Well, it’s that time of the year again and we all know what this means! It means a bunch of obnoxious songs screaming at you to buy luxury items, malls packed full of depraved people ready to knock old ladies down in order to get the last Xbox, demented family members coming to visit and eat all your food while terrible movies play on a constant loop as if they’re pagan drumbeats that you can’t escape. Luckily, I’ve immunized myself against the last one by watching trash every Monday for the last four years. So let’s talk about that by reviewing today’s movie Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation.
The Silent Night Deadly Night franchise is fairly unique in horror movie history for the fact that it’s the only series that I can think of where each entry gets progressively more insane. Last time we had a movie starring Bill Moseley (Chop Top from Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Otis from House of 1000 Corpses) as the killer, a bunch of David Lynch actors, and was directed by seventies arthouse director Monte Hellman. Now we have Clint Howard, Reggie Bannister (Phantasm) and Maud Adams (Octopussy) in a movie directed by Brian Yuzna (Re-Animator and Society). Oh, and the special effects are by Screaming Mad George so you KNOW we’re going to see some weird crazy shit. As for the story, it’s not connected to the original three movies at all. Not even slightly. In fact, they actually show the characters watching Silent Night 3 on a television at one point.
The movie is about a female reporter trying to investigate a case of spontaneous combustion where a woman fell off the top of a building and burst into flames after hitting the ground. It soon becomes obvious that this is linked to witchcraft of some sort. Clint Howard sort of putters around the movie pretending he’s the bad guy when it’s obviously Maud Adams. SPOILERS, by the way, but who else would it be? They didn’t hire one of the only actresses to star in two Bond films for no reason. The story then drums up one of my least favorite horror movie tropes, which is the “It was an Evil Cult!” twist, but to its credit this is done relatively well. The movie’s not too obnoxious about it anyway.
TOP TEN THOUGHTS I HAD WATCHING THE MOVIE
#1 – Clint Howard being Clint Howard is good enough for me. He just rolled with the script and I love him for it.
#2 – Simulated sex, real nudity, and a cute curly redheaded actress. Ho! Ho! Ho! IT REALLY IS CHRISTMAS!
#3 – Spontaneous combustion, for a hot minute in the late eighties, was the “drones over NJ” of today. It was an omnipresent bit of weird stuff on the news that was obviously out there to distract the public about whatever godawful thing the government was probably doing at the time.
#4 – Hey, remember when this series was about a killer Santa? Me neither.
#5 – I gotta be honest with you, I kind of love how this movie feels like a Hallmark Christmas movie written by William S. Burroughs.
#6 – You can’t not want to hug Allyce Beasley. She’s just too damn sweet, even when she’s playing an evil character like in this movie.
#7 – This is the “Halloween III” of the Silent Night, Deadly Night series. In the sense that it switches horror genres, from slasher to witchcraft and the occult, and it’s so totally different from the first couple of movies that you wonder why they bothered making it an entry in the Silent Night series at all.
#8 – You can tell this movie was made from a repurposed script that had nothing to do with the other Silent Night films because it barely even mentions Christmas. In fact, I don’t remember seeing a tree or any other Christmas decorations anywhere except for one or two scenes that were awkwardly shoved in to justify the title.
#9 – After waiting nearly over an hour, Clint Howard finally gets a lot more screen time in the third act and he’s easily the best thing in the whole damn movie and perhaps the whole damn world.
#10 – The ending perks up significantly. Murder, Mayhem, Clint Howard, Human Sacrifice, and Body Horror! Usually, films like these have a great first act, a meandering second, and a blegh third. Not this one. So you’ll have that to look forward to at least if you decide to watch this.
WAS IT REALLY A BAD FILM?
This is not a bad film at all. It’s weird and fun, although it does feels strangely bland considering how wild some of the scenes are. The problem is that it’s often shot in a generic straight-to-video sort of way with generic straight-to-video music. A story like this needs a lot of visual and auditory madness. The camera needs to move like a paintbrush on a canvas and the music needs to swoop and screech like a pack of birds attacking. Every scene should feel like it has a weight attached to it, pulling you in. However, this movie doesn’t do that as often as it should. It tries its best, and I think Brian Yuzna probably would have done more if he could have, but it never quite soars upwards like it should because it simply does not have the budget nor the time to do overly complex shots. There’s a few times when the movie tries to break free of its VHS shackles, and they’re awesome, but then it just goes back to it’s humble roots and it feels like a Halloween episode of Moonlighting. Still, it’s an interesting footnote in eighties horror history and worth a look. It won’t blow your mind or anything. Go watch Society, another Brian Yuzna film, for that. However, Silent Night 4 ain’t bad and it’s free on Tubi for the 2024 Christmas holidays. So consider this a recommendation.
Silent Night Deadly Night 4: Initiation is a 1990 movie starring Clint Howard as Ricky Baker, Neith Hunter as Kim Levitt, Tommy Hinkley as Hank, Reggie Bannister as Eli, Allyce Beasley as Janice, and Maud Adams as Fima. It was directed by Brian Yuzna and written by Woody Keith.
