NINJA CLOWN

 

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LEVITY

SHITTY FLICKS: SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT: PART 2

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

MEMENTO MORI: PART V

I will not ask where thou liest low,
Nor gaze upon the spot;
There flowers or weeds at will may grow,
So I behold them not:
It is enough for me to prove
That what I lov'd, and long must love,
Like common earth can rot;
To me there needs no stone to tell,
'T is Nothing that I lov'd so well. 

- Lord Byron, And Thou Art Dead, As Young And Fair

UNSUNG HORRORS: RAVENOUS

Every once in a while, a genuinely great horror movie—one that would rightfully be considered a classic, had it gotten more exposure and love at the box office—makes an appearance. It comes, no one notices, and it goes. But movies like this are important. They need to be treasured and remembered. If intelligent, original horror is supported, then that's what we'll begin to receive, in droves. We need to make these movies a part of the legendary genre we hold so dear. Because these are the unsung horrors. These are the movies that should have been successful, but were instead ignored. They should be rightfully praised for the freshness and intelligence and craft that they have contributed to our genre.

So, better late than never, we’re going to celebrate them now… one at a time.

Dir. Antonia Bird

1999

Fox

United States

"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster…"

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Eat me."

- Anonymous

I’m not sure how a movie like Ravenous ever received a wide release. It surely wouldn't today – not even with more immense star power. The film’s budget was a moderate one, being estimated at just twelve million (in late 90s terms), and despite the relatively low budget, the film was a box office disaster upon its release. It received warm notices from critics, notably Roger Ebert, who called it “clever in the way it avoids most of the clichés of the vampire movie by using cannibalism, and most of the clichés of the cannibal movie by using vampirism. It serves both dishes with new sauces.”

I applaud FOX for releasing the film, for today they are a studio known as troublesome and bullying; they have gained a reputation for meddling in the productions of some of their tent pole films, neutering some of their harder franchises (Alien, Die Hard ) for the PG-13 crowd, and for being unreasonably fan unfriendly. How a movie like Ravenous ever managed to slip past their radar I’ll never know, but I’ll be forever grateful it did.

Ravenous was one of Guy Pearce’s immediate post-L.A. Confidential roles, and it was certainly a bold one to take on. There is very little dialogue for his character (he does not utter a full onscreen line of dialogue for nearly the first third of the movie), and his role as Captain Boyd, the disgraced war hero of the Mexican-American War, did not stand a chance against Robert Carlyle’s truly maniacal Colqhoun. The role of Boyd is understated and unorthodox – for much of the film he is a weakling coward, and then later, something comparable to a drug addict desperate for a fix.

But make no mistake – this movie belongs to Robert Carlyle. Had Ravenous received more attention upon its release, Carlyle would have certainly been nominated for Best Actor/Supporting Actor (and why couldn't he? Another famous cannibal was honored just eight years prior). His portrayal as the two-faced Colqhoun alernates from helpless and terrified to downright bloodthirsty and savage. Trainspotting’s Begby (another Carlyle role) does not hold a candle.

The rest of the cast is comprised of recognizable and respectable character actors (another detractor in the weird world of cinema, where money talks and bullshit walks). Jeffrey Jones (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off ) plays Colonel Hart (ho ho), the even-tempered and fatherly leader of the U.S. Army outpost where the bulk of the film takes place. He reads world literature, eats walnuts, and has graciously accepted his niche as keeper of a bunch of misfits. This role could have easily been written as the typical overbearing army superior fuckhead, but it wasn’t, and Jones bring a real humanity to what could have been a one-note role. Jeremy Davies (Saving Private Ryan ) plays Private Toffler, a possibly autistic, God-loving ball of nervousness. Neal McDonough (Minority Report ) plays Private Reich, and despite his short crop of screaming blonde hair, he fits right into the role of the soldier with far too much testosterone and very little reason. Finally, David Arquette plays Private Cleaves, and despite being fresh off the success of 1996’s Scream, his part is minor and perhaps underwritten.

Our plot is a relatively simple one: During the Mexican-American war, Captain Boyd fakes dying during battle in order to spare his life. He is thrown into a pile of dead bodies – at the very bottom – and has no chance at escaping, due literally to the dead weight piled above him. However, blood from his commanding officer’s “half shot-off head” leaks into his mouth, and he gains the strength to crawl out from under the dead and take out several enemy soldiers. He is hailed a hero, but military superiors know the truth of his cowardice. He is banished to Fort Spencer under the guise of being promoted, and here he remains with the above-mentioned characters until someone comes calling late one night – someone with tales of wintry survival and inhuman appetites.

A strange man named Colqhoun collapses just outside the fort’s main cabin, freezing from the cold, and ready to drop dead from malnourishment. He is brought inside and cared for by the fort’s occupants. He soon awakens with quite a story:

We left in April. Six of us in all: Mr. MacCready and his wife, from Ireland. Mr. Janus – from Virginia, I believe – with his servant, Jones. Myself. And our guide: a military man, coincidently. A Colonel Ives. He professed to know a new, shorter route through the Nevadas. Quite a route that was. Longer than the normal one. Impossible to travel. We worked very, very hard. By the time of the first snowfall we were still one hundred miles from this place. That was November. Preceding though the snow was futile. We took shelter in a cave. Decided to wait until the storm had passed. The storm did not pass. The trails soon became impossible, and we had run out of food. We ate the oxen. All the horses. Even my own dog. And that lasted us about a month. After that, we turned to our belts, shoes, and roots we could dig up... but, you know, there's no real nourishment in those. We remained famished. The day that Jones died I was out collecting wood. He had expired from malnourishment. And when I returned, the others were cooking his legs for dinner. Would I have stopped it had I been there? I don't know. But I must say. When I stepped inside that cave... the smell of meat cooking... I thanked the Lord! I thanked the Lord!

