Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 ★★★★☆

This film is so much funnier than I remember. Half of it is just footage of the first film and then most of the rest is more flashbacks and it briefly turns into In the Mouth of Madness when Ricky goes on a date to the cinema where they are also playing footage of the first movie.

Nitpicking in the extreme: The reused footage has a strangely inconsistent quality and seems to often be much darker than the original film actually was, at least in the copies we watched, but they do at least colour-correct the slow motion shot from the end of the first film that had a jarringly different colour temperature to the rest of the shots surrounding it. I was also very glad that they removed the extremely harsh white flashing that accompanies flashbacks in the original movie that we are flashing back to here.

What elevates the reused footage is Eric Freeman’s narration. He is trying to be sinister throughout the movie but delivers every single line with the exact same menace and weight that would be comedic in and of itself but as it becomes a monotone across the entire picture just gets funnier and funnier as it goes on. Also, despite a huge portion of the film being reused from the first film Ricky’s narration manages to get some of the plot details wrong. When we finally leave the flashbacks his physical acting is iconic, constantly waggling his eyebrows like someone rigged his animation skeleton incorrectly and tied them directly to his lip movements.

There is someone named Samurai Retz in credits listed as playing himself and I have no idea who in the film that is meant to be and there does not seem to be any information about him online other than the fact that he is listed in the credits of this film.