Haddonfield X-Rated Xmas – Silent Night, Deadly Night

A young boy witnesses his parents murdered by a man dressed as Santa. After some unpleasantly abusive nuns get their hands on him in an orphanage he flips out when made to dress as Santa for a toy store and kills people in an unconvincingly gruesome fashion. Oh and EVERYBODY gets their tits out.

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Oh my, where to start with this one? Sticking my pin in the random wheel of awful;  I’m gonna go with:

I think you could file this under ‘not really required’. The kid playing 8 year old Danny makes a pretty good stab (pun intended) at it, despite being hindered by one of the most godawful mullets ever to grace the silver screen (and I’m including 80s Kurt Russell in that, which should give you a measure of the horror). You do end up feeling truly sorry for him as he is ‘punished’ with the good old fashioned ‘beat em until they turn into a serial killer’ method by the nuns at THE WORLD’S MOST EVIL ORPHANAGE.

Older Danny is also semi-decent in that he looks relatively psychotic and utters the word ‘PUNISH’ with something vaguely resembling conviction and the Mother Superior at THE WORLD’S MOST EVIL ORPHANAGE is also pretty convincingly unpleasant.

The rest of the cast just potter about, reciting their lines and getting their tits out as and when required (it’s required A LOT) with an honourable mention going to the toy store boss for at least having the sense to play it for laughs.

Part ridiculous and part unnecessarily cruel I wasn’t a big fan of this element either. The ridiculous parts – tits flying about everywhere, PUNISH, the bullies who decide randomly to turn up and steal someone’s sledge (why the fuck would you do that?) were bad enough but then add in some child cruelty and rape and you’ve pretty much lost me.

If the film had gone one way or the other it would possibly have been better (I say possibly, there is a limit to how many boobs I can stomach during the course of a film regardless of plot) but it completely lost its way in the end third when Danny starts yomping around the suburbs randomly picking thieves and shagging teenagers to stab.

There were some pleasantly gruesome deaths I suppose, the best of which is the teenage girl being impaled on a deer’s antlers (bare chested of course) (the girl, not the deer) which provided a suitably creepy shot but the rest were all a bit, well, eighties. I know the film was made in the eighties BUT THAT’S NO EXCUSE!

Worryingly this movie spawned countless sequels. Needless to say I shan’t be watching them. I’ve had my fill of big-breasted murder victims for this year thank you very much.