Beats me why the need to remake 80's slashers is still around. They rarely work - Nightmare on the Elm Street and Friday the 13th remakes would be fine proof to that. Last night I encountered Silent Night, a retelling of the controversial and cult favorite Silent Night, Deadly Night. There I found my answer.
The script of this equally conventional slasher doesn't exactly appeal but director Steven C. Miller (The Agression Scale) has a handful of tricks up in his sleeve, journeying the audience from one gruesome killing to another, without having to lose interest. Loosely based on the 1984 original, the movie follows a murderous maniac dressed as a Santa. Killer Santa rampages the small Wisconsin town and people who have been naughty this year will face inventively brutal demise.
Set in the middle is a plucky deputy (Jamie King) who sets out to find the homicidal maniac on the loose and maybe try to stop one person being killed. But in slashers, we don't get to live in these kinds of fantasies, do we? Demented killer kills - there's no stopping it. This template, along with some of the sub-genre's tropes are in sight, but utilized in a way that it begins to feel more than a mayhem of gore.
Malcolm MacDowell (Rob Zombie's Halloween) plays an amusingly surly sheriff who is kept busy in either underestimating his deputy or throwing sharp one-liners. One more reason why Silent Night became this much watchable. Donal Logue is the killer in red-and-white. King, who began starring in slasher remakes with that bland 3-D incarnation of My Bloody Valentine, seem to know how to handle holiday horrors. She has also appeared in a recent slasher (also a remake) with Shawn Ashmore (X-Men) in Mother's Day.
Silent Night, Deadly Night was one of the most controversial horror films - next to Cannibal Holocaust - and it seemed right to do a remake. Notwithstanding it, I've come to this theory: these remakes represent the guts one need to have in order to make these utterly remarkable films and give it something better, and very rarely - fortunately this movie counts - it does.
The last few frames show a road sign, on conventional letters the sign reads: "Goodbye." Upon reading, depending on the viewer, either a sigh of relief or a grin of amazement is conjured.
VERDICT: B
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