{"id":46017,"date":"2024-12-23T17:30:31","date_gmt":"2024-12-23T22:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=46017"},"modified":"2024-12-23T17:32:38","modified_gmt":"2024-12-23T22:32:38","slug":"bad-movie-monday-silent-night-deadly-night-4-the-initiation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/23\/bad-movie-monday-silent-night-deadly-night-4-the-initiation\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad Movie Monday: Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Well, it\u2019s 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\u2019re pagan drumbeats that you can\u2019t escape. Luckily, I\u2019ve immunized myself against the last one by watching trash every Monday for the last four years. So let\u2019s talk about that by reviewing today\u2019s movie Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation.<\/p>\n

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The Silent Night Deadly Night franchise is fairly unique in horror movie history for the fact that it\u2019s the only series that I can think of where each entry gets progressively more insane. Last time<\/a> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s the bad guy when it\u2019s obviously Maud Adams. SPOILERS, by the way, but who else would it be? They didn\u2019t hire one of the only actresses to star in two<\/i> Bond films for no reason. The story then drums up one of my least favorite horror movie tropes, which is the \u201cIt was an Evil Cult!\u201d twist, but to its credit this is done relatively well. The movie\u2019s not too obnoxious about it anyway.<\/p>\n

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TOP TEN THOUGHTS I HAD WATCHING THE MOVIE<\/strong><\/p>\n

#1 \u2013 Clint Howard being Clint Howard is good enough for me. He just rolled with the script and I love him for it.<\/p>\n

#2 \u2013 Simulated sex, real nudity, and a cute curly redheaded actress. Ho! Ho! Ho! IT REALLY IS CHRISTMAS!<\/p>\n

#3 \u2013 Spontaneous combustion, for a hot minute in the late eighties, was the \u201cdrones over NJ\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

#4 \u2013 Hey, remember when this series was about a killer Santa? Me neither.<\/p>\n

#5 \u2013 I gotta be honest with you, I kind of love how this movie feels like a Hallmark Christmas movie written by William S. Burroughs.<\/p>\n

#6 \u2013 You can\u2019t not want to hug Allyce Beasley. She\u2019s just too damn sweet, even when she\u2019s playing an evil character like in this movie.<\/p>\n

#7 \u2013 This is the \u201cHalloween III\u201d of the Silent Night, Deadly Night series. In the sense that it switches horror genres, from slasher to witchcraft and the occult, and it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

#8 \u2013 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<\/i> Christmas. In fact, I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

#9 \u2013 After waiting nearly over an hour, Clint Howard finally gets a lot more screen time in the third act and he\u2019s easily the best thing in the whole damn movie and perhaps the whole damn world.<\/p>\n

#10 \u2013 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\u2019ll have that to look forward to at least if you decide to watch this.
\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

WAS IT REALLY A BAD FILM?
\n<\/strong>
\nThis is not a bad film at all. It\u2019s weird and fun, although it does feels strangely bland considering how wild some of the scenes are. The problem is that it\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s a few times when the movie tries to break free of its VHS shackles, and they\u2019re awesome, but then it just goes back to it\u2019s humble roots and it feels like a Halloween episode of Moonlighting. Still, it\u2019s an interesting footnote in eighties horror history and worth a look. It won\u2019t blow your mind or anything. Go watch Society, another Brian Yuzna film, for that. However, Silent Night 4 ain\u2019t bad and it\u2019s free on Tubi<\/a> for the 2024 Christmas holidays. So consider this a recommendation.<\/p>\n

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.
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\n<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, it\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3070,12],"tags":[3569,3442,200,1911,3568,3570,3567],"class_list":["post-46017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-badmoviemonday","category-movie-reviews","tag-allyce-beasley","tag-brian-yuzna","tag-christmas","tag-clint-howard","tag-maud-adams","tag-reggie-bannister","tag-screaming-mad-george"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46017"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46029,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46017\/revisions\/46029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}