Josh Keown | Night Terror Novels 🧛🏻♂️’s review published on Letterboxd:
“It ain’t all candy canes and Christmas lights. Christmas can fuck you up.”
-Stein Karsson (Mike O’Brien)
In this very loose remaking of ludicrously camp slasher Silent Night, Deadly Night, poor old Malcolm McDowell (revered in the underbelly of cult films for his deranged 1971 turn as Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange) stamps his career further down the drainpipe with Silent Night.
Okay, so it’s not all that bad, but it certainly isn’t the festive cult classic I think it’s aiming to be. Remaking ‘80’s horror seems to be the ‘in’ thing at the moment for the genre, and i don’t have any immediate opposition to that if it’s done sufficiently. The Fright Night remake, for example, that was actually rather good. Something I’ve mentioned before but is relevant here is the upcoming Maniac remake, which has been garnering rave reviews. Both are examples of ‘80’s cult hits adapted for the modern audience, and done so nicely.
Silent Night, however, falls short of that classification. The main problem is not what it does, but what it doesn’t. Its biggest shortcoming is that it is far too formulaic to be of any consequence. There is some moments of humour, but it is far too straight-faced to be as enjoyable as the zany original. Ironically, the soundtrack is far too festive and actually works to the film’s detriment. Although, there were several good red herrings in the story, so that it wasn’t entirely predictable. It just wasn’t particularly memorable, bar the odd cool scene (usually someone’s painful death, though the Vicar rant is also pretty awesome).
VERDICT; Well, McDowell has been in worse, but that doesn’t mean Silent Night is a good movie by any standard; it is in fact a rather average slasher. It chooses a far more gory approach than its tongue-in-cheek predecessor, but isn’t wholly without its moments. There are some inventively gruesome death sequences and buckets of blood aplenty to sate horror fans. Still, it needed a lot of work, as other areas are neglected in favour of shock value, leaving a mediocre product.
But I’m always going to love McDowell, no matter how much shit he stars in nowadays.
2.5/5 or 5/10