Christmas In July: Round Yon Victim Mother And Child

Year: 1991

Director: Martin Kitrosser

Cast: William Thorne, Jane Higginson, Van Quattro

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As we continue our July event of pretending that it’s not so hot outside that your steak cooks itself while you’re walking home from the store, we also reach a very important point in the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise: the end. We're not finished -we still have the remake to look forward to with a mixture of vague optimism and extreme suspicion - but the contiguous franchise ends here in 1991 with Silent Night, Deadly Night V: The Toy Maker, only 7 years after the original controversial flick hit theaters. 

To quickly recap, Part IV: Initiation obliterated the series’ already senile continuity by presenting a story with no killer Santa that wasn’t even obviously set on Christmas. But it hardly matters, because the series hasn’t had a rating above the 5/10 line since Part 2, and that one was most just recut footage of the much better original. We’re barely looking at a Sorority House Massacre quality average.

Although The Toy Maker is – pretty predictably – a stinker, it does feel a little more like a traditional Silent Night, Deadly Night film. The plot actually centers on Christmas and holiday-related activities, there’s a clip from the previous movie haphazardly sandwiched in (this time, it’s Silent Night, Deadly Night-ception as the TV plays the clip from Part 4 where Clint Howard is watching a clip from Part 3 – stop the world, I wanna get off), and the talent both behind and in front of the camera is startlingly overqualified.

No, I’m not talking about Clint Howard and Neith Hunter, who cameo as characters with the same names as their Part 4 counterparts, as if anyone was actually enough of a fan of that movie to be excited. I’m talking director Martin Kitrosser, Quentin Tarantino’s go-to script supervisor. I’m talking effects shaman Screaming Mad George, back for a second helping. I’m talking f**king Mickey goddamn Rooney!

What is even happening at this point?

So, the plot, shall we? Young Derek (William Thorne) loses his father when a wrapped present that arrives on the stoop turns out to be an evil killer toy, this franchise’s answer to the popularity of Puptpermaster, but accomplished more cheaply (which is saying something). He is traumatized and goes mute, while his mother Sarah (Jane Higginson) attempts to deal with her grief and coax him into talking with various Christmas-related surprises, unaware of how her husband actually died.

Then there’s the roughly 900 splinter plots birthed from their story. Noah (Tracy Fraim) is a department store Santa who we see tinkering with nefarious Christmas goodies in his motel room, goodies that can be seen terrorizing neighborhood children. He is also snooping on the local toy store, Petto’s. That name is supposed to be a pun on the name “Gepetto,” but I only ever heard it as “Pedo’s,” which was mildly alarming. He owner of the shop is Joe Petto (why, Mickey Rooney, why?), a friend of Sarah’s. He has a teen son named Pino (Brian Bremer of Pumpkinhead), who never does anything explicitly bad, but always seems to lurk creepily around the edges of the frame, talking in a nasal whine like he’s Buster Bluth or something.

But seriously, Mickey Rooney is in this. I’m not playing around here.

The one truly valuable thing about SNDN 5 is that it’s quite firmly established in the 90’s (Derek’s best friend dresses like he got oversized hand-me-downs from his older brother. And his older brother is Shaq.), but it still manages to capture the lunatic 80’s high concept spirit of films like Puppetmaster or Halloween III: Season of the Witch. It’s a rare thing to find a film so genuine and sincere in the era of waning slasher rip-offs, angsty vampires, and winking post-Scream know-it-alls, so let’s take a moment to appreciate that.

OK, moment over. This movie sucks. It’s a cheap direct-to-video crock that overpromises and underdelivers. Its weird affinity to Part 4 (cemented by some shared cast and crew) just means that they’re reheating the leftovers, and everything good about that dish was already pretty bland. Part 5 continues that film’s theme of slathering screeching music over totally banal sequences in the hopes that you might be too distracted by a date (or these days, a phone) to notice that nothing remotely scary is actually happening. This movie is another thin, useless lump carelessly slapped together by everyone but Screaming Mad George.

