After the modest success of Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation on home video, yet another sequel was immediately commissioned, retaining producer Richard N. Gladstein, but not Arthur H. Gorson, who was instead replaced by Brian Yuzna, the director of that film, who also co-concocted the absolutely mental story-line of the movie.
Taking the criticisms to heart that the Christmas elements were a bit perfunctory, this time around Yuzna made the holiday directly connected with the plot-line, revolving around a possibly evil toy maker- hence the title. Yuzna opted not to direct this time around, and the two producers drafted Martin Kitrosser, a screenwriter and script supervisor to take the helm.
Kitrosser had worked on several entries in the Friday the 13th series, supervising the first two movies and writing the screenplays for Parts Three and Five. He also supervised the scripts for such films as Wes Craven's underrated Deadly Blessing and Silent Madness, and, like producer Gladstein, would go on to work regularly with director Quentin Tarantino on movies like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and The Hateful Eight.
Kitrosser and Yuzna hammered out the screenplay and the film went into production almost immediately, aiming to be released in time for the following Christmas, a deadline it would indeed meet. Once again, Yuzna recruited special effects extraordinaire Screaming Mad George to do the FX honors, commissioning him to create some of the film's bonkers killer toys.
Warning! Spoilers ahead for those who haven't yet seen the film!
The plot revolves around a family who receive an unexpected gift late one night. When his parents, who are having sex, don't respond to the doorbell, little Derek (William Thorne) takes matters into his own hands and opens it himself and starts to open the mystery present, but is caught and admonished by his father (Van Quattro), who sends him to bed.
However, Derek hangs back on the stairs to watch his father open the package, and is horrified when the toy found inside, resembling a Santa-themed ornament, sprouts arms and legs and attacks his father! He stumbles around the room, frantically trying to remove it, and ends up impaling himself on a nearby, handy fire poker, as Derek helplessly watches, subsequently joined by his speechless mother, Sarah (Jane Higginson) shortly thereafter.
Realizing that the toy was meant for him, Derek understandably goes into an extended state of shock and becomes a mute. Two weeks later, he's still not over it, even with Christmas swiftly approaching. In an attempt to cheer him up, Sarah takes him to his favorite toy shop, run by local toy maker Joe Petto (Mickey Rooney!)- see what they did there? If not, the fact that his teenage son is named Pino (Brian Bremer) might tip you off that much more.
Pino is abnormally obsessed with the family, often spying on them, and even going into their house while they aren't there and rummaging around. In addition, another man, Army vet Noah (Tracy Fraim) seems to be stalking the family to boot. Could one of them, or even seemingly kindly old Joe be responsible for the toy that killed Derek's dad?
Whatever the case, the mysterious packages keep coming, but, no fool he, Derek avoids them like the plague, and various killer toys end up in the hands of other, unintended victims throughout the film. Some of them are also killed, while others barely survive the attacks to tell their tales of wacko toys gone amok.
Eventually, we discover the truth: it turns out that Joe and his son used to live in Derek and his mother's house, but couldn't afford the rent and were evicted. To make matters worse, Joe's wife, who was expecting, died in a car crash, taking their child with her. Heartbroken, Joe threw himself into his work, creating a wide array of nutty toys, and even crazier, a life-size son, in the form of Pino, who, being a robot, never ages.
Unfortunately, Pino has a few screws loose, which cause him to behave erratically, which is part of the reason he's so fixated on Derek, who he's jealous of his father's affections for. The other being, of course, the fact that Derek's family now live in his old house. Both Joe and Pino have been visiting and terrorizing the poor family, with Pino, disguised as Joe, being responsible for the killer toys and later on, kidnapping poor Derek and taking him back to the toy store.
As for Noah, it turns out he is Derek's real father, but didn't know about it, as he and Sarah broke up before she told him, with Sarah thinking Noah was too immature to raise a child at the time. Having since gotten his act together in the Army, Noah returned to town in an attempt to reconcile, only to discover that Sarah had moved on with another man. However, he suspects that their son may be his, due to his age and the timing of the break-up.
He's right, of course, and Noah and Sarah eventually get back together and team up to fight off the dastardly Pino and his father, Joe. However, in a twist, we discover that Pino has killed his father and built himself a faux face to resemble the man, which he later reveals to a horrified Sarah. Fighting ensues, and Noah and Sarah eventually quash their robotic foe, with a key assist from Derek- though it's implied at the end that Pino might not have been the only dangerous toy at the shop.
