SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 3: BETTER WATCH OUT (1989)

Streaming on Tubi!
Directed by Monte Hellman.
Written by Monte Hellman, Rex Weiner, Arthur Gorson.
Check out the trailer here!!

Turns out Ricky (the brother of the killer Santa Billy who donned the Santa suit himself in SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT 2) was revived and has been comatose since his last killing spree. Dr. Newbury (TWIN PEAKS’ Richard Beymer) has been caring for Ricky (now played by TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE’s Chop Top aka Bill Moseley) and attempting to enter the killer’s mind via a blind telepath named Laura (Samantha Scully). Frightened by the dreams of the psychopath’s mind, Laura decides to stop the treatment and go to her grandmother’s home for the holidays. But the link has already been made and when Ricky wakes up, he follows Laura, along with her brother Chris (TWIN PEAKS’ Eric DaRe) and his girlfriend Jerry (MULHOLLAND DRIVE’s Laura Harring). As Ricky stalks Laura, Dr. Newbury and Lt. Connelly (Robert Culp, yes, the Robert Culp is in this stinker) are on the case to stop this Killer Santa from ruining another Christmas.

Though I’ve seen the first two SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT’s multiple times, I hadn’t seen the third installment before and if you thought Part 2 was bad, you’re going to find that this one is as bad as year old fruitcake. Helmed by Roger Corman’s B-unit director Monte Hellman, SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 3: BETTER WATCH OUT is one of those so-bad-it’s-good…almost films. Hellman actually had a pretty solid resume going into this film, having directed B to Z-movies like BEAST FROM THE HAUNTED CAVE, SHATTER, IGUANA, COCKFIGHTER, and TWO-LANE BLACKTOP. So, this movie had the makings of a fun little grindhouser and Hellman says this film was one of the most favorite films he made.

And look at that cast. There are two TWIN PEAKS alum in this one, as well as Laura Harring in one of her first roles, who was in David Lynch’s MULLHOLLAND DRIVE. So while this is far from Lynchian weirdness, the cast make it look like some kind of footage on the editing room floor of a TWIN PEAKS episode. And Bill Moseley plays the Killer Santa. Bill freakin’ Moseley! All that and somehow they got elder actor Robert Culp to add a little gravitas to the cop role. With that cast, this should have been a surefire winner.

Unfortunately, the March ’89 production was rushed, as was post production so the film could be released in July ’89. But despite Hellman and his daughter rewriting the script, since they didn’t like the original one, SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 3 really isn’t a good movie. The original screenplay was actually used in the 4th installment of the SNDN series. Everything from pacing to the acting to the music to the editing is bad in SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 3. There are whole scenes without a score, making supposedly dramatic beats plop like a turd. Some scenes seem to end, though the camera lingers. The lighting ain’t great either, and some of the dialog is pretty muddled.

But while the film might be a technical mess, some of the concepts are kind of intriguing, involving someone entering someone else’s dreams—this was probably lifted right from the A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series to cash in on that success and later done to great success with THE CELL, but I imagine Tarsem wasn’t inspired by this plopper.

Hellman said he wanted to make this film a little farcical, acknowledging the third installment of a pretty weak series is getting old. He and the producers admitted afterwards to not seeing the original and the sequel, so they were allowed to take the series wherever they wanted. There’s a line that states that deja-vu twice is just stupid, which could be a comment on this being a third sequel itself. There’s also a few tongue-in-cheek scenes like one where Ricky is hitchhiking along the highway wearing his hospital gown and sporting his fishbowl helmet revealing his brain underneath. There’s another scene where Moseley stretches a sock hat over his head to barely cover up the fishbowl. Moseley’s trademark manic nature he showed as Chop Top and Otis Firefly isn’t here at all. Instead, Moseley has a grimace frozen on his face the whole time, more reminiscent of Karloff’s take on Frankenstein’s Monster. The fact that he is finds himself at an old lady’s house and is treated kindly there and Laura is blind also backs up the Frankenstein references.

On the bright side, pre-boob job Laura Herring gets naked and there are a few bloody kills and dream sequences. It’s kind of interesting that this film involves a psychic link between Ricky the Killer Santa and Laura, as the new SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT remake, kind of borrows that concept by having Santa Claus’ essence haunting Billy and being driven by psychic urges to kill naughty people. Still, this is a stinker of a movie. It’s comically bad at times. I hadn’t seen it before, so I’m glad I can check that one off my list, but I doubt I’ll be thinking of this one come New Years.