And he really must have been screaming mad, because he’s given fart-all to do here. Although his effects are still the best part of the movie, they look plasticky and cheap, through no fault of their own. This is what happens when you’re asked to bring kids’ toys to life. It’s a hazard of the job (although there’s no excuse for a shoddy, halfhearted, larger piece that shows up in the third act). 

There’s at least a shred of creativity here (an evil Santa doll with a revolving head that plays Jingle Bells until it switches to a fanged face and blares a funeral march is by far my favorite thing in the movie), but these scenes are far more slashery than the MPAA-deceiving body horror of Part 4, and as such have the bajeezus cut out of them. Every last drop of blood is sponged from this movie, so as an effects showcase there’s no way these crummy dime store monstrosities can hold a Citronella candle to the dripping insect nightmare appendages that torture Neith Hunter in Initiation.

But her performance is back to torture us, so that’s cool, I guess.

The performances are more nondescript than Part 4, which I suppose makes them better, and Mickey Rooney at least instills an endearing warmth into the film in his opening scene (he never manages to shed his palpable discomfort when he’s asked to be sinister in any way, shape, or form). But it’s not like anybody could have performed this dialogue well. Sarah and a nurse share a Room-esque greeting, two teens are forced through a sausage grinder of unpronounceable slang, and the material crumbles form everyone’s mouths like mothballs.

The one thing I can cling to is that, especially in the third act, things get real weird in an invigorating burst of camp. The film inexplicably careens into soap opera melodrama and psychosexual absurdism, dragging its million disparate plot points into a miasma of aborted twists, fascinating sex scenes that defy physics and logic, and a charming lack of self-awareness. This reaches a shrieking crescendo with a reveal that can be predicted from the first frame of the film, yet is carried out in the most batsh*t way imaginable. And then the film abruptly ends at an arbitrary point, just like last time.

[HIGHLIGHT FOR SPOILERS: I didn’t want to spoil any of the delicious, gooey weirdness on tap here, but screw it. Who’s ever gonna watch this film anyway? This movie ends with a sitcom-style warm smile when Derek asks who the strange man who saved their lives is. This man is his real father, a reveal treated with the bizarrely sincere under-reaction of “kids say the darndest things, don’t they?”]

Anyway, Silent Night, Deadly Night V: The Toy Maker isn’t the worst of the bunch, but that’s hardly cause for celebration. This movie can’t match the dizzy heights of Part 4, and that one was a steaming turd. It’s no wonder that after this, the franchise didn’t see the light of day until 2012.

TL;DR: Silent Night, Deadly Night V: The Toy Maker is at least a return to Christmas-themed horror, but is a weak swing and a major miss for this ancient franchise.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1296
Reviews In This Series
Silent Night, Deadly Night (Sellier Jr., 1984)
Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (Harry, 1986)
Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (Hellman, 1989)
Silent Night, Deadly Night IV: Initiation (Yuzna, 1990)
Silent Night, Deadly Night V: The Toy Maker (Kitrosser, 1991
Silent Night (Miller, 2012)

Christmas In July: O Unholy Night

Year: 1990

Director: Brian Yuzna

Cast: Clint Howard, Neith Hunter, Tommy Hinkley

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Happy July, everybody! Now that the fireworks have fizzled out and your stomachs are comfortably plump with barbecued foodstuffs, isn’t summer getting a little draining? Let’s beat the heat and dream of a white Christmas in July!

Two Christmases ago, I reviewed the first three Silent Night, Deadly Night films. Little did you know, but I stopped halfway through. That’s right, we’ve got three more Christmas crackerjacks to review, starting with Silent Night, Deadly Night IV: Initiation. As you may remember, SNDN’s 1 through 3 covered the continuing story of Billy and Ricky, two brothers who donned Santa suits to go on holiday rampages, punishing the naughty. Honestly, it doesn’t even matter if you remember, because Initiation has heck-all to do with them. Hell, it’s not even a slasher. Or a Christmas film, come to think of it. Oh sure, there are occasionally decorations in the background, but the Christmas in this movie looks exactly as festive as the sweltering view outside my window right now.

