User Reviews

"Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out!" begins as a sexy young blind woman, Laura (Samantha Scully), is having nightmares featuring the previous movies' psycho-Santa killer Ricky Caldwell (now played by genre icon Bill Moseley). As it turns out, her demented doctor, Newbury (Richard Beymer), has been planning to probe the mind of Ricky, who is still alive yet in a coma, and is using Laura to this end. Laura and Ricky now share a psychic link; what one sees, the other sees. As Laura, her brother Chris (Eric DaRe), and Chris' new girlfriend Jerri (Laura Harring) travel to the family homestead to visit with Laura and Chris' grandma (Elizabeth Hoffman), Ricky naturally escapes and leaves a few bodies in his wake as he attempts to meet up with Laura. Trailing Ricky are Dr. Newbury and a detective named Connelly (Robert Culp).

Done by cult favourite director Monte Hellman ("The Shooting", "Two-Lane Blacktop", etc.) basically as a favour, Part 3 largely eschews any sense of humour that the previous sequel displayed, playing its material with a very straight face. The one exception to this approach is the ever so slightly off kilter character of Connelly, amusingly and effectively played by Culp, a man who's quick with the sardonic quips, and who has one strange yet memorable exchange with Beymer during a car ride. This character and performance are really the best things about Part 3, which unfortunately, despite some solid atmosphere, is ultimately too tedious to maintain much interest. It should be pointed out that one supposed shock moment just falls way too flat. The science fiction element is a fresh enough new hook, but it fails to inject much life into the story.

Moseley, better known for much more uninhibited performances in movies like "The Devil's Rejects" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2", is awfully low key here; his antagonist never registers very strongly, or inspires much fear or unease. Co-star Harring does show off some of her nice body in a bathtub scene, but horror fans who crave nudity and lots of gore aren't going to find enough here to suit their tastes.

Not even the finale (which borrows a little from "Wait Until Dark") is particularly exciting. Scully's character isn't particularly likable, although some viewers could see that as an appreciable break from convention. The use of archive footage is still present, but not prevalent.

As an interesting footnote, it's been noted by buffs that both DaRe and Beymer became regulars on 'Twin Peaks' after and that Harring would get a showcase role in David Lynchs' feature film "Mulholland Drive". (It's also worth noting that Hellman and executive producers Richard Gladstein and Ronna Wallace would also executive produce Quentin Tarantinos' break through film "Reservoir Dogs" a few years later.)

In any event, SNDN No. 3 is dull, draggy, and something of a chore to sit through.

Hellmans' daughter Melissa plays Newbury's assistant.

Four out of 10.

(Credit to IMDb) The Ricky Caldwell, the "Santa Claus Killer," once thought dead, has been brought back to life by a crazed scientist. A blind woman finds that she is somehow psychically connected to the reanimated serial killer.

My mind was overflowing with merriment at the thought of watching this one! If you can't sense sarcasm, I don't know what to tell you. After the atrocious second movie, they decided to go the route of many franchises, by going STV. This movie was so unbearable I only lasted an hour with it! It's almost as dull as watching paint dry. Barely ANYTHING happens! It's filled with painful chit-chat that bored me to tears. It's also filled with crude dialog that irritated me to no end. This is set in a hospital! One of my favorite settings in a horror movie, because a hospital is a very scary place to be! They fail to capitalize on this. It's almost like they didn't care, deciding to half-ass it, knowing it was going STV anyway. These STV sequels were hard to find, and now I wish it stayed that way. There isn't even any gore, or so bad it's good type fun to be had in this one. The acting is extremely amateurish! Horror veteran, Bill Moseley makes a surprisingly bland psycho. Laura Harring shows up in an early role. The cast looked like they were reading lines off a cue card! Thoroughly disinterested in my opinion.

Stay far away from the sequels! Watch the original...and then be done with this series! This is 60 minutes of my life I'll never get back! All because I was insistent on watching every movie in this series. This series would take a bizarre turn with the next two, and there wasn't much improvement. I love the original, but I'd rather be shot with a paint-ball gun in the nuts several times than watch the sequels

DUD (0/10)

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.

Monte Hellman started his career by directing Roger Corman's Beast from Haunted Cave before working with Jack Nicholson on the westerns The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, as well as creating the films Two-Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter. He also shot second unit on RoboCop and executive produced Reservoir Dogs.

The original script was thrown out and rewritten in one week, with that rejected version becoming the fourth film in the series. Shooting was completed by the next month and then editing was complete two months after that. This is a down and direct VHS rental film, but it isn't without its charms.

After being shot by police at the end of the previous film - cue the stock footage from Silent Night, Deadly Night - Ricky Caldwell has been in a coma for six years. Now, he has a transparent dome covering his damaged skull and the blood sloshes all around inside his brainpan.