In addition, in a clever move that pre-dates all the anthology-verse shenanigans of something like American Horror Story or Castle Rock or the like, it also turns out that this film is set in the same universe as the previous film. Sarah and Derek's next-door-neighbor is none other than Kim (Neith Hunter), who has since obviously settled down in the suburbs with her late boyfriend's little brother, Lonnie (Conan Yuzna), whom she clearly adopted after the events of the prior film.
In one amusing scene, Kim alludes to said events, saying something to the effect of: "You wouldn't believe some of the things I've been through!" to Sarah, while the two are commiserating over the death of Sarah's husband. Lol. That's putting it mildly.
Her adopted son, Lonnie, who has become a bit of a dick- albeit understandably, given that his entire family was murdered in the last installment- is among the victims of the killer toys, as he gets a hold of a pair of juiced-up roller blades, which take him on a wild ride he won't soon forget! (He lives to tell the tale, though.)
Meanwhile, at the local mall, who should crop up, donning a Santa suit, but Ricky (Clint Howard), in a brief cameo. Given that his character seemingly died at the end of Part Four, it's a bit confusing, but as he's shown applying extensive make-up to his face, perhaps he managed to escape the clutches of those killer larvae after all and turn his life around, from being a homeless nut-job to a gainfully employed mall Santa.
As we aren't given much to go on it's hard to say one way or another, but it's a nice nod to the previous film nonetheless, and I love that Kim and Lonnie return, albeit in a more diminished capacity. One can't help but wonder if the series had continued, if Yuzna and company would have continued this sort of thing moving forward, incorporating previous characters into future installments.
As this would prove to be the last film in the franchise until the inevitable reboot with 2012's Silent Night, I guess we'll never know. Be that as it may, the attempt at continuity where it wasn't necessarily expected is much appreciated, even if fans were decidedly split on their opinions on SNDN 4: Initiation.
Regardless, always nice to see looker Neith Hunter in anything, and it is amusing to scan the credits and see so much Brian Yuzna nepotism at play- though wife Cathy, who was a member of the casting department, may be the actual culprit there.
Also worth a mention: in the scene where the kids go to sit with Santa at the mall, you can see a man wearing a Re-Animator t-shirt standing in line, and a little girl asks Santa for a copy of Bride of Re-Animator! Yuzna, of course, was a producer on the former and wrote, produced and directed the latter.
Another fun fact: when the original Silent Night, Deadly Night was released in theaters, it inspired a lot of outrage and wide-spread criticism, including comments from none other than this film's star, Mickey Rooney, who wrote a letter calling the filmmakers "scum" who should be "run out of town" for sullying the good name of Christmas. Guess he decided if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Literally!
Also, the office building that Sarah works at is the actual then-headquarters of Live Home Video, which just so happens to be the company that released the film. Talk about using your available resources, lol. Way to keep things in the family- not to mention kind of meta. If you think about it, that means that Sarah worked at the very company that released the film version of the horrific events she went through with her family!
In case you didn't pick up on the not-so-subtle subtext, Joe Petto is a play on the name Gepetto and Pino is short for Pinocchio, of course, making the main underlying plot a spin on the whole Pinocchio fairy tale, albeit a decidedly warped one. For instance, I must have missed the part where Pinocchio tries to dry hump his would-be surrogate mother! (Nice touch with Pinocchio being like a Ken doll downstairs, BTW- poor guy. Or robot, as it were.)
Note also that the babysitter, Merideth (Amy L. Taylor), is heard reading the much-beloved fairy tale to Derek in another scene. In another bit of meta-style business, Derek is also shown watching- you guessed it- Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 on TV! (I believe that Ricky was shown doing the same thing in the previous entry, which is to say, watching the prior movie in the franchise in a scene.)
SNDN 5 isn't perfect by any means, but it is much more Christmas-themed than Initiation and some would say overall a step up from that film, both in terms of writing and acting. The whole gambit of killer toys has, of course, been done before- see also Stephen King's Battleground (which also featured little Army men and tanks and the like that shot live rounds), the Zumi Warrior doll in Trilogy of Terror and the menacing toys of Puppetmaster, all of which pre-date this film- but I do like the weirdly cartoonish way it's handled here.