Although, now that you mention it, SNDN4 probably WAS shot in SoCal in July.

So, what the Hell is Silent Night Deadly Night IV: Initiation about, if it’s not about a psycho Santa with a bag of coal and an axe? Well… You tell me. I can’t make heads or tails of it, but here’s the basic plot. Kim (Neith Hunter) is a reporter for the calendar section of an LA newspaper who wants to cut her teeth on a real story like, say, that woman who just jumped of an apartment’s roof after spontaneously combusting. Her boyfriend Hank (Tommy Hinkley) is a hotshot reporter who doesn’t stand up for her and takes the story for himself, because their editor Eli (Reggie Bannister of Phantasm) runs his office like it’s a spinoff of Mad Men.

Frustrated, Kim decides to go rogue and investigate anyway, which leads her to Fima (Maud Adams, Octopussy herself), who lives up to her name, causing a disaster when she invited Kim into her group of friends that may or may not be a coven of witches. Spoiler: They super duper are and they Rosemary’s Baby her with drugs that make her hallucinate giant bugs as the first part of her initiation into their circle. The witches abhor men but for some reason they keep a Renfield-esque helper hobo named – inscrutably but perhaps inevitably – Ricky (Clint Howard of Evilspeak). Will Kim succumb to their vaguely lesbian seduction? Or will she… Oh, who cares?

If the screenwriter doesn’t, then neither shall I.

I don’t mean to damn SNDN4 with faint praise when I say that my single favorite thing about it is its opening credits, but it’s true. The Saul Bass-inspired sequence is a cheesy delight, stretching the titles into oblivion or squashing them out of existence. The credits form a colorful dance, leaping in and out of frame, spinning in on spirals, and interlocking with constant motion. It’s stylish, it’s engrossing, and it promises a fun, clever, maybe even Hitchcockian movie that unfortunately we never get. Well, at least we’ll always have each other, Title Cards.

The second best thing about SNDN 4 – by a mile – is the special effects. Makeup guru Screaming mad George is credited for “surrealistic visual design,” which could hardly be a more accurate, if fanciful, pronouncement. His effects, which crop up fairly frequently, are some of the best work of the early 90’s; a last gasp of the gooey, rubbery madness that haunted 80’s horror. We get giant bugs, twisted hands melting into a slavering beaklike mouth, living spaghetti, and a woman vomiting up a giant Fear Centipede. It’s gross, unforgettable stuff that clamps onto your brain and burrows directly into your fear center. Without a lick of research, I could have told you it was he who designed the infamous cockroach kill from Nightmare on Elm Street 4.

If all this feels like a repeat of director Brian Yuzna’s earlier FX flick Society, well… you would be right. Basically, SNDN 4 takes all those crumpled paper balls from under Society’s brainstorming desk, soothes them out, staples them together, and calls it a movie. The effects might be tremendous, but they have as much to do with the plot as Initiation has to do with the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise at large.

This scatterbrained sense of composition spreads across the entire film like a rot, shriveling everything good that attempts to blossom. This film is just plain clumsily assembled. It cuts from medium close-ups to other medium close-ups without context (or warning). There are pauses in the dialogue that stretch into massive chasms between words. The acting is shrill pantomime at best, blissed-out Xanax mumbling at worst. It just reeks of an utter and total lack of coverage. This is a movie that wasn’t cared for by anybody or anything without “George” in their name, left naked, and shivering behind a dumpster to perish.

Maybe they should have sent it to that orphanage from the first movie.

As amateurish as most of the film is, the director who made Society does show up to set every now and again. One shot that uses a pan up a building to disguise a time jump is chillingly surreal, and there’s a kill viewed from the perspective of Kim hiding under the bed that’s a masterpiece of suggested brutality. The script also feints toward social commentary with a scene discussing religious holidays and Biblical allegory, and the overall undercurrent of pushing back against sexism, but it squeaks and sputters like a leaking balloon around the midpoint, whereupon it devolves into a Ballbusting Lesbians romp without the commitment. Or the fun.