Dr. Newbury (Richard Beymer, Ben Horne from Twin Peaks) is an eccentric doctor who wants to reach Ricky (now played by Bill Moseley!) by using a blind clairvoyant named Laura Anderson (Samantha Scully, Best of the Best).

Laura hates the experience and decides to quit. She goes home for the holidays to visit her grandmother (Elizabeth Hoffman, Fear No Evil) with her brother (Eric Da Re, Leo Johnson from Twin Peaks) and his girlfriend Jerri (Laura Harring, who played Rita and Camilla Rhodes in Mulholland Drive, as well as being the first hispanic Miss USA).

Meanwhile, a drunk hospital employee dressed as Santa taunts a comatose Ricky, who wakes up and kills the guy. Soon, he's on a trail of bloody murder all over again, tracked by Newbury and Lieutenant Connely (Robert Culp).

Ricky can see into the mind of our heroine - and vice versa - which means she can tell that he's probably already taken out grandmother and that her brother, his girl and she are next.

Honestly, this is my favorite of the series so far - I haven't gotten to 4 and 5 yet - because it's sheer madness punctuated by people who have acted in David Lynch movies. I wonder if he used this as an example of who to cast?

Better than average slasher film that was surprisingly directed and co-written by iconoclastic director Monte Hellman ("Two Lane Blacktop" "The Shooting" "Cockfighter" "China 9, Liberty 37"). This direct-to-video sequel would be Hellman's second to last film, until he made "Road to Nowhere" over 20-years later. This third sequel has the Santa Claus Killer Richard "Ricky" Caldwell, a deranged man obsessed with Old St. Nick, awakened from his coma after a blind woman makes a psychic connection with him, who he then stalk for the remainder of the film. Caldwell is played by genre regular Bill Moseley, Chop-Top from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2" and Otis in "The Devil's Rejects," which adds tremendously to the fun of the film, where he sports a visible man style transparent dome over the top half of his skull, to repair damage from the first two films, where the audience can see right into his brain cavity. Hellman delivers effective suspense and plenty gory special effects, which are sure to please horror fans, but it's the film's black humor that sets it apart from the more pedestrian first two films, making this this best of the rather lack luster five films in this series. The only reason the original film ever spawned a sequel was due to the notoriety it gained due to the controversy surrounding its use of killer in a Santa Clause outfit with an axe. Also bolstering the film over it's predecessors, it features 1960s hunks Richard Beymer ("West Side Story" "The Haunting" "Twin Peaks") and Robert Culp ("I Spy" "Hickey & Boggs" "The Greatest American Hero") in supporting roles. Overall, I don't think this is necessarily a film I'd recommend for fans of Hellman's prior films, unless you're also a fan of 80s slasher films (which I am). It will likely appeal more to fans of oddball comedy/horror films along the lines of TCM2, "Sleepaway Camp" or "Slumber Party Massacre."

Vicious Santa Claus killer Ricky Caldell (a strangely subdued portrayal by the usually more manic Bill Moseley) gets reawakened from a six year coma by ruthless unscrupulous physician Dr. Newbury (a respectable performance by Richard Beymer). Of course, Ricky reverts back o his previous murderous ways, escapes from the hospital, and goes after Laura Anderson (a decidedly annoying and less-than-appealing turn by the pretty Samantha Scully), a bitter and remote blind clairvoyant he shares a special psychic connection to. Director Monte Hellman, who in better days graced us with such offbeat and engrossing existential art-house winners as "The Shooting," "Two-Lane Blacktop," and "Cockfighter," here handles this mercenary hired hack assignment with a dismaying lack of style and vigor: the plodding pace, a crippling dearth of tension, mild off-screen deaths, blandly staged murder set pieces, tame gore, faltering attempts at humor (in one especially ridiculous scene Ricky hitches a ride with a motorist despite the fact that he's wearing a white hospital gown and has a plastic Plexiglas bubble on his head covering his visible brain!), clips from both "The Terror" and the first movie, a minimal body count, the dumb sequel set-up non-ending, the potentially compelling, but seriously unexplored psychic theme, and a dismal last third which degenerates into a tepid rehash of "Wait Until Dark" all leave a great deal to be desired. J. Steven Soles' generic shivery score likewise fails to impress. The game cast do their best with the lackluster material: Robert Culp contributes an amusingly kooky turn as sarcastic detective Lt. Connely, Elizabeth Hoffman is endearingly perky as Laura's chipper Grandma, and lovely brunette stunner Laura Harring as the sultry Jerri bares her cute little breasts in a pleasingly gratuitous bathtub nude scene. An extremely insipid and instantly forgettable clinker.