Linnea Quigley Week: Silent Night, Deadly Night

Hello all and greetings to Day 2 Linnea Quigley Week and this one is more of a holly jolly film but still apt in the horror genre. This film is the first of a loosely convoluted franchise. Its original intent was probably not to creating a series of sequels. With seasonal themed motif horror movies on the rise since John Carpenter's Halloween, a trend throughout the 80's that builds up throughout the years and this is no exception.

Deemed by Siskel & Ebert as a travesty of modern film made a protest to convince viewers to avoid this movie read the writer (Paul Caimi of Silent Night, Deadly Night and Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2) the director (Charles E. Sellier Jr. Of Silent Night, Deadly Night, Snowballing and The Annihilators) and the producer (Ira Barmak of Rosenthal and Jones, The Other Side of Victory, Mason, Silent Night, Deadly Night and Hotel Colonial) trying to shame the lot of them and only intriguing the horror crowd. This is Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Stop fidgeting, you are on Santa's... sack.

With taglines like: If "A Nightmare on Elm Street" gave you sleepless nights, or if "Halloween made you jump in every shadow or if every "Friday the 13^th" was more frightening that the others... THEN BEWARE! Yeah methinks a bit big for the britches but what the heck maybe we will see something out of this.

So a young boy travels with his mother, father and baby brother to see their grandfather (Will Hare of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The Electric Horseman, The Rose, Back to the Future and Mob Queen) in a psychiatric ward/full-care hospital. Father, mother and baby head with Grandpa's doctor when Grandpa tells 5 year old Billy (Johnathan Best of Silent Night, Deadly Night, The Legend of Wolf Mountain, Daniel, The Story of Ruth, Solomon and Jesus, the Song of God) that Santa will punish those he deems naughty so for God's sake be good... then he shuts right back up after delivering that bit of exposition. The ride back home leads our family on the road to a Santa on the side of the road only to be killed with Billy running away to hide.

Get outta here, hippy!

3 years later both Billy and his brother Ricky are made to live in an Catholic orphanage keeping quiet to himself his Mother Superior (Lilyan Chauvin of Falcon Crest, Listen to Me, Death Doll, Predator 2 and Universal Soldier) who is relentless in that Billy give up this ridiculous loathing of Santa... a mythic character that has NO relation to Catholicism whatsoever but I digress. There until the age of 18, Billy (Robert Brian Wilson of Santa Barbara, Dynasty, Perfect Strangers, Generations and Gunsmoke: The Last Apache) is placed in a job at a toy store but the nagging holiday is on the rise, no one at the orphanage bothers to tell the shop owner of Billy's troubled youth and thrusts him into a Santa suit. Billy struggles with this as he doesn't want to disappoint his boss but the inner demons are on the rise.

Only after a co-worker attempts a rape on another he snaps and kills him. The girl screams, calls him a psycho (after she was saved) and Billy dispatches her next leading to a killing spree as he treks through Los Angeles back to the orphanage to no doubt gack Mother Superior. Being Christmas Eve, the police force is spread all over town on the search for Billy. Well, that is all fine and good Jake but where in the nine hells is Linnea Quigley??!!! Okay, hold your horses already!

Diddling each other on a pool table at a nearby house is flimsy pretty boy Tommy (Leo Geter of No Way Out, Near Dark, Eisenhower & Lutz, FM, The President's Child and Slaughter of the Innocents) and bubbly Denise (Linnea Quigley of Vice Academy, Witchtrap, Sexbomb, Virgin High, Guyver and Beach Babes from Beyond) was down to her panties when all of the sudden... there rose such a clatter. Quigley sprang up to see what was the matter. Still topless reeking of smut, she almost took an ax right in the gut. Darting away from the loon, she got lifted up like a cartoon. Skewered on a pair of horns, her fella was chucked through a window out of scorn.

Will Billy continue his rampage of blood? Will the cops catch him in time? Could he be reasoned with?

Now, just a bit of trivia of the movie at this time. Thanks to the brilliant distributors, our horror film was showing ads for the film in the afternoon apparently terrifying kids galore and caused an uproar with angry parents picketing local theaters left and right and raising a fairly big stink about ads of Santa Claus carrying a ax with murder on his mind. Parents protesting depictions of ax murder Santa caused distributors to yank the film from theaters after pocketing a nice profit from a limited release.

The ax that gets driven in the wall Linnea Quigley was leaning against was real and barely missed her. With a degree of nudity, sexual situations, a light amount of gore similar to the early Friday the 13^th sequels provides a decent set of scares, violence and not too shabby story. With the creepy song on every other radio, "Santa's Watching" leaves the hairs on the neck up and proper bothered.

So Sister, have you been naughty?