For the most part SNDN 4 is just a wisp of a film, flitting in and out of tired subgenres (it briefly flirts with being a slasher, but it has to grotesquely contort Clint Howard’s character to do so), arbitrarily tossing out totally disconnected dialogue and plot points because it seemed like a good idea at the time. The parts that aren’t packed to the gills with bugs and rubber are deathly dull, with a stifling pace that plods through the motions of about twenty different horror films. Kim gets knocked unconscious once every twenty minutes or so, a fate I fervently yearned for while slogging through theses segments.

Silent Night, Deadly Night IV: Initiation is a film that has no sense of identity. It’s not connected to its franchise, its holiday, or even itself. There are some truly spectacular moments that can be panned out of the silt of this movie, but there’s not enough gold to be worth rushing out to see it.

TL;DR: Silent Night, Deadly Night IV: Initiation is a wholly unfulfilling, inconsistent jumble redeemed only by some gonzo special effects.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1155

Reviews In This Series

Silent Night, Deadly Night (Sellier Jr., 1984)

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (Harry, 1986)

Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (Hellman, 1989)

Silent Night, Deadly Night IV: Initiation (Yuzna, 1990)

Silent Night, Deadly Night V: The Toy Maker (Kitrosser, 1991)

Silent Night (Miller, 2012)

Census Bloodbath: Cadet Killy

Year: 1981

Director: Eric Weston

Cast: Clint Howard, R. G. Armstrong, Joe Cortese

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I might as well just stop Census Bloodbath right here and now, because Evilspeak is possibly the most 80's movie ever made. Of course, I must continue - my contract with the Dark Ones has very little wiggle room. But this film is so exhaustingly, damnably culled from the darkest depths of the decade that it pushes beyond the envelope of camp into the dark, impenetrable void beyond.

Combining Video Nasty status-earning gore with the waning specter of Brian de Palma's Carrie, the caveman-like fascination 80's screenwriters had with rudimentary computer technology, and the burgeoning Satanic Panic, Evilspeak is an indelibly strange amalgamation. If it only included a pair of roller blades and maybe some Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, it would be the indisputable king of 80's horror.

All hail the goblin king.

Evilspeak tells the story of Stanley Coopersmith (Clint Howard), a cadet at West Andover Military Academy, which I guess unofficially continues my Back to Skull college slasher marathon. Every single person in the world hates Coopersmith. He's basically the Justin Bieber of the Massachusets military. 

The school bullies, led by the vicious Bubba (Don Stark) despise him because he is chubby and clumsy and school rules force him to play on their soccer team. Their bone-chillingly clever, incisive nickname for him is "Cooperdick." Keep it up, fellas. You're doing God's work. The Coach (Claude Earl Jones of Dark Night of the Scarecrow and Miracle Mile) hates him because he keeps losing games. The head of the school hates him because he is a poor orphan welfare case and a symbol of the school's financial erosion.

Coopersmith's only friends are his classmate Kowalski (Haywood Nelson of What's Happening!) and the school's cook, a gruff but understanding man named Jake (Lenny Montana of Blood Song). But after relentless torment at the hands of everybody and their mother and their kitchen sink, he's understandably a little irate at humanity in general. When he is sentenced to clean up the chapel basement as punishment for something he didn't do (I mean, seriously), he finds a Satanic book left behind by the excommunicated Spanish Satanist Father Lorenzo Esteban (Richard Moll of House).

He loads the text of the book into his trusty computer, and it becomes an expert on the rites of Black Mass. He fashions a secret room in a convenient basement cave, fills it with the entire candle stock of Pier One, and sets out to see if he can summon that pesky Devil. While he searches for the blood of a consecrated host ("Gotta have it," he sighs, like he's buying pomegranate juice at the supermarket), the computer gets possessed by the vengeful spirit of Esteban, who seeks revenge for something or other.

Maybe he's mad he didn't snag some of that Apple stock before he died.

