We finally get the big payoff we've waited for since the end of the first film. The stalk, slash, and kill at the end of this movie almost make up for the torture we had to endure sitting through the rest of it. Almost.

Jesus Christ but the director of this movie was a hack. And I mean that. He was an editor hired to splice footage from the original movie together with new footage to create a new story, so he agreed, but he even admits in interviews now that he thought the original movie was too violent and that he'd just had a daughter, so he didn't want this movie to show images of a killer Santa Claus. Stop me if I'm wrong here, but maybe you shouldn't take your infant daughter to see horror movies if the idea bothers you so badly. I mean seriously, this is a horror movie franchise based upon the idea of a killer Santa Claus, so if that kind of imagery bothers you so badly, then don't make the movie. By no means should you agree to take on the project and then subvert everything so you could water it down so the horror wouldn't bother you as much (and there's plenty of killer Santa footage in this movie, so I don't know what that guy was blathering on about because he certainly didn't cut the idea of a killer Santa out of the movie or anything). What he did was splice together images from a good movie and add some pathetic, bad footage to make a pathetic, bad movie. Way to go. First of all, this movie has painfully slow scenes with slow, atonal music that numbs the mind before you even get past the opening sequence.

The movie doesn't fare any better once it starts showing original footage, either. I'm sorry, but I need to take issue with the way this director advertises himself as an editor. He sure as hell didn't edit any of these boring, overlong sequences before cramming them together to make a movie. Everything goes on to long, from the awkward, choppy sex scenes to the awkward, choppy scenes of dialogue that are supposed to constitute "character development." And when the movie isn't being awkward and boring, it's being ridiculous. Here, instead of the kind, childlike Ricky we met in the first movie, we get a mean, sneering Ricky who can lift people into the air and throw them twenty feet and survive five gunshots with enough oomph left in him to scream and swing an axe around. Good, I'm glad to know that Ricky is Hercules now. Nice to know he's moving up in the world. Is this the director's way of trying to make the movie more "comedic"? I suppose you could interpret this as a joke...in some cultures...on the planet Klipton. But here, on earth, we usually like things to be actually FUNNY before we refer to them as "comedy." Here we get a bunch of horror shots that are campy, but not funny and really not even fun.

The movie is stupid at every turn when it could have been interesting or engaging, and it shows a patent lack of understanding of, well, just about everything. Newsflash filmmakers, nuns who retire don't usually sit around their houses wearing full uniform and wimple. People who witness horrible vehicular manslaughter don't usually say "Thank you" and wander off, because the families of the dead people typically miss them and wonder where they are. If a patient has killed all of his previous psychiatrists, the authorities probably wouldn't send a current psychologist to interview the patient alone, and it's not that easy to waltz out of a high security mental hospital after killing a psychologist and all the guards. No one will ever accuse these filmmakers of striving for realism.

In case you can't tell, I wasn't impressed by this cheap, shoddy follow up to one of my favorite horror flicks. Basically, this movie takes everything that made the first movie good and then shits all over it and calls it a movie. I knew coming into this movie that it wasn't going to be great, but I wanted to see the payoff I'd been promised since the ending of the original, and I was hoping the movie would at least be watchable. It's not. Fast forward to the last twenty minutes and save your retinas the torture of having to endure this garbage.