Shitty Flicks is an ongoing column that celebrates the most hilariously incompetent, amusingly pedestrian, and mind-bogglingly stupid movies ever made by people with a bit of money, some prior porn-directing experience, and no clue whatsoever. It is here you will find unrestrained joy in movies meant to terrify and thrill, but instead poke at your funny bone with their weird, mutant camp-girl penis.
WARNING: I tend to give away major plot points and twist endings in my reviews because, whatever. Shut up.
The first
Silent Night, Deadly Night is an unremarkable, yet fun and unapologetically gimmicky slasher movie whose late-1980s presence at theaters was very brief; lame parents with lame ideals protested the movie’s depiction of a killer Santa offing “naughty” people and had the movie successfully banned from all theaters. The victorious parents then turned their protesting to the local gay (probably). For a long time,
SNDN was a mirage until it was released on VHS years later and became a cult favorite.
Silent Night, Deadly Night isn’t groundbreaking in any way, and compared to today’s standards, where we’re able to see testicles ripped off a man and fed to wild dogs in theatrical films (preceded by commercials for Fanta), the idea of a man in a Santa costume offing people doesn’t just pale in comparison—it’s become its own punchline.
A few years down the road, morons decided that Silent Night, Deadly Night—the movie that no one saw—needed a sequel, anyway. And with an entire first film from which to haphazardly pluck footage, a lazy and monotonous wrap-around story was written so audiences could see the original movie that disappeared from theaters, but in a new way.
Our story begins on Christmas Eve with Ricky, a young man currently residing in a mental institution. He smokes, casts hard glares, and makes black men nervous.
Dr. Bloom, a man who looks eerily similar to the dad from "7th Heaven," sets up his tape recorder and introduces himself.
“Fuck off, doc,” Ricky snarls, and with this first line, the acting for the movie is already pitiful.
“Who killed your parents, Ricky?” Dr. Bloom asks.
Ricky’s eyebrows dance all over his face as he smiles and answers: “Santa Claus.”
And we hit our first flashback.
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"Say, Ricky...I don't mean to sound jive, but, gee whiz,
why not pray to Christ?" |
Ricky, merely a baby in a car seat, and his older brother, Billy, are on their way to visit the kids’ grandfather. Billy, who is disgustingly adorable, looks precious and asks kid-like questions about Santa Claus. The parents play along until they come across Santa Claus himself in the middle of the road. Santa waves the car down, and when they pull up next to him, he pulls out a gun and shoots Dad in the face. Billy runs off into the bushes as Santa Claus makes Mommy’s boobs tumble out of her sweater. Then, for good measure, he cuts her throat. Ricky bawls in the car as Billy loses his shit in more ways than poop.
The boys are shipped off to an orphanage, where Billy can’t help but get himself into trouble by drawing pictures of an evil Santa, and I can’t help but notice that Billy goes from being an adorable five-year-old to a slightly older boy who looks like his face was fucked by a lawnmower.
Billy is carefully watched over by two nuns: Mother Superior, whose idea of growth and development is to dispense justice, and Sister Mary, who fears that Billy’s mind has been ass-fucked by the massacre of Christmas past.
The boy is punished for his bad drawing of Santa, but Sister Mary frees him from his room and coerces him to go outside and mingle with the other children. On the way there, Billy hears fucking, so he does a bit of spying through a keyhole. He sees tits, freaks out, and fleas. Mother Superior later catches up to Billy outside and tells the boy that what he witnessed was naughty. She tells him that people like that must be punished—that “punishment is absolute.” Then she whips him on the ass with his belt, even though he didn’t do anything.
“Do you dream, Ricky?” Dr. Bloom asks.
Ricky turns and glares. “I DON’T SLEEP.”
Well then.
Billy’s time at the orphanage isn’t the best time anyone’s ever had. Not only does Mother Superior constantly pick on him, the other children inexplicably tie him up at night and beat him with stuff, a la Full Metal Jacket. On Christmas Day, Mother Superior forces Billy to confront his demons and sit on a visiting Santa’s lap. Well, Billy cold-clocks Santa with an admirable right hook, sending Santa sailing to the floor.
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Say what you will about Paul Walker, but he's always ready to party. |
When Billy turns 18, he leaves the orphanage and works at a job that Mother Superior found for him: Santa Claus at a local toy store. Yeah, she's a dickhead like that.
Billy threatens each child that sits atop his lap, and he handles them with great zest: “You’re being naughty. I don’t give toys to naughty children. I punish them. Severely.”
