BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Anoushka Slater While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Eric Stevenson I saw this in Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide even though apparently this and all the other "Silent Night, Deadly Night" sequels were direct to video. How nice of Maltin to go through the rest of these awful movies! Anyway, this movie's terrible because it's entirely pointless and looks stupid. The previous movie ended with the villain Ricky being shot numerous times. This movie features him coming back to life because scientists have reconnected his brain together. Why? Why would you reconstruct a serial killer's brain? That is very dumb.Never once does he even dress up like Santa so this really has nothing to do with the other movies. There's one Santa that appears at the beginning who's killed. There's fairly little connection to Christmas at all. I would think that a movie literally titled "Better Watch Out!" would feature Santa. Instead, we get a pointless violent film with Ricky's brain being exposed making him look like the DC supervillain, Psimon. What ever happened to the original Santa who killed his parents? Was this film really necessary? Couldn't they have addressed that to give this movie a reason for existing? *1/2

MisterWhiplash I don't know what I was expecting from this, but I knew I wanted to see it for a simple reason: Monte Hellman is the director. You don't often get someone to helm a made-for-video sequel to a schlocky horror flick about a guy who gets triggered as an adult to kill lots of people around Christmas for... reasons I don't need to go into here that made such existential genre films like Ride in the Whirlwind, The Shooting, Two-Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter.It's a curious choice, and I have to wonder if Hellman went for it for reasons other than money (his previous film, Iguana, barely got a release in the US, and before that he hadn't directed in ten years), but rather to have the odd kind of challenge of getting something done very quickly that would certainly be seen by *some* people, regardless of format. Maybe I was expecting that Hellman would put a crazy twist on the slasher genre, and in a way I did get that. Sort of, kind of, maybe by the end it's all so damn crazy that it's less inspired crazy and more trying too hard.Certainly his premise has promise, leaning at first to seeming like a Nightmare on Elm Street movie: a girl, Laura (Samantha Scully), is having dreams/nightmares in a facility (the opening is perhaps the best part of the movie, or one of them), but it's soon revealed she's actually trying to be connected via, uh, unconventional Dr. Newbury (Richard Beymer) to 'Ricky', the killer from previous entries (or a previous one, I still haven't seen the second of these movies), who is in a coma. She's allowed to leave since, you know, it's Christmas so it's time to go with her brother (Eric DaRae) and his girlfriend (Laura Haring) to their grandmother's house... but lo and behold, somehow he wakes up, maybe from her connecting to his visions (the whole "Is he seeing what's inside me like I'm seeing what's inside him" comes up), and it becomes more like a Halloween movie as he is a) seemingly indestructible, and b) is basically a walking corpse.One curious thing of course to note is the cast of people from David Lynch projects - seeing Leo Johnson from Twin Peaks with a hair-do out of the band Whitesnake is unreal, but it's also nice to see an early Haring performance (of Mulholland Drive), though I actually forgot Beymer, aside from being Tony in West Side Story, was Benjamin Horne on Twin Peaks too until I looked it up - and in the first act I thought that Hellman was going for a Lynchian sort of set up. Probably not intentional, but certainly the connections with the sub-conscious, dreams, nightmares, the inner landscape of the mind as a f***ed up minefield of terrors, it made for a set up that I was initially engaged in, and Hellman as a director has a pacing that is set apart from the usual hacks and journeymen doing these horror sequels, much less direct to video.He takes his time, doesn't always use music where you expect, and whether it's due to him being disgusted by what's usually done in these movies or wanting to change it up, there's not as much blood (when Granny gets it - oh, is that a spoiler, nope, come on, you see it coming a mile away, folks - he cuts away to an outside shot of her house), and so there's an uncanny sense of suspense at times. Yet the key word here is 'at times', since Hellman is also seeming to be so set apart from other horror movies of the time that he trips himself up: much of the mid-section of this is dull, as there is only a slim narrative that's actually going on with Ricky already ahead of Laura and Chris and Jerri (plus the doctor and one of those "logical" cops that doesn't get this doctor's higher theories about Ricky - again, a knock-off of Halloween), and Christmas is only used sparingly, as if we have to be reminded of it at the very end as 'Oh, right, yeah, it's Christmas, you actually made it to the end, here's Bill Moseley again to finish off with a WTF moment).But the thing that keeps me from finding this to a full on guilty pleasure as opposed to something that is decent but only has its moments is Scully's acting. For some reason she's made to be blind as a, I guess, way to make her seem stronger in the film, that she has to rise up to fight Ricky with, uh, some post-death guidance from her grandma. None of that really matters though since she's not terribly convincing, either talking in a monotone or screaming her head off. I think that ultimately this is the best possible Silent Night, Deadly Night III we could've asked for, and I'm glad Hellman tried out something extremely different for him. The results were just hit or miss (this includes a rather self-conscious reference, done twice as if there's a friggin' marathon on it TV, of The Terror, which Hellman did uncredited work on). 5.5/10

