MY CALL: This is a perfectly “decent” choice for a Bad Movie Tuesday. It has weird, gross, buggy special effects and gore and some over-the-top nonsense. PSA: This movie essentially has zero to do with the previous three Silent Night Deadly Night movies. MOVIES LIKE Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: For more holiday horror, check out Black Friday (2021), Black Christmas (1974, 2006 remake, 2019 reimagining), Await Further Instructions (2018), Holidays (2016; Christmas), Better Watch Out (2016), A Christmas Horror Story (2015), Krampus (2015), Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010), Elves (1989), Tales from the Crypt Season 1 (1989; And All Through the House), Christmas Evil (1980), Silent Night Deadly Night (1984), Gremlins (1984), and Tales from the Crypt (1972; And All Through the House). I might skip Don’t Open Till Christmas (1984), The Oracle (1985), Silent Night Deadly Night part 2 (1987), Silent Night Deadly Night part 3: Better Watch Out (1989), and maybe even All the Creatures Were Stirring (2018).
This franchise has taken some interesting turns. Sure, we began with a proper psycho killer Christmas horror movie followed by the cheapest of throwaway sequel treatments for more of the same, but weaker in SNDN 2. But then we wandered into an ultra-basic Frankensteinian Michael Myers stalker movie in SNDN 3 and now… a holiday horror witch movie? It seems that for SNDN 3-4, a bunch of weird crap just happens to occur around Christmas time (like Lethal Weapon 1987) instead of a proper Christmas movie (e.g., Die Hard 1988). More specifically, SNDN 4 feels like someone rewrote a witch movie to take place during Christmas for the sake of stealing the recognized namesake.
Seeking to impress her boss (Reggie Bannister; Phantasm I-V, Wishmaster) and become an investigative reporter, Kim (Neith Hunter; Carnosaur 2, Silent Night Deadly Night 5) is looking into the unexplained death of a woman who fell from the roof of a building… while on fire. While researching spontaneous combustion, she is gifted a strange book (Initiation of the Virgin Goddess) by a conspicuously interested shopkeeper named Fima (Maud Adams; Tattoo) who also invites her to a group picnic with an uninvited kiss on the cheek. Viewers, this shopkeeper may just be an important character with some big reveals coming ahead.
Just to let you know you’re wandering into weird territory, by the very next scene a certifiable wacko (Clint Howard; Ticks, Ice Cream Man, Evilspeak, Leprechaun 2, Lords of Salem) pulls an impossibly giant, slimy, writhing insect larva from an air vent. Why…? No reason apparently. Just because it’s weird and the prop guy had access to it during filming is my best guess.
From here we see lots of bugs, a giant cockroach, some possessed pasta, yet more bugs, Kim regurgitates a giant roach-like larva-thing that is then used in some sort of ritual, and then a weird gross sex ritual, and then an even weirder birth-mutation-macabre menagerie sequence.
So what’s really weird here is that this is a SNDN sequel, yet the only character named Ricky (Clint Howard) seems to have nothing to do with the Ricky character of SNDN 1-3. In fact, this “sequel” behaves as if those previous movies never even happened, making this one of those awkward standalone sequels like House III (1989). In fact, the only connection I can find to SNDN is when Ricky turns on the TV—when he sneaks into the room while Kim is having sex—and watches a scene from Silent Night Deadly Night part 3 (1989).
The whole purpose of all this: to initiate Kim into a witch’s coven? Seems like a lot. Maybe they could’ve asked if she thought it would be cool to join. And if she wanted to… would it still involve all the nonconsensual stuff with that monster larva? But, I guess that’s the kind of gross delight we’ve simply come to expect from director Brian Yuzna (The Dentist 1-2, Society, Bride of Re-Animator, Beyond Re-Animator, Necronomicon: Book of the Dead, Faust, Return of the Living Dead III, From Beyond).
The ending is kinda’ dumb, but totally par for the course for this level of bad movie fare. And overall I think this movie is a perfectly “decent” choice for a Bad Movie Tuesday, even if not the level of bonkers I’d normally recommend. However, this is definitely the best of the SNDN sequels so far. So I guess there’s that.