Silent Night Deadly Night

Directed by Charles E. Sellier Jr., Silent Night Deadly Night details the carnage that ensues after a young man (Robert Brian Wilson’s Billy), traumatized from witnessing a Santa-suit-wearing criminal murder his parents, embarks on a killing spree on Christmas Eve. Filmmaker Sellier Jr. does an effective job of instantly luring the viewer into the decidedly hit-and-miss proceedings, as Silent Night Deadly Night kicks off with a surprisingly engrossing prologue detailing the aforementioned murder of Billy’s parents. (There’s also a fantastic scene in which Billy’s seemingly comatose grandfather suddenly awakens and tells him to fear Santa Claus.) It’s only as the movie enters its midsection and essentially transforms into a distressingly generic endeavor that one’s interest begins to flag, as Sellier Jr., working from Michael Hickey’s screenplay, delivers an entirely by-the-book slasher that’s been suffused with some of the hoariest cliches and conventions of the genre – with the decidedly uninvolving atmosphere compounded by a proliferation of one-dimensional, one-note periphery figures. And although the picture has admittedly been peppered with effective kill sequences, including the beheading of a downhill sledder, Silent Night Deadly Night ultimately progresses into a somewhat anticlimactic finish that does, in the end, cement its place as a sporadically watchable yet mostly underwhelming piece of work.

** out of ****