Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987)

Both of the following statements can be true: Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 is a rushed, direct-to-video production that barely qualifies as an actual movie, and - based on what director Lee Harvey was working with - it's shocking it's not far worse. The original plan was to release recut footage from the first movie as a new movie in a bait-and-switch scheme to trick fans into handing over more money. And, to be clear, repackaged clips are still a significant part of the sequel, with most of the first half devoted to a series of flashbacks to famous scenes from part one. But the team making this managed to secure a modest budget and a rushed shooting schedule, and were able to cobble together something that could be reasonably called a movie. They deserve credit for that.

Maybe a little more than that, too. While the movie isn't at all good, it contains sections and choices that are smarter - or at least more ethical - than you might expect, particularly when compared against the first film. That movie treated sexual assault as lurid and titillating, while this... well, it's still got some of those clips from the first movie in here, but it mitigates those with a sequence acknowledging consent in a surprisingly responsible manner, considering the era and subgenre. When a man ignores those rules, the movie doesn't take it as an opportunity to exploit a woman's body (again, unlike part one). She's ultimately saved by Ricky, who "punishes" her assailant but recognizes her as innocent (yet another departure from the earlier film, where Billy executes anyone engaging in sexual activities, consensually or otherwise).

I don't want to oversell anything here: the sequence in question is campy and largely played for laughs, but it displays a far more responsible portrayal of assault than was present in the original.

It also establishes the idea of the Slasher Santa as vigilante - or even hero - rather than a one-dimensional killer. The movie doesn't sustain this: before long, Ricky is indiscriminately knocking off random people left and right (though as is common in this subgenre, he spares kids), but I wouldn't be shocked if this were the spark leading the 2025 reboot (which - unlike the original movie or the even-trashier 2012 version - I really like).

We actually get a few sequences of Ricky acting as a vigilante, told in flashback along with almost everything else. But let's back up, seeing as I'm well into this review and haven't established the premise, plot, or even explained who the hell Billy and Ricky are.

The 1984 movie this is following told the story of "Billy," a kid who watched his parents murdered on Christmas Eve by someone dressed as Santa, was subsequently raised in a Catholic orphanage overseen by a fanatical Mother Superior drilling the idea of punishment as an absolute good into the boy's head, then subsequently went on a Christmas Eve murder spree that brought him back to the orphanage, where he was gunned down while attempting to murder the aforementioned Mother Superior.

Oh, and he had a younger brother, who the end implied would one day follow in his footsteps. Said brother, of course, is Ricky, who we catch up with in a mental institute years later on Christmas Eve as he meets a new psychologist. The first forty minutes consist of him relaying the events of the first movie to that psychologist before transitioning to similar vignettes of his life after seeing his brother killed.

These sequences don't really add up to much of a story. They're told in flashback, don't line-up well, and certainly don't provide any sustained insight into the character, whose arc seems to shift between sections. You can choose to interpret key events as catalysts, but the movie doesn't break free from the reality that they're clearly writing and filming around a tight schedule. The goal really seems to have been to get as much decent looking footage onscreen and hope the audience fills in the gaps.

So as a child, he's pathologically afraid of nuns as a result of his harsh upbringing. Then, after his foster father dies, Ricky becomes a vigilante, punishing the guilty (and for a while only the guilty). Then he falls in love with a woman and starts punishing people who annoy him. Then he kills her ex-boyfriend and her, because... he learns she hadn't been a virgin prior to their relationship? Or maybe because she freaked out when he murdered someone in front of her? This sudden outburst of violence was triggered by him watching a movie about a killer Santa Claus. Beyond that, the movie's unclear what caused him to pivot from trying for a normal life to gleefully just killing everyone around him, aside from seeing a movie reminiscent of his brother's last few days alive. Eventually, he almost kills himself and is only stopped by running out of bullets and being taken into custody.

I should note that only that last sequence was set around Christmas. Sort of. I mean, presumably he caught that movie around Christmas, since that's when you'd expect that sort of thing to be in theaters. Then, after he kills his girlfriend and goes on a brief killing spree, there are lights and decorations in the background. The foliage, however, strongly implies this was shot in the fall, but - again - they made use of the limited resources available.

When we get back to his psychological eval, we see he's murdered the psychologist. He then breaks out, kills a Salvation Army Santa, takes his suit, then hunts down and murders the Mother Superior before being gunned down by the police. This final sequence, which represents the entire time Ricky is wearing a Santa costume, encompasses about ten minutes. Most of Ricky's killing was done earlier in flashbacks while wearing normal clothes, though it should be noted the color red was a constant trigger.

No discussion of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 would be complete without some mention of Eric Freeman, who played Ricky. The Bloody Disgusting article I linked to earlier has more on him, but the short version is he took this as a short term gig, approached it as campy horror/comedy he assumed would be immediately forgotten, and wound up becoming something of a punchline, which seems unfair. It's true his portrayal is absurd, but wasn't that the assignment? If anything's to blame, it's the editing and score, which imply there's something here worth taking seriously, when nothing could be further from the truth. This is a mismatch between acting and tone, and that's not his fault.

In terms of Christmas, there's not much that isn't obvious. This repeats a lot of the thematic beats from the first movie, particularly surrounding the horrors of religious fanaticism and its consequences. Likewise, it's exploring the same dichotomy in the Santa mythos between rewarding and punishing. I suppose there's also a case to be made that the structure of the frame story plays into the idea the holidays are a point of reflection existing outside of normal time, but... let's be real: that's at best a happy accident. They had ten days, a quarter million dollars, and a bunch of footage to recycle. That's why the movie's a bunch of flashbacks.

I'm not sure there's much more to say about this. I found its connections to last year's shockingly good reboot interesting from an academic standpoint, but beyond that there's just not much substance here. Freeman is kind of fun as an over-the-top campy serial killer - serious horror fans may want to track this down for context to a bunch of memes taken from his performance. But other than that, there's nothing in this making it worth watching, even if you're a fan of the original.