utgard14 Yes, we'd better all watch out. Watch out for the terrible acting in this terrible series of slasher flicks. After the abysmal part 2 I can't believe anyone thought the Silent Night, Deadly Night series needed to continue. But it was the '80s and crappy movies like these were very popular on home video. This time the Santa killer, Ricky Caldwell (Bill Moseley), is awakened from a coma and naturally returns to killing people. There's also a blind psychic girl (Samantha Scully) with a telepathic connection to the killer. Her brother has an awesome perm and loves denim. They take a trip to see their grandmother and find Ricky instead.Samantha Scully is one of the worst actresses that ever lived. It's not surprising that her career was so brief. What is surprising is that her career didn't end with her first audition. She is exceptionally bad in this. Consider yourself warned. The movie is somewhat notable for being directed by cult director Monte Hellman, who does manage to imbue the film with more quirky weirdness than most '80s slasher sequels. Also notable for a nice Laura Harring nude scene. Robert Culp had bills to pay, I guess, so he's in this as a detective with one memorably awful scene discussing the merits of the car phone with his partner. It's really a dull chore of a movie to sit through, even for the most avid slasher fan. The acting is incompetent, the pace sluggish, and the 'kills' unimaginative. We can thank the good people at Ragu for the blood used in this. Avoid unless you really like garbage. And don't forget -- it's Piru, not Peru.

happyendingrocks Even though the final frames of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 hinted that there was still life in this series, this third chapter strongly suggests otherwise.Continuing the story of Ricky from Part 2, Silent Night, Deadly Night III opens with our recurring killer in a coma with a clear plastic dome housed over his exposed brain like a cryogenic beanie. Apparently, Ricky is now at the center of a bizarre experiment in which a young woman named Laura, a blind girl with an inexplicable psychic link to him, explores the recesses of his psychotic mind and re-lives the chapters of his tormented past.After Part 2 squandered over a half-hour of its running time with repeats of scenes from the first Silent Night, one would assume the film-makers knew that the viewers of this installment were up to speed on the origin of this character. Not so, apparently, since once again, the run-time here is liberally padded with flashbacks to the original slasher Santa tale. Amazingly, even though they were obviously aware enough of Silent Night, Deadly Night to crib portions of it for this movie, the geniuses behind this outing overlook the most crucial element of the story. Ricky is referred to here as "the Santa Claus killer" who "butchered people with an axe," but Ricky was just a little boy when the first SN, DN took place, and it was actually his older brother Billy who was responsible for those murders That example of the producers' keen attention to detail should give you a good idea of how sensible this outing is as a whole.Once our blind mind-reader gets attuned to Ricky, she begins to experience violent hallucinations and envisions his forthcoming series of brutal murders before they occur. Of course, Ricky awakes from his coma when a drunken lout in a Santa suit wanders into his hospital room to spout priceless one-liners like, "Hey, vegetable, who's your favorite singer? Perry Coma?" Apparently, the psychic link forged by the experiment is a two-way street, and when Laura hits the road with her brother and his girlfriend for Christmas at Grandma's, Ricky hears the directions in his mind and decides to join their holiday festivities. Seeing Eric Da Re from Twin Peaks as Laura's brother is one of the few bits of fun the movie offers, and with his nipple-length curly locks, he looks like he's planning on auditioning to play bass for Whitesnake on the way to Granny's.Ricky doesn't have Laura's carpool connection, so he's forced to hitchhike to the gathering. Despite being dressed in a hospital gown and having the afore-mentioned brain-display bubble atop his head, he doesn't have any trouble getting someone to pick him up, and this short road trip provides an excuse to throw a couple of random victims into the mix. Somehow, Ricky reaches Granny's before the rest of the gang, and when he arrives, she does what any old woman living by herself would do if a mute Frankenstein-esque stranger with metal circuitry poking out beneath his snow cap showed up at her doorstep: she invites him inside and makes him cookies.Since Laura is clearly meant to be our main protagonist, we're probably supposed to care what happens to her, but she's actually a braying shrew and completely unlikeable, so this becomes a dicey proposition. Worse, she sounds as disinterested as we are most of the time, and even a line like "if we don't leave, he'll kill us all" is delivered with all of the emotional intensity of someone asking for a glass of water.Yes, Bill Mosely portrays our plastic-skulled villain, but even Mosely completists will find little of interest here, since all he really does is lurch after his intended victims with a drunken stagger and moan "Laura" occasionally. Although, he does turn up just before the credits in a tuxedo to wish us a Happy New Year, so I guess that's something.The acting here is uniformly lifeless, the plot makes absolutely no sense, and the dialogue is some of the most atrocious you'll ever hear (my favorite line occurs when Chris confronts Ricky during the final showdown, shouting: "Hey, Bubble-Head! Is it live or is it Memorex?"). The series of murders the title implies are bland and uninspired, and so clumsily staged that some of the victims basically just walk into the knife themselves. On every front, Better Watch Out ventures so far beyond "bad" that it would probably be funny if it wasn't so damn boring. These 90 minutes feel like an eternity, and without any decent scares or splatter to dilute the tedium, finishing this film becomes an endurance test.This is one of those rare pieces of cinematic history that I silently loathe myself for owning, and whenever anyone says they hate Christmas, I just assume they feel that way because they've seen this movie.