Later that night at the employee Christmas party, Billy smells sex, and he follows two employees to the warehouse where he spots another tit.
“Naughty!” Billy screams, strangling one of them with a string of Christmas blinkies. “Punishment good!” he shrieks, stabbing the other in the stomach.
The store manager, hearing the disturbance, enters the warehouse and immediately has his head caved in by a claw hammer.
That Billy works fast!
He then grabs a bow 'n' arrow and shoots the last employee: an old bitty woman who attempts to smash the front windows of the store and flee.
We flash forward again to even more titters, where Billy amusingly dispenses justice to a girl with a pair of deer antlers before strangling a dude and tossing him out the window.
Later, while fleeing from the cops, Billy stumbles across two sledders who are just asking for it. He takes their heads and leaves, having fulfilled his expectations for this scene.
Thanks to the help of Sister Mary, the cops make it to the orphanage before Billy does. A cop dashes out of his truck, takes aim at a Santa Claus reaching out to the children, and shoots him.
“One problem,” Ricky says. “It was Old Man Kelsey, the janitor" (although according to the first film, it was actually Father O’Brien).
Billy unsurprisingly pops up and barely farts out “punish!” before killing the cop. He also kills a snowman, because my god, Billy really hates Christmas.
A stupid kid unlocks the door and lets Billy in as Mother Superior stands her ground. “There is no Santa Claus!” she bellows, as Billy raises his axe. Another cop shows up just in time and they’re finally able to shoot the real Santa. (Well, you know.)
“You’re safe now,” Billy says to the kids. “Santa Claus is gone.” And he dies right in front of Ricky, who then says, “naughty.”
Ricky continues his story, which is finally new material.
Soon after the massacre at the orphanage, Ricky is adopted by a Jewish couple who obviously don’t celebrate Christmas. Out on the street, Ricky’s simmering madness flares at the sight of a red drape in a store window, as it reminds him of Santa’s suit.
Five years later, Ricky’s stepdad dies, leaving just Ricky and his mother. After the funeral, he wanders off to be alone where he, just like his brother, effortlessly stumbles across breasts.
“I never told anyone this before, but, HERE IT COMES!” Ricky promises directly to the camera, his eyebrows quivering.
He creepily watches the couple for a few minutes until the man becomes a bit demanding. He slaps her and goes to his jeep for some more beer. Ricky figures he’ll do a solid for the poor girl, and so he drives the jeep over the man, over and over, until it becomes ridiculous.
“Thank you,” the girl stammers, not at all afraid or upset, and stumbles off into the woods.
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| RICKY FACE # 1: Angry + Found Some Money |
Dr. Bloom scrawls
RED CAR!
in his notebook.
“Good point!” Ricky says, spying over his shoulder.
“My old lady couldn’t afford to send me to college,” Ricky bitches. “So I got a JOB instead!” The amount of disdain present in this statement either reeks of genuine disgust or severely tepid acting.
Dr. Bloom gears up for another round of Ricky’s over-acting, but Ricky promises him, “You’ll like this next part, Doc. It was like a squirrel getting its nuts squeezed.”
During this job, Ricky spies one man accosting another over some owed money in a back alley while taking out some garbage. The man after the money takes out a red handkerchief and wipes his face, thus setting off Ricky’s rage. He finds a random umbrella in a trash pile and runs it through the man, snarling “naughty” and opening up the umbrella to punctuate this newest murder.
Dr. Bloom whips out a photo and throws it across the desk. “Who is this?” he asks.
Ricky turns and sees the photo of a reasonably attractive blond, a former flame of his. “Jennifer. She was a knock-out. I never wanted to lose her.”
And so we flashback again so we can meet Jennifer, who has a laughable car accident with our unfortunate lead, and the two kids immediately rub skin. After a tepid love scene, comprised only of side-boob, they go to the cinema to see a film. That film? The first Silent Night, Deadly Night.
Why—oh.
The movie begins, but a rowdy movie-goer in the back row gets on Ricky’s nerves.
“Faggot!” the rowdy man shouts at Ricky.
“Well, we know that’s not true,” Jennifer retorts, as if Ricky might have actually been worried about his sexuality for a moment.
“What’s this movie about, anyway?” Ricky asks.
“Oh, it’s great. It’s about a guy who dresses up as Santa Claus and kills people.”
“What?!” Ricky shrieks and quickly becomes enraged.
