Overrated and overhyped

Brilliant and touching

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Hoping to rest for the holidays, a blind psychic woman and her friends' trip to a family gathering is interrupted by the reanimated killer that was part of her experiments with and tries to stop him before he kills off her friends.This was a truly abysmal and near worthless slasher effort. About the only positive this one has is the finale stalking around the house, which is quite effective here at putting her in danger due to the use of her physical condition causing a lot of fumbling and stumbling around in the dark while trying to avoid the killer who's closing in, through several different floors of the house and down into the basement where the real stalking is used and the best bloodletting is all thrown together. By itself, it's a decent enough sequence but is just trapped all throughout here with the rest of the banal attributes that hold it down. Among the numerous flaws here, nothing is bigger than the utterly lame and unimposing killer, who looks so ridiculous with the coma-device still strapped to his head that he gets quite more laughs than scares by his appearance and really settles into this one quite weakly. It's hardly off to a good start when we find ourselves treating the killer as a joke, and the other flaws only enhance that since this one is just interminably boring and lifeless. There's hardly any action at all within this since the first half tends to run through her experiments at the hospital before finally just getting to the house at the forty-minute mark as the useless side-tangents of the killer's stops along the way and the detectives spouting pointless scientific jargon at each other make up the rest of the running time in the first half. This is naturally spurred on by the criminally-low body-count that never really gives this one a chance to let loose with the splatter that would've helped the running time along here and in the end there's just not enough action to really get this one going at all. The last flaw here is the overall cheap-ness of the film, both in regards to the locations and sets but also the overall quality of the rest of the special effects as the kills are all off-screen, the design is pretty bad and overall this one never really had a chance to do much good for itself.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Nudity and Language.

A belated addition to my earlier tribute to the cult American director for his 79th birthday; back then, I did not manage to acquire this but, now that Christmas-time is here, I have so as to augment a series of Yuletide thrillers. This is the third entry in a horror franchise (started in 1984) I was not familiar with; given the similar title, I often got it confused with the earlier 1973 film SILENT NIGHT, BLOODY NIGHT with Patrick O'Neal, John Carradine and Mary Woronov; as if that was not enough, this film's subtitle equates it with the much superior Christmas EVIL (1980) whose original title was YOU BETTER WATCH OUT! I believe Hellman only became involved in this as a personal favor to the producer who was just starting out; though he ditched the original script and had it rewritten, this was still a straight-to-video blot on his filmography and which stopped his already plodding career for 21 straight years! – luckily, he finally bounced back with one of his best films i.e. ROAD TO NOWHERE (2010; though, typically, it only received a limited exposure). Given the latter's Lynchian echoes, it is interesting that Laura Harring (who became a relative star with the latter's MULHOLLAND DR. {2001} – incidentally, just this week, her GHOST SON {2005} i.e. Lamberto Bava's remake of his father Mario's SHOCK{1977}, was on Italian TV!) has a major supporting role in this one; the film also features another future notable character actor – Bill Moseley (of THE DEVIL'S REJECTS {2005}) – and two Hollywood veterans in Richard Beymer (who also received a brief lease of life around this time thanks to Lynch's TWIN PEAKS TV-series) and Robert Culp (who, by now, had apparently let his hair go white).The film initially riffs on a theme from John Boorman's EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (1977) with psychiatrist Beymer making blind psychic Samantha Scully connect to comatose murderer Moseley (from the second entry in the series – ironically, the manifestations she has of Moseley's visions were lifted from the first film, in which the murderer was a totally different character!); needless to say, this works only too well and Moseley is soon off his bed and up to his old tricks at the hospital itself (his first victim being a visiting drunken Santa who sarcastically asks him if Perry Coma{!} was his favorite singer), a gas station and at a cottage in the country (it is amusing to see him hitching a ride in his hospital clothes, with his exposed brain inside a steam oven-type device, resulting in a driver who jokily queries about whether he has had his head transplanted being dumped on the side of the road soon after)! Scully and her incredibly hirsute (sporting not just long hair but a plentiful chest as well!) brother Eric Da Re, accompanied by his girlfriend Harring, are on their way to their granny's country house for a Christmas reunion and, given that the girl is telepathically connected to the killer, he follows them there (doing off with the old woman after she unwisely tries some BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN {1935}-like hospitality!); in the meantime, Beymer and Culp – on their way there themselves in the latter's car – indulge in pseudo-intellectual conversation that leads nowhere!Predictably, Moseley literally slits Beymer's guts open when the doc attempts to approach him (having deserted Culp when the latter has gone out to take a leak!) and the policeman only arrives on the scene after Moseley had been at long last dispatched by Scully (he unaccountably survives a shotgun blast to the chest) – the former having already done away with both Da Re and Harring; the unbelievably corny ending (with Moseley's ghost wishing us a "Happy New Year" in reply to Scully's "Merry Christmas"!) was apparently merely devised as a means of paving the way for a potential sequel (there were, in fact, 2 more of these in quick succession)! I had watched a "You Tube" clip of Hellman attending a screening of the film in which he jokingly names it his best work (while also taking care to badmouth THE EXORCIST {1973}!); it is a long way from being the best Christmas slasher, much less Hellman's zenith; even so, he does imprint it with his persona by quoting the famous "Even the phone is dead" line from Edgar G. Ulmer's classic THE BLACK CAT (1934) – apart from having various clips turn up on TV from THE TERROR (1963), the infamous Roger Corman quickie on which Hellman did uncredited doctoring work!

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.

i have seen the first two silent night deadly night movies,and this one is the best one.its a very good fright film with a great cast,two from my favorite TV show twin peaks;Richard beymer,and Eric Da Re(Ben Horne and Leo Johnson from twin peaks)also Leonard Mann,Samantha scully, laura harring(muholland drive)and Robert culp(i spy)a Christmas themed movie that focuses on a blind girl,her big brother,his girlfriend and an escaped killer.(from silent night deadly night 2)Robert culp is great as the cell phone obsessed police detective and Richard beymer as the nutty doctor.directed by Monte Hellman who is a protégée of roger corman.they show scenes from the terror with jack Nicholson and Boris Karloff during the movie,Hellman worked on that movie in 1963.the violence is'nt too graphic,and the good cast really works the movie and makes it interesting,this was one of laura harrings first roles before moving on to the black scorpion,and muholland drive.my summary was from one of Forrest j Ackerman's puns for a magazine from the 1960's monster world.ill have to say silent night deadly night 3 is a guilty pleasure favorite.and I'm giving this the highest rating,call me crazy.