To All A Goodnight (1980)

Four years ago I revisited a number of movies in the "slasher-Santa" subgenre and was surprised to realize a surprising number were good. Even many of those I dislike deserve credit for being smarter, better shot, or at least based on more a more interesting foundation than the straw man I'd concocted. Let that be a lesson to you about making assumptions.

I bring all this up mainly because the most interesting thing about the 1980 horror film, To All A Goodnight, might be how perfectly it encapsulated my original ignorant assumptions about what the subgenre would be like. This is pretty much exactly what I'd imagined the subgenre to be like: cheap, lazy, dumb, and misogynistic with few redeeming qualities.

The movie plays like a knockoff of Black Christmas, minus the complex themes, genuine terror, eerie fear, iconic performances, effective direction... basically anything and everything that makes Black Christmas endure. In its place... gah. There's just not much here. Not much story, not much in terms of performances, no real scares...

Let's cut to the synopsis. The movie is set in a finishing school somewhere in southern California. I'm assuming they chose to set this in a finishing school rather than a college sorority as a nominal deviation from the setting of Black Christmas, a decision slightly undermined by a girl chanting, "Sorority, sorority," in the movie's cold opening. Or maybe it's a sorority house at a finishing school? Hard to say, since finishing schools were basically extinct by 1980, so there's not much of a real world analogue to compare this to.

At any rate, the movie kicks off with a prologue set a couple years earlier (also at Christmas), when the girls (some wearing Santa hats or other Christmas attire) are hazing a student by chasing her with weapons, inadvertently causing her to fall off a balcony to her death.

Despite being witnessed by several characters in the movie, this won't come up again until the very end of the movie.

After the credits, the movie picks back up with all but a handful of students leaving for Christmas break two years later. Those left include four extremely horny girls, one virginal blonde named Nancy, an aging housemother, and a creepy groundskeeper who walks around with giant gardening shears, talks about the Bible a lot, and repeatedly warns Nancy something evil is at the school. 

He's a red herring, incidentally.

Soon boyfriends arrive (everyone except Nancy is either involved with a boy or hooks up with one). They drug the housemother and start having sex and/or getting murdered by someone dressed in a Santa outfit, complete with a plastic mask. The mysterious killer then drags the bodies away and buries them, which is about as compelling as you'd expect.

By the next morning, they're down to about half the cast, though no one realizes anything's up for quite a while. Eventually, Nancy stumbles across the body of the groundskeeper, and they call the police, who fail to find any of the other corpses buried around the school. Detective Polansky assigns two other cops to watch over the house, then leaves.

No one other than Nancy and a nerdy guy who becomes something of a love interest take any of this remotely seriously enough. 

The cops are quickly dispatched by the killer, along with more of the coeds. Eventually, the movie whittles the surviving kids down to Nancy, the nerd, and a girl who's completely lost her mind and starts dancing and singing to herself. The phone lines are cut, and there's no way out (for some reason), so the only option is to fight.

If you were wondering where the housemother was in all this... yeah, she's the killer. She's the mother of the girl who died at the beginning, and she's out for vengeance. Nancy points out that she wasn't even at the school at the time, but the crazed housemother insists she's lying and chases her with a knife. Eventually she falls off the same balcony somehow - the editing is profoundly muddled here, so I couldn't even guess as to whether Nancy tripped her, pushed her, or if she just tripped on a banana peel or something. Fortunately, it doesn't matter, since she's dead.

...And found by the other killer dressed in a Santa outfit. That'd be her husband, Detective Polansky, which... okay, to be fair that does fill in a few dozen plot holes surrounding everything from how the killer is able to move around so fast to how the police failed to notice a bunch of freshly dug graves in their supposedly thorough search. It doesn't explain why he left two of his deputies there and killed them, but maybe there were budget cuts or something.

Anyway, before he can kill Nancy, the nerd shoots him with a crossbow that was introduced in an earlier scene. Nancy and the nerd then run off to get help while the other survivor dances and sings to herself on the balcony. I think it's supposed to be eerie or something.

There are, to be fair, handful of things the movie does decently. First, I think we can all agree, "To All A Goodnight," is a pretty good name for a Christmas horror movie. Second, there's a shot of Nancy and the nerd going up some stairs shot at a Dutch angle with lighting coming through a stained glass window. If there were other good shots in the movie, I probably wouldn't even think to mention it, but... look, one good shot is better than none. And they use that framing and lighting again when they go down those stairs, so that's two good shots! While the "second killer" twist isn't interesting dramatically, I actually do appreciate how good a job it does filling in obvious plot holes throughout. It was pretty clear from early on the housemother was going to be the killer (just by process of elimination), so adding an accomplice was a good call. Lastly, the soundtrack is occasionally neat. Sure, it sounds like a Goblin cover band, but it added a bit of ambiance to a movie starved for it.

In more or less every other aspect imaginable, this was just bad. First time director David Hess doesn't display any sort of artistic vision or thematic depth (and before you accuse me of expecting too much, I'll remind you that the movies this is copying - Black Christmas, Italian Giallos, Carpenter's Halloween - absolutely offer substance and style). The narrative is structured as a cheap morality story implying that sexually promiscuous women deserve to be punished, but it's impossible to take even that offensive message at face value considering how eager the movie is to showcase nudity. This is cheap exploitation... and frankly if you're looking for that you'll be far better served by watching Silent Night, Deadly Night, which employs more competent cinematography in the service of its exploitation.

Stylistically, the movie seems largely confused. Several of the characters are exaggerated, which would be well served by a campier approach, but the movie is shot much more like a '70s drama than an over-the-top '80s horror/comedy. This isn't funny or engrossing, nor is it particularly shocking or disturbing. The gore isn't awful for the era, but there's nothing here inspired or impressive.

The Christmas aspects are fairly surface level. Like many, many horror movies before and since, the premise is leaning on the isolation created when a typically busy environment is largely abandoned for the holidays. The movie has its killers dress as Santa Claus in a nod to some of the students donning Christmas paraphernalia in the opening, but there's no psychological rationale or mythology referenced. I don't recall any reference to being "naughty or nice," nor is there a sense in which they believe they're inhabiting the role of Saint Nicholas or drawing on some element of that associated power. Likewise, there are no children present to be confused by the outfit. It just seems to be a random thing the producers thought was funny or scary.

It's very difficult to imagine anyone finding this more than mildly diverting. The movie pales in comparison to both the films it's mimicking and the generation of similar films that followed it.