At Chirstmas The Wicked Have To Be PUNISHED! -- Silent Night, Deadly Night

This must be one of the most basic and/or ultimate "Santa Slayer Movies"... Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) has finally found a place to call home inside my sparsely spaced DVD-closet; it took a few years of negotiating the terms, but eventually it came to me in the form of a cheap, bare-bones copy from our Swedish joy and pride -- Noble Entertainment. Why not? If there's not any international copy that has much better transfer or extra material, and if doesn't cost anymore than a dime a piece...

Anyway, it's not a great movie; it's not even a good movie throughout. But it's definately a fun and quite violent little piece that, according to the blurb on the back cover, was the cause of moral panic among parents when it came (but what film wasn't back then?!). It's about a little boy who visits his grandfather at an asylum (what parents takes their children to such a place?): The old man (a funny looking bastard) appears to be in a state of total mental oblivion and suddenly both Gramp's son and daughter-in-law take a hike, leaving the two of them alone in the visiting room (my god, that would make even me a good parent...). What follows, in my opinion, is the film's most redeeming quality -- it's a shot where the old fart suddely wakes out of his catatonia (or more likely: the feigned one) and menacingly and traumatizingly begins to describe how Santa Clause really punishes all the kids that have been bad... When they're on the way home, the family is later that night attacked and the parents visciously killed by a robber and murderer all dressed and in you-know-who... ho-ho-hooo! 

The little boy is then raised in an orphanage, with his little brother, where he learns the hard way how the wicked are always found out and punished. The years pass and our little boy grows to be big and handsome young lad (a disturbed, blond nutcase pupped up with steroids, all the same...). When everything appears to have worked out for him; he's gotten a job; he's fallen in love with a beautiful girl... But it's almost Christmas again... And this time he will be Santa! PUNISH!!!