For just about its entirety, Evilspeak is a supernatural bullying drama rather than a slasher movie, only picking up any sort of body count during its final sequence. So as a candidate for Census Bloodbath it's not exactly prime, but as a candidate for cheesy Satanic horror it's... still not exactly prime. There's a great deal of amusement to be found in the computer graphics which have aged worse than the horse-drawn carriage, but beyond that the film is plodding. Despite matching the classic Carrie in its slow-burn buildup to an explosion of carnage, it lacks that film's sense of gravitas and thematic resonance.

For the bulk of its run time, Evilspeak devotes itself to a depiction of bullying unrivaled in even the most hardcore John Hughes films as Bubba and his crew prank, injure, and verbally assault Coopersmith. They toss his hat out the window, sabotage his class project, and (last but not least) slaughter his dog. It's unrelenting and mean-spirited, doing a good job of depicting just how bad a situation the act of bullying can cause, but not providing much reason to enjoy the act of watching the film.

It's a nice bit of representation to have a lead character who's a little dumpy, so I respect that, but the tone of the film is just a bit too morbid. Not even unintentionally campy moments like a character vowing to "extract revenge," the music evoking Tom and Jerry whenever the janitor comes onscreen, or the bullies attempting to seem threatening at a roller disco can save Evilspeak from its dismal fog.

Not even THIS scene can - OK, this scene is pretty cool.

The saving grace of Evilspeak is its ending. The supernatural horror steadily builds up in the background in the form of some surprisingly effective low-key fright gags until it screams like a kettle, pulling out all the stops and dumping the entire remainder of its budget.

Many of the movies persecuted in Britain as Video Nasties live on the strength of one particular scene and this film is no different. This grand explosion of a finale features decapitations galore in a burning church, an evil heard of pigs mauling a soccer team, and a bully's still-being heart ripped from his chest. It's, in a word, awesome, and the one reason I would recommend this film to anyone.

You'll have a devil of a time.

If you're stalwart enough to survive the dreary excesses of the first half of the film, Evilspeak can be immensely rewarding. And its attempts at depicting the mistreatment of young cadets is admittedly impactful. Although I wish that it was more than a cut-and-dry Satanic revenge story and had more thematic meat on its bones, the flick is chock full of top notch Magic Computer nonsense and surprisingly decent grue when the time comes.

I'm afraid I have to halfheartedly recommend it. Do with that what you must.

Killer: Father Lorenzo Esteban (Richard Moll) and/or Lucifer (Himself), acting through a boxy computer and/or Stanley Coopersmith (Clint Howard)
Final Girl: Not even close.
Best Kill: As the wrist of a large crucifix begins to show a pulse, the nail through Christ's hand wriggles out and impales Reverend Jameson's forehead.

Sign of the Times: Literally anything that happens to any computer, which is pretty much everything.

Scariest Moment: A weird fetus creature in a jar begins to wriggle and escape during a dream sequence.
Weirdest Moment: Coopersmith asks his computer "What are the keys to the kingdom of Satan's magic?" and somehow expects an answer in the era before Google.
Champion Dialogue: "Don't they teach you damn fool cadets nothin' about pigs?"
Body Count: 13; not counting poor Freddy the dog.

1. Topless Sacrifice is decapitated with a sword.
2. Sarge's head is spun around backward.
3. Miss Friedemeyer is mauled by pigs in the shower.
4. Colonel Kincaid is impaled on a hanging chandelier.
5. Reverend Jameson is impaled in the forehead with a crucifix nail.
6. Cadet #1 burns to death.
7. Colonel Something or Other has a sword burst his skull.
8. Cadet #2 is mauled by pigs.
9. Cadet #3 is decapitated with a sword.
10. Cadet #4 is killed offscreen.
11. Coach is decapitated with a sword.
12. Cadet #5 is mauled by pigs.
13. Bubba is strangled and has his heart pulled out of his chest. 

TL;DR: Evilspeak is a mean-spirited slog that is occasionally livened up by some top notch practical effects.
Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 1229