Say what you want about the first “Silent Night, Deadly Night”, but the button-mashing 1984 slasher achieves a certain ghoulish effect simply by contriving new and upsetting opportunities for its axe-wielding Santa Claus to “punish” the wicked. There have been five sequels to that “Halloween” clone and now two remakes. The second reboot, also called “Silent Night, Deadly Night,” re-imagines the first movie’s disturbed lead character, Billy (now played by Rohan Campbell), as a tortured antihero.
Like the first “Silent Night, Deadly Night”’s Billy, Campbell’s protagonist loses his parents in a freakish childhood incident involving a gun-toting Kris Kringle. Unlike the original Billy, this new one tries to control his seasonal urges. And like Dexter Morgan before him, Billy only slays bad people. He also has a chatty voice in his head (Mark Acheson), making parts of this new remake an unhinged sort of buddy movie.
That twist on the first movie’s premise is a gamble, and it mostly doesn’t pay off since Billy’s new creators never dig deep enough into his inherently messed-up emotions. Some gnarly kill scenes are definitely a plus, but what’s the point of a more character-driven remake if you don’t do anything with your characters?
The new “Silent Night, Deadly Night” re-imagines Billy as a Byronic drifter like the one from the 1978 “The Incredible Hulk” TV show, only instead of a radioactive id monster, this guy’s compelled to murder people by the voice of Charlie, the killer Santa who took out Billy’s parents. Billy started killing ten years ago, as he explains in a later scene. He was only 17 years old at the time and far less comfortable with the idea of dispatching bad people to stay balanced. Now he’s wandered to Hackett, MN, where he settles down and takes a job working at a holiday trinket shop run by affable Mr. Sims (David Lawrence Brown) and his charming daughter Pamela (Ruby Modine).
Billy immediately crushes on Pamela, and his attraction only grows after he learns that she has behavioral issues, too. Mr. Sims jokingly refers to Pam’s righteous outbursts as “EPD” or “explosive personality disorder,” But who knows what that means in a movie where even a killer Santa has standards?
This version of Billy targets people who are unquestionably naughty in the context of a decades-late slasher. He’s helped by Charlie, whom Billy later claims has an extra-sensory understanding of who deserves to die and what’s going on around them. Billy also thinks of Charlie as a surrogate dad, a can of Freudian worms that’s barely opened.
Unfortunately, while Billy’s been doing this for some time, there’s no real dramatic tension in watching him drift from one kill to the next without a pressing need to either be caught or escape detection. Instead, we get a wan romance with Pamela, which is mainly intriguing given the suggestion that Billy and Pamela have matching emotional baggage to unpack. Sadly, that’s another conceptual cul-de-sac in this meandering cash-in.
For the most part, the new “Silent Night, Deadly Night” coasts on the sketchy notion that this new Billy is sorta likable, or at least trying his best despite his sordid circumstances. Caring about Billy is easy for the same reason it was easy to invest in the original Billy—this guy really looks like he’s struggling. Campbell and Modine also have an awkward, but credible on-screen chemistry, making their characters’ stalled romance that much more frustrating, especially given its formulaic conclusion.
Movies like “Silent Night, Deadly Night” ultimately serve as meat puppet conveyor belts, and this new one provides no real surprises or thrills in that regard. The most elaborate murder set piece comes partway through the movie, and it’s already prominent in its advertisements. Billy stumbles on a neo-Nazi holiday party, which gives him a whole dance hall full of disposable victims to work through. And he does, of course, with a cheerfully ironic hair metal song on the soundtrack and a high body count on display. None of Billy’s victims really matter, though, not beyond the pretext they give Billy to do what he does. I wanted to root for him, but the fight choreography is dull, and each new death is more generic than the last.
The problem with this new “Silent Night, Deadly Night” isn’t that it tries something different, but that its creators didn’t follow through on their gonzo impulses. Unholy conviction sets apart the first movie, and a few scattered moments from the sequels. This new holiday chiller mostly idles when it should charge at its most unsound ideas. A nice guy killer isn’t an inherently bad idea, but a nice guy killer Santa should be so much more full-throated than this one is.
