Wrong Turn) takes some pretty clever liberties with the source material, which won’t be revealed here.

Suffice to say, Nelson has made a film better than it has a right to be, given a tight schedule and a tighter budget. In the quick-and-dirty realm in which he is working, the film is top-notch.

He even shoots for a Roger Corman-esque sense of social satire in some elements, in which the small town isn’t the wholesome place it appears.

He deviates from the Corman school by eschewing some of exploitation elements, such as sex and nudity, of which there is little. And as much as the film is advertised as coming from the producers of Terrifier 3, it is nowhere near as gory and sadistic as that franchise, to its credit.

But sometimes, it’s apparent that Nelson’s ambitions are bigger than his capabilities. For example, the film is divided into chapters in much the same way as Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies, or, to use a more recent frame of reference, Jalmari Helander’s 2021 Finnish bloodbath Sisu. But the film’s violence is not as creatively realized, a function of the aforementioned budget/schedule constraints.

The director deserves to be freed from those Jacob Marley chains dragging his ambition.

Still, Silent Night, Deadly Night shows Nelson has a solid facility with actors. Campbell is, against all odds, a kind of lovable monster, and Modine proves a match for his antisocial energy. There is also solid work from local actors, including Sharon Bajer as a nasty small-town she-wolf, Brown as a rare decent man and child actor Logan Sawyer as the traumatized young Billy.

This time next year, it would make a good grindhouse double bill with the upcoming Ben Wheatley/Bob Odenkirk film Normal, which likewise features local actors meeting an assortment of gruesome ends in a town filled with secrets.

Cinematheque, please make it so.

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