He goes on to explain that the consumption of human flesh gave him almost supernatural strength…and unnatural appetites. These words give Boyd pause, as he remembers his own experience on the battlefield — when all seemed lost until dripping blood from the corpses above him gave him unnatural strength…

Colqhoun, we soon come to realize, is not who he seems, and when the men trek to the cave to search for survivors, he reveals his true face. With the help of a buried dagger, he picks off the men one-by-one, leaving Boyd for dead. Out of desperation, Boyd slices off some of Private Reich’s dead flesh, gaining enough strength to make it out of the wilderness and return to Fort Spencer. As does Colqhoun…under the guise of Colonel Ives, one of the alleged murdered. No one believes Boyd’s wild stories about murder and cannibalism and he is shackled.

One of the fort’s occupants, Martha (a Native American), warns Boyd that the only way to defeat a wendigo – an evil force that devours men and absorbs their spiritual and physical strength – is to “give” … because all the wendigo does is “take.”

At movie’s end (this should come as no surprise, but, spoiler), Boyd and Colqhoun battle to the death by falling into an awaiting bear trap, which snaps them both together, six-inch spikes stabbing into their flesh. Boyd is victorious, having “given” his life to stop Colqhoun from “taking” further lives. Before he dies, Colqhoun challenges Boyd: “If you die first, I am definitely going to eat you. But if I die first, what will you do?”

What Boyd chooses is ultimately left ambiguous, but I think it’s safe to say he opts to fast.

At the end of the day, the plot of Ravenous is gleefully and unashamedly stupid – it amounts to no more than a bunch of men stabbing each other, getting blood all over pretty much everything, and eating human flesh. The movie really just wants to have fun, and that it does. Director Antonia Bird knows the movie’s true strengths lie in the atmosphere that can be created – that of a stark winterscape draping across a barren military outpost. Despite this – and as unusual as it may sound – none of the murder and the mayhem ever feels mean-spirited. If made today by a different director, the movie would be a bloody show set in dingy basements or laboratories. Men would be locked into rooms and forced to eat each other. And there would be no humor in the proceedings at all. And this is where Ravenous truly shines.

The onscreen events are horrifying – not just the notion of death, but of your earthly body being consumed after you check out – but director Bird keeps the levity going. And she was smart to. (Credit must also be given to screenwriter Ted Griffin, who would go on to write more straightforward comedies like Ocean’s Eleven, Tower Heist, and Rumor Has It…) Most of the humor comes from the wry dialogue between the characters, but also from the film’s score by Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn (a rare foray into film music from the frontman of Blur and Gorillaz). Hillbilly fiddles play as Colqhoun chases Private Toffler through the woods with a dagger, ordering him to “run;" poorly performed military music squeaks in the beginning of the film, during which a hundred men sit down to their post-war meals of bloody steaks, showing just how ridiculous it all really is. The musical score utilizes found audio, native vocalizations, and wildly diverging tones to create one of the most frenetic (and frankly, best) film scores I’ve ever heard. It effortlessly rotates between goofy, to dreamlike, to pulse pounding, to downright creepy.

And creepy the movie is.

Colqhoun’s descent into newfound madness, and his frenzied digging at the dirt where his dagger is buried; the rapidly increasing cuts that begin when Boyd and Reich descend into the cave; the close-up shot of Reich's dead and dirt/blood-covered grinning face, tinted blue under the light of the moon – it's all incredibly and effectively unnerving, even on repeated viewings.

As for the movie’s “moral”? Take your pick: During the film, Colqhoun muses on the idea of manifest destiny—of the infant country’s citizens as they expand across the land with their voracious appetites. And while they are consuming the natural resources of the country, in the end, it is the country that is consuming them. Meanwhile, the backdrop of the movie is set against the Mexican-American war, yet another conflict involving stolen land and the United States, who in an effort to consume even more territory and grow stronger, killed a lot of their own men in the process. And lastly, there is the Native American element (two of whom live in Fort Spencer), and worn of the “wendigo.” Interesting that this warning would come from them, being that it was their people who were displaced when our ships first breeched their shores so many years ago – in an effort to consume, dominate, and grow stronger.

"McDONOOOOOOUUUUUUUGH!!!!!!"

Most importantly, however, is that Ravenous is just a great movie, whether or not you want to dig beyond the surface and examine the themes below. It boasts great performances, great atmosphere, and amazing music. The red stuff flies, as do limbs and bones. The chemistry between the cast is pitch perfect, and it's truly a shame this movie was not more appreciated upon its initial release.

THEIR STRICT ATTENTION

What sick ridiculous puppets we are

and what a gross little stage we dance on.

What fun we have dancing and fucking.

Not a care in the world.

Not knowing that we are nothing.

We are not what was intended.

If we don't, remember me.

OLD APPARATUS

Old Apparatus Music