Silent Night

• Directed by Steven C. Miller
• November 30, 2012
• Based on Silent Night, Deadly Night by Charles E. Sellier Jr.

A killer Santa Claus is picking off citizens on Christmas Eve in a remote Midwestern town.

As marketed Silent Night is supposed to be a reboot of Silent Night, Deadly Night but like far too many reboots it has little in common with the original. Screenwriter Jayson Rothwell wrote based on his own ideas and used the Covina Massacre where on Christmas Eve in 2008 Bruce Jeffrey Pardo opened fire at a Christmas party at his ex-wife’s house and burned the house down, killing himself and multiple others while wearing a Santa suit. Not quite like the original.

The original was no masterpiece but if you’re going to reboot something the goal is to improve meaning you do it again but better. This does very little that the original did. There are a few jokes or meta-references present that act as reminders or acknowledge the original film but this is a story that does not connect to or have similarities to the 1984 film. The closest we get is a comatose old man that suddenly talks.

Sheriff James Cooper (Malcolm McDowell) and Deputy Aubrey Bradimore (Jaime King) are the two cops caught up in the situation. Once again I’m trying to figure out if Malcolm McDowell was trying to fake an American accent or not. He’s a great actor and gives way more to every part than they probably deserve, especially something like this, but he is certainly no American. His English roots are strong.

Cooper is seeking a bit of glory by catching the killer and doesn’t want people stepping on his toes in his town. He is crusty and insensitive though not impossibly so. No villain but merely a strong jerk

Bradimore is his traumatized deputy. You’re kind of trying to figure out how she got on the police force and at no point do they bring up that it’s a small town and that’s how they were able to look the other way. She’s got some serious baggage. King does a fine job, but her character often acts as the connection between set pieces. She does a better-than-this-movie-deserves job of communicating the emotional pain and being a likable character. She’s not some two-dimensional creation. You get a sense of the character and their uniqueness.

These are the only two characters that get depth. The rest are shallow, but they do not even matter. They are cannon fodder for the kills. You know who is a death candidate just by what you know about them.

Santa much like the original one kills people who are engaging in or who have done some wrong. He’s punishing the naughty. We have a pervert priest. The mayor’s wife who is a way too young wife and is cheating on him with the guy whose grandpa references the original. We have a mayor who probably cheated on his wife to get with the young wife or just abandoned his family. There are a few others but something links them all. These are not random kills making this a weak mystery.

Being Christmas there are Santas everywhere and they do a nice job of playing into that. It logically stretches out the story with the obvious while avoiding feeling like it was the padding that it was. This movie even makes what nudity it has come off as logical in contrast with the original.

The direction is solid and it’s just entertaining gory fun. It’s not the scariest thing I’ve ever seen but it’s far more entertaining than I thought it would be. My only complaint is it’s not a film that fixes the wrongs of the original. It’s much more its own thing that uses the memory of the original to get people interested. 

Silent Night isn’t bad. It’s entertaining enough Christmas horror that horror fans most likely will enjoy it.