Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker (1991)

... aka: Silent Night, Deadly Night V: The Toy Maker

Directed by:
Martin Kitrosser

A present addressed to young Derek Quinn (William Thorne) arrives on his doorstep late one night. Luckily for him, his father Tom (Van Quattro) ends up opening it instead and is killed when a strange ball / toy latches onto his face and causes him to fall and gouge his eye out on a fire poker. Two weeks pass and Derek hasn't spoken a word since the incident. He also refuses to go into his bedroom, where the deadly toy sits on a shelf, and seems to be frightened of packages and Christmas things in general. Derek's mother Sarah (Jane Higginson) didn't see what really happened and is, of course, completely oblivious to why Derek is behaving the way he is. In an effort to cheer him up, she takes him to a small, struggling toy store run by Joe Petto (Mickey Rooney), who crafts handmade toys. Joe seems like a jovial and friendly sort... until customers are out of the store and he starts sucking down Jim Beam and snarling "I oughta break you in half!" to his awkward teenage son Pino (Brian Bremer). Joe isn't very nice to his poor boy, whom he berates on a regular basis and forces to sleep in the cellar, and Pino himself may be more than just a run-of-the-mill oddball himself.

Army vet Noah Adams (Tracy Fraim) shows up in town with a clipping about Tom's murder in his back pocket. He begins  frequenting the toy store, buys up bunches of the toys at a time and takes them back to his hotel room to disassemble them. Seems like he's caught on that something fishy is going on over at Petto's Toys; namely that some of the toys that come out of the place have been designed specifically to kill. Behind on his rent, Noah pays off the hotel owner with a "Larry the Larvae" toy from the store, which ends up springing to life. It forces itself inside the guy's mouth, pushes out his eyeball and causes him to crash and blow his car up. Another boy puts on a pair of roller blades, which are hard-wired to make him go out of control and he's run down by a car. Strange packages keep getting left at the Quinn home by someone. Joe and Pino used to live there and are resentful they've fallen on hard times. And if you think the references to Pinocchio in the character names have nothing to do with the plot, you'd be mistaken.

Sometimes it's a good idea to watch horror franchises in order and in quick succession or else you'll probably miss out on clever little touches when they actually are present. This is one of those cases. There's a lot of poking fun at the previous film if you pay attention and some of it is actually pretty amusing (like the above-mentioned larvae toy). Neith Hunter, who starred as Kim in the previous entry, plays Sarah's best friend and neighbor, who's also named Kim. At one point she says "You would not believe the things I've been through. I hardly believe them myself." in winking reference to all the crazy things that went down in Silent Night 4. Clint Howard, who played Ricky the mentally-impaired rapist bum in Part 4, has a one scene cameo as a department store Santa Claus named, you guessed it, Ricky. 

Not only are some cast members back, but so are some of the crew people. Part 4's director Brian Yuzna also co-wrote the screenplay and produced this one and Screaming Mad George and Tom Rainone are back on fx duties. Yuzna's son Conan Yuzna, who had a small role in Part 4 as Lonnie, also plays a kid named Lonnie here. Cathy Yuzna (Brian's wife) and Zoe Yuzna (their daughter) also have small roles. As silly and utterly ridiculous as this whole thing is, I had quite a bit of fun with it. Production values are fine, acting's OK, there's plenty of humor, lots of nifty little killer gadgets and some moments here and there that genuinely take you by surprise. The ending had me laughing out loud.

Apparently, Mr. Rooney was among those who publicly protested the original SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (1984) and wanted it removed from theaters, so for him to show up later on down the line in the same series is quite odd. Then again, if there's one thing that can get someone off their moral high horse and make them forget their values, it's a wad of cash being waved in their face. Rooney's presence here probably just boiled down to nothing more than another paycheck for the 70+ year old. This is most certainly not in better taste than any of the others in this series, particularly during a scene where the teenage babysitter and her boyfriend get accosted in bed by a slew of killer playthings that Rooney's character (dressed as Santa Claus!) unleashes upon them. So what's really less moral: a killer dressed as Santa committing axe murders or a killer dressed as Santa who lets killer toys loose in a bedroom where a disembodied hand sticks a finger up a guy's ass and a toothy piece of green plastic chomps down on a girl's crotch? These "good moral values people" are a fuckin' riot!