Why would you go see a fucking movie without knowing what it is, Ricky, you dickhead?
Ricky then beats the living shit out of the rowdy man.
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After the cancellation of Arrested Development,
Executive Producer Ron Howard just couldn't deal. |
In his absence, one of Jennifer’s previous lovers, Chip, an extremely unnatural blond fellow who presents himself as the generic cocksure rich boy we all know doesn’t have much time left on Earth.
The next day, while taking a walk, Ricky and Jennifer run afoul of Chip, who immediately oozes with douchebag residue. Chip acts the cock, makes a reference to his “red” car to set up his death, and then has his face melted with the aid of a car battery.
Jennifer shrieks at Ricky that she hates him and tries to flee, but Ricky makes quick work of her with a car antenna.
“Uh oh!” she unrealistically yells before meeting Elvis.
And thus begins the best sequence ever shot for a movie that starred Ricky as the lead.
A cop rushes in, gun in hand, to take care of the murderous Ricky, but he soon has his own brains blown out with a quick flick of Ricky’s wrist.
Now armed with the cop's gun, Ricky strolls down the street, shooting a man who comes out of his house, demanding to know why all the noise. “Motherfucker,” Ricky mutters, and laughs.
He then spots a hapless man putting out cans of trash.
“GARBAGE DAY!” Ricky shouts, shooting him in super cool slow motion.
Ricky continues his stroll down the street, and after allowing a moment to capture the entire film crew in the shot...
...he meets a little girl with a red ribbon in her hair. Despite the red, he lets her go, even smiling at her. And since the movie is making up its own rules, Ricky figures he’ll shoot randomly at a car coming at him until it overturns, crashes, and explodes. In what is actually a legitimately cool stunt, and in a single take, the car flips and narrowly avoids hitting Ricky by seriously only a few inches, had it not been for a quick turn of his body.
Ricky giggles in his typical Ricky self and then continues on with the massacre, or at least tries to. But alas, his murdering was not meant to be. Ricky eventually hits a road block of cops and tries to turn the gun on himself. A look of disappointment crosses his face when he is greeted with an empty click.
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| "JOKES AND DREAMS COME FROM MY IDEA BALL." |
Ricky, it seems, is done reminiscing, since at some point during this story he has opted to murder Dr. Bloom, yet keep talking, anyway. He then flees the hospital to see to some unfinished business… to rent Silent Night, Deadly Night.
Or...
Sister Mary tells the cops that Ricky is most likely going after Mother Superior, now wheelchair-bound thanks to a stroke and living in isolation.
Ricky finally dons a Santa suit for the first and only time in this movie, but sans beard, and calls Mother Superior to let her know “Santa’s back.”
She nervously hangs up and wheels her puny body over to the TV and watches the Christmas parade and babbles typical Christian “Bah, blasphemy!” remarks at the big balloon animals on the screen.
Not too long after, Ricky begins to chop his way through Mother Superior’s front door (which is unsubtly numbered 666) and chases her from one room to the next, smashing doors and delivering really bad one-liners.
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| RICKY FACE # 2: Angry + Lemons |
Mother Superior, who is clearly played by a different actress than the woman in the first movie's footage, wears prosthetic scars on her face that are allegedly caused by strokes. She gets booted down the steps, somehow survives, and escapes in yet another wheelchair.
She grabs a knife from the kitchen and then suddenly grows a pair of nun balls. “You must be punished,” she screams. “You are being very, very naughty!”
“Naughty this!” Ricky nonsensically screams before delivering an admittedly satisfying, yet off-screen blow to Mother Superior’s nun head.
The cops enter and spy Mother Superior sitting motionless, her back to them. I bet you a sawbuck she’s just aces.
A cop gently shakes her and her head falls off a very cleanly cut neck, even though Ricky’s ax thrust was a downward blow. Sister Mary (who is there for some reason) screams at the head and falls down and almost becomes Ricky’s next victim.
The cops shoot Ricky, who is so insane at this point that he can't even feel bullets. One more blow to the chest does the trick, however, and sends Ricky flying through a glass patio door.
“He’s gone, sister. It’s over,” says the cop.
And then Ricky’s eyes open as Sister Mary screams at a head.
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| Please, no head jokes. A real nun has died. |
Ricky further continues his adventures in Silent Night, Deadly Night 3, where he is brought back to life by a mad scientist, and suddenly played by Bill Moseley.
God bless us, everyone.