As ever, Screaming Mad George's creations are brain-twisting and truly inventive, even if they inspire more chuckles than scares in this case. As such, the film lacks the yuck factor of his work in the previous entry, but it's not much less demented, thanks in particular to one bravura scene in which the babysitter and her boyfriend, Buck (Eric Welch), are both, in turn, felt up by a toy severed hand, which later almost chokes Buck to death.
Then, a host of toys attack them, including a snake, a little robot and an odd-looking tank-like vehicle that sprouts saw-like blades and spikes, like some toy version of the Silver Sphere from Phantasm.
I also got a kick out of the scene in which a Glo-Worm-esque toy crawls into a driver's mouth and pops out his eyeball and crawls out of the hole, causing the man to wreck. Naturally, in glorious old-school bad movie fashion, the car flips once and just randomly explodes!
Leading up the game cast is the aforementioned Mickey Rooney, a Hollywood legend decidedly better known for such classics as The Big Cage, Manhattan Melodrama, A Midsummer's Night's Dream, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Captains Courageous, Love Finds Andy Hardy, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, National Velvet, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Requiem for a Heavyweight, It's a Mad Mad Mad World, Pete's Dragon, The Black Stallion and the Night at the Museum movies. He also played none other than Pinocchio in a TV movie way back in 1957, so that may have played a part in his casting here.
As his "son," Pino, there's Brian Bremer, who's done his fair share of cult films over the years, including a role in Yuzna's notorious Society, as well as Pumpkinhead, Spontaneous Combustion, Test Tube Teens from the Year 2000, Vicious, Dead Birds and the Tyler Perry vehicle Why Did I Get Married?
As the matriarch of the Quinn family, there's the lovely Jane Higginson, a former soap actress, known best for General Hospital, before cropping up in a wide variety of cult movies, including The Devil Wears White, Slaughterhouse, Danger Zone II: Reaper's Revenge, Object of Obsession, T-Force, Access Denied, The Silencers, An American Reunion and The Indian.
You might know little William Thorne, who played Derek, from his brief role as "Young Bill" in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, and he also cropped up in yet another killer toy movie, Demonic Toys, from the same people that brought you the Puppetmaster movies, with which it would eventually merge with in the Puppetmaster vs. Demonic Toys showdown. Alas, that proved to be his final role, as Thorne retired from acting afterwards.
As Sarah's ex, Noah, there's Tracy Fraim, who notably went on to appear in such decidedly more high-profile flicks as Fear, alongside a young Mark Wahlberg and Reese Witherspoon; Best Men, with Drew Barrymore, Luke Wilson and Sean Patrick Flannery; plus Love Always, No Tomorrow, Dirt, Wanderlust and Backroad Motel. He also did a lot of TV work, including a recurring role on the original Melrose Place and guest spots on shows like Desperate Housewives, CSI & CSI: NY, Criminal Minds and American Crime Story.
Other notable cast members include character actor Van Quattro (Fight Club, End of Days, The Majestic) as Tom, Sarah's ill-fated husband; Gerry Black (The Re-Animator, Vacation, TV's The King of Queens) as Noah's also ill-fated landlord; Eric Welch (Vamp, Desire & Hell at the Sunset Motel, TV's Life Goes On) as the horn-dog Buck, who likes to... you know; and Jennifer Pusheck (Hit the Dutchman, TV's Eden, Married with Children and the original Beverly Hills 90210) as the cutie elf that Santa Ricky drools over.
All in all, Silent Night, Deadly Night 5 is a decent enough addition to the franchise, even if it's a bit marred by some of the sillier scenarios within. Granted, one gets the feeling that it's all meant to be a little ludicrous, and that the filmmakers are nothing if not in on the joke, so it's hard to fault them for going broad, even if it makes the end results a little on the slight side.
Still, one could do a lot worse, in terms of Christmas-themed horror. It's perfect party movie fodder that doesn't take itself too seriously, with a game cast that does the same, especially Rooney as the titular loony. I also like the fact that it kind of keeps the continuity of the prior film, which they didn't have to do, but serves as a nice in-joke for those who liked that one. As such, you might want to see the fourth installment first, if you haven't already.
By all means, check it out! 🎅🎄😈
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