Director Kitrosser also wrote the third and fifth installments of the Friday the 13th series, directed the Bad Seed rip-off Daddy's Girl (1996) and has served as a script supervisor for Quentin Tarantino ever since Reservoir Dogs (1992). This, SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT III: BETTER WATCH OUT! (1989) and SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 4: INITIATION (1990) are all available from Lion's Gate.

★★1/2

Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990)

... aka: Bugs
... aka: Initiation: Silent Night, Deadly Night 4
... aka: Silent Night, Deadly Night IV: Initiation
... aka: Welcome to Hell

Directed by:
Brian Yuzna

I've always liked Brian Yuzna, despite the fact his resume is all over the map. Though he's been involved in mostly mediocre movies (and some downright bad ones), he'll occasionally take everyone by surprise by turning out a real gem. Aside from his creativity, I think what I enjoy most about the guy is that he seems to possess a great deal of humility and isn't some huge egomaniac who thinks everything he touches is golden like many of his contemporaries. In an October 2013 interview with Phil Wheat, Yuzna categorized himself as "...someone who has made a lot of horror movies that I wouldn't characterize as 'really good.'" In the same interview he pretty much nails the stale state of contemporary genre fare: "Horror has become so mainstream that it seems to have mostly lost that transgressive creativity that used to make it so exhilarating." Yuzna (who was born in the Philippines but later emigrated to America) started out very strongly on the scene in the mid-80s, producing the cult favorite RE-ANIMATOR (1985) and producing and co-writing FROM BEYOND (1986); both loose H.P. Lovecraft adaptations for director Stuart Gordon. Yuzna's directorial debut came in 1989 with the successful and highly imaginative SOCIETY (1989). That same year he helmed the middling sequel Bride of Re-Animator and soon after that landed this gig. Uneven as SNDN4 undoubtedly is, one has to give Yuzna some credit for at least attempting to do something different.

Unlike the three films preceding it, each of which involved a "Santa Claus Killer" (first Billy and then his brother Ricky), Part 4 goes a completely different direction much like HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1982) ditched the Michael Myers routine for a brand new supernatural horror story set on the same holiday. There's no killer in a Santa suit here (aside from on a TV set) and it's not a slasher flick. It also happens to be completely bonkers! Things begin with a woman whose lower half is engulfed in flames falling to her death from a rooftop. The victim's identity is unknown and there's no explanation behind her death, leaving the murder cold. Kim Leavitt (former model and Richard Gere squeeze Neith Hunter), who works for "The L.A. Eye" newspaper usually doing their classified ads, wants to be taken seriously as a journalist, so she insists on doing an investigative story on the mysterious death. After some persistence, she's finally able to convince her boyfriend, fellow reporter Hank (Tommy Hinkley), into sweet-talking their sexist boss Eli (Phantasm series star Reggie Bannister) into giving her the story.

Kim goes to where the woman had died and discovers the building is owned by the glamorous Fima (Maud Adams), who also runs a bookstore out of the building. Fima, who's extremely touchy-feely right from the get go, gives Kim a giant fig to eat and a free book entitled "Initiation of the Virgin Goddess" before inviting her to a picnic she's having with some lady friends. Immediately after, tons of strange things begin happening. Kim sees a spiral ("The symbol of woman's power") in a plate of spaghetti and notices faces all over the place formed out of food, tree branches, etc. Her apartment becomes infested with bugs, including a king-size cockroach, and a strange, mentally-disturbed vagrant named Ricky (Clint Howard) seems to be stalking her. Fima doesn't really have anything nice to say about men. In fact, she despises them ("There seems to be this parasitic quality to men...") and seems to have sexual designs on our heroine. I guess I'll just let the cat out of the bag now: Fima is the leader of a lesbian witch cult who worship Lilith; biblically-speaking, Adam's first wife (who is reportedly in portions of the bible removed by the Catholic church). Since Lilith was made from the same dirt as Adam, she didn't have to take any of his shit, and these ladies seem to follow the same philosophy.

