Silent Night Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990)

directed by Brian Yuzna

USA

90 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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If you like your Christmas movies slightly unhinged and only vaguely about Christmas, this is the one for you. I've never seen the first Silent Night Deadly Night because it always struck me as being kind of mean-spirited, but I think it's pretty safe to say that this entry into the series (which I had no idea was a series until recently) has little to nothing to do with it, unless there's more grubs in the first three movies than I had imagined. I think the original Silent Night Deadly Night is partly to blame for how difficult it is to find Christmas horror movies that don't involve a mentally ill person dressing up as Santa Claus and killing people, or some variation thereupon, so it's a little ironic that an entry belonging to the same series is so wildly unconventional and carefree.

Its Christmas vibe is, as I said, quite minimal; the main character is actually Jewish so what little Christmas ambiance there is kind of exists in the background as something that other people are involved in. This is ideal for the current time: 'tis the season, but I don't want to be, like, smacked in the face with it. But something about the overall atmosphere of SNDN4, as we'll call it, feels strangely cozy nonetheless. There's a realness to it that only belongs to movies from the past, a deliberately unpolished tone that reflects how things look in a more honest way than mainstream film today tends to portray it. This version of LA looks grubby and sort of run-down, everything is a little bit dirty and looks like it really is, not how we want it to be. The main character moves around in a world that looks like she belongs in it - the office she works in, the used bookstore that is really a front for a coven, even the interior of her apartment all look like real places that a camera crew just walked into one day. Everything felt recognizable, which only makes the overall mood all the more wacky, because the hyperreal backdrop contrasts sharply with all the bizarre stuff going on.

The plot is really all over the place, and kept switching lanes so fast I couldn't always figure out what tone it was going for. I genuinely love the main character - she's the driving force behind everything, a pissed-off reporter who gets fed up with struggling to make her voice heard in the boys' club of a newspaper she works for, not listening to nothing or nobody when it comes to how she's going to live her life. The movie itself seems to be in support of her, which is why I'm not so sure how I felt about the role played by the urban coven she gets involved with. With the presence of both a bunch of misogynistic guys and a cult of militant feminists who don't value men's lives, there was a kind of undertone of "but both sides are wrong!!!!" to this that is frequently deployed by bigots to shift blame away from themselves and back onto the target of their bigotry. But I truly don't think this is an anti-feminist movie or anything; the main character remains independent throughout it, and the film never punishes her for not fitting into roles and stereotypes. Like I said, everything that happens is so weird that I struggle to find any message in it. I thought the bug cult would take more precedence over everything, but then next thing I knew somebody was pulling larvae out of a vent shaft, and then the main character was birthing a grub, and then there was some kidnapping... this movie just does what it wants. It's best not to pin your expectations on any one avenue of the storyline.

This is one of those things that I'd recommend to anybody who is into practical effects, even if it's something you think you'd hate and you have to suffer through the movie attached just to get to the effects. There's so much slime and goop and the giant bug puppets are so good that I at times forgot I wasn't looking at a real creature. Screaming Mad George is at the helm of it all, so you know what you're going to get. I really appreciate how unafraid this whole movie is to get its characters down in the sludge and the gunk and have their bodies become gross and weird. This is an ugly film and it wears it with pride.