Silent Night, Bloody Night [reviewed by Jori]

88 min., 1974
Directed by Theodore Gershuny
My rating: 
IMDB • Netflix

Secrets and drama that wouldn’t be out of place on Jerry Springer or Maury Povich.

* * *

What better way to celebrate Christmas than with a cozy dose of horror, right?  Who needs sappy presentations when we all know that the holidays bring out the crazy in humans.  Just try to go out and tell me that isn’t true.  You don’t even have to hit the mall to encounter lunatics, they’re all over the road driving like they belong in a horror movie.  I’ll see people at their worst in the comfort of my own home and just skip actual interaction.

The Butler house is somewhat of a legend in a tiny town.  The original owner Wilfred Butler burned to death on Christmas eve about twenty years earlier and it has been empty ever since.  To call it the town’s personal haunted house seems accurate as everyone stays away from it except for the occasional kids the sheriff has to chase away.  Now the house’s owner Jeffrey Butler (James Patterson the Tony award winning actor, not the author) is in a damn hurry to sell the house.  There are clearly secrets to be discovered–can we figure it out before the only people that truly know get killed?

The biggest problem we encounter is a terrible transfer.  I’m not quite sure if the distributor couldn’t get the master copy or if they just didn’t bother attempting to clean it up at all.  For a really great story, it is hard to watch because the picture is far too dark.  It also has a hint of blurriness about it that combined with the washed out dull colors feels for like a VHS print than a DVD.  The dubbing is frustrating as no matter how loud you turn it up, it always sounds muffled.  The quality is so distracting that it really ruins what should be a great experience.

For a title that includes the words “bloody night”, it isn’t at all.  The deaths are all off-screen and the small amount of blood we do get to see is minimized by the absence of color.  I don’t know how it works, but if they had maybe just made it a black and white film it would have been more effective.

But never mind all that because the story is actually interesting.  Stilted acting?  Sure, but I’ve seen much worse.  Choppy editing?  Distracting, but no necessarily unwatchable.  As the story unfolds it is actually more disturbing than you originally thought.  Some of it is easy to pick out but it was nice to have a little bit of a surprise at the end.  Learning about incest is fun enough, but realizing that the people who are running the town (including the mayor and the sheriff) were all former mental patients makes you forget about the shitty transfer in a minute!

I would have liked to give this a better rating, but it really is hard to get past the quality.  It’s a shame because it is so much better than it seems.  This one is about the story, and it is engaging enough to outweigh the substandard acting and discombobulated editing.  Is it really a holiday film?  Not really.  Besides the reference to events happening on Christmas eve and the Silent Night soundtrack in the background, there is nothing here to remind you of Christmas at all.  It is a good film to put on in the month of December, but I would watch other holiday oriented films like Gremlins, Santa’s Slay, or Black Christmas to get in a more festive mood.

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