Kim is drugged and goes through an extremely icky ritual where she has a larva inserted into her stomach and vomits up a huge worm. Fima wants to impregnate her with her mutant "child," but Kim manages to escape before finishing the ceremony. She goes home, starts to lose it and tries to down a bottle of pills. Ricky sneaks into her apartment and, while she's in the middle of having sex with Hank, sits on the edge of the bed, turns on the TV and watches a scene from SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT III (!!) Kim is eventually dragged back to the cult, where she has to go through a second and much more horrifying part of the initiation. What could be more horrifying than yakking up a giant bug, you ask? How about having Clint Howard rape you while wearing a dildo-nose mask while a bunch of old women slather him with oily goo? The finale explodes with a bunch of surreal, rubbery, body-twisting fx courtesy of Screaming Mad George which are similar to what he did for Society, only on a smaller scale.

I'm not quite sure what point the filmmakers were really trying to make here but it's pretty obvious they were attempting to convey some kind of allegorical message. There's an extremely strong and extremely odd anti-feminist theme that runs throughout. Kim becomes loud, shrill, demanding and unreasonable once she starts getting involved with the cult. It's clear that these women are a bad influence on her and she's even told at one point that the only way to become a "whole woman" is by killing a man. When a man is killed, it's no big deal to these ladies because he's "just a man." The only guy the cult has any use for is the slow-witted Ricky, and they use him specifically to do their dirty work. That could be viewed as either them being too weak to do the physical stuff themselves or them being too smart to be risk implicating themselves. 

On the flip side, the men in this film are far from sympathetic and all of the guys Kim works with are smarmy, sexist creeps. At her job, the only way Kim is able to advance her career is through the guy she happens to be sleeping with. In addition, a subplot involving Hank's father (Ben Slack) shows him to be yet another sexist asshole who's intolerant of Kim being Jewish and says that a woman's place is in the home. Maybe what this is really about is a career woman having trouble navigating a sane path; trying to avoid both a lesser position in a male dominated world and extreme feminism. It's is all very strange and muddled, but I'll gladly take the imaginative oddness on display here over yet another routine Santa slasher flick.

There's a plug for Psychotronic Magazine and the cast includes Allyce Beasley, Jeanne Bates (a regular in David Lynch films going back to Eraserhead), Marjean Holden, David Wells and Conan Yuzna (the director's son). The score is from Richard Band. Yuzna followed this one up with the mediocre Lovecraft-inspired anthology Necronomicon: Book of the Dead (1993) and the very good zombie sequel Return of the Living Dead III (1993). The fifth and final installment in the series was Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toymaker (1991), which is again unrelated to what came before it.

★★1/2

Evilspeak (1981)

... aka: Computer Murder
... aka: Evilspeaks

Directed by:
Eric Weston

The Howard brothers were both fairly successful child TV actors of the 1960s; Ronnie on The Andy Griffith Show and Clint on Gentle Ben. As what happens with many other kid stars, their appeal was put into question as they moved into adulthood. Ronnie had luckily managed to snag a starring role on the very popular Happy Days series in 1974, which kept him in the public eye well into the 80s. By the time the show was winding down, Ronnie was nearing 30 years of age and starting to lose his boyish looks (not to mention his hair), so it was time for a change in career. Wisely, he'd already begun Plan B while he was still gainfully employed on Days. He'd made his directorial debut in 1977 with the successful Roger Corman production Grand Theft Auto and from there eventually carved out a reputation as a reliable mainstream director with such hits as Night Shift (1982), Splash (1984), Cocoon (1985) and Willow (1988) to his credit. He'd hit his peak when he won himself an Oscar for his work on A Beautiful Mind (2000). Clint on the other hand just kept acting. While Ronnie had a squeaky clean appeal in his youth; Clint was quite the opposite. Unattractive, short, squatty, flat-faced, whiny-voiced, gap-toothed and eventually balding himself, Clint's on-screen career destiny would be playing geeky schlubs, weirdos, perverts, psychos and borderline retarded backwoods rednecks in low-budget B movies. Evilspeak - an outcast's revenge tale - would be one of his only top-billed starring roles.

If you remember CARRIE (1976), some of the opening scenes here are going to look awfully familiar. Instead of Sissy Spacek being tormented in the locker room by her classmates after fouling up a volleyball game, here we get Clint Howard being tormented in the locker room by his classmates after fouling up a soccer match. Things are set at the West Andover Military Academy, which is full of macho jerks in need of a punching bag and poor Stanley Coopersmith fits the bill perfectly. He's pushed around, nicknamed "Cooperdick" by his peers, branded a "welfare case" by much of the staff and is made fun of for being an orphan. They unplug his clock so he'll be late for class, rub boogers on his books, blame him for things he's innocent of and do other things just to ensure he's going to be in need of disciplinary action by the school's staff. The aptly named Bubba (Don Stark) seems to give him the most grief and has three friends who help him make Stanley's life as unpleasant as possible. Because the academy forces athletics upon the students, the Coach (Claude Earl Jones) makes a little nudging aside to Bubba that if Coopersmith is injured and cannot play then so be it. There are only two people at the school who are somewhat nice to the poor kid; fellow student Kowalski (Haywood Nelson), who frequently defends him, and grizzled cook / janitor Jake (Lenny Montana), who cooks him special meals and gives him a puppy.

The military academy was built upon a cursed plot of land once owned by an order of evil Spanish monks, who had to flee their home country in the sixteenth century for practicing black magic (and holding human sacrifices) and eventually settled in America. All that comes into play once our luckless protagonist is forced to clean out the cellar of an old church for Father Jameson (Joseph Cortese), who's every bit as mean as the guys at school. Put under the not-so-watchful eye of violent drunken military vet bum Sarge (R.G. Armstrong), Coopersmith eventually discovers a hidden room full of books, skulls, weapons, candles and other ancient relics, begins using a computer to translate one book from Latin to English and starts messing around with black magic. He hits a standstill once the spells call for human blood to complete the ritual, but lots of abuse and one dead puppy later, Stanley's ready to finally take the plunge to get his revenge.

A serviceable, entertaining and well-made revenge tale for the most part, Evilspeak is flawed but better than it's reputed to be. There's plenty of blood and gore (enough to land it on the coveted British "video nasties" list), a solid cast, decent special effects and adequate production values. Echoes of the aforementioned Carrie aren't limited to the opening but are apparent throughout. The film spends the majority of its time dealing with the lead's maladjustment before the deserving parties get what's coming to them during the last fifteen or so minutes. Carrie unleashed her telekinetic fury at the prom; trapping everyone inside the gymnasium, setting the place ablaze and using her powers to knock off all those who have wronged her (and a few unlucky bystanders who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time). In this film, Coopersmith traps everyone inside a church, sets the place ablaze and uses his Satanic powers to knock off those who have wronged him (and a few unlucky bystanders). The difference is this one's much bloodier. A heart is ripped out of a chest, a hand is ripped off, a spike from a crucified Jesus flies out of the statue to impale a head and there are no less that four decapitations... and that's not even including a scene where someone's head gets twisted around backwards!

One aspect that provides additional interest (and some genuine amusement) is the inclusion of rabid, flesh-eating hogs (!), which seem to be connected to the book Coopersmith is translating. The book is stolen from him by the colonel's hot-bodied secretary Miss Friedemyer (Lynn Hancock), who attempts to remove a silver pentagram from the front cover. This riles up the pigs, who eventually show up at her apartment, attack her in the shower and rip her guts out in a very gory shot that was removed from many prints of the film. The piggies also show up again at the finale and help to dispatch the bad guys. The Satanic forces manifesting themselves through computer technology was perhaps a novel idea back in 1981, though these elements (and the accompanying computer graphics) have dated it somewhat.

Though he's sometimes annoying in these things, I quite liked Howard in this particular role. He gives an earnest performance and is able to make his character somewhat sympathetic. Everyone else is fine in their respective roles. Hamilton Camp plays a sniveling teacher who ends up impaled on a chandelier, Charles Tyner is the asshole head colonel and Katherine Kelly Lang (1985's Night Stalker) plays the winner of a Miss Heavy Artillery (!) beauty pageant. Future Night Court TV star Richard Moll is also here to spit in a priest's face and then decapitate a topless peasant girl with a sword in the opening scene (set in Spain in the mid sixteenth century).

★★1/2