Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (1989)

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Hoping to rest for the holidays, a blind psychic woman and her friends' trip to a family gathering is interrupted by the reanimated killer that was part of her experiments with and tries to stop him before he kills off her friends.This was a truly abysmal and near worthless slasher effort. About the only positive this one has is the finale stalking around the house, which is quite effective here at putting her in danger due to the use of her physical condition causing a lot of fumbling and stumbling around in the dark while trying to avoid the killer who's closing in, through several different floors of the house and down into the basement where the real stalking is used and the best bloodletting is all thrown together. By itself, it's a decent enough sequence but is just trapped all throughout here with the rest of the banal attributes that hold it down. Among the numerous flaws here, nothing is bigger than the utterly lame and unimposing killer, who looks so ridiculous with the coma-device still strapped to his head that he gets quite more laughs than scares by his appearance and really settles into this one quite weakly. It's hardly off to a good start when we find ourselves treating the killer as a joke, and the other flaws only enhance that since this one is just interminably boring and lifeless. There's hardly any action at all within this since the first half tends to run through her experiments at the hospital before finally just getting to the house at the forty-minute mark as the useless side-tangents of the killer's stops along the way and the detectives spouting pointless scientific jargon at each other make up the rest of the running time in the first half. This is naturally spurred on by the criminally-low body-count that never really gives this one a chance to let loose with the splatter that would've helped the running time along here and in the end there's just not enough action to really get this one going at all. The last flaw here is the overall cheap-ness of the film, both in regards to the locations and sets but also the overall quality of the rest of the special effects as the kills are all off-screen, the design is pretty bad and overall this one never really had a chance to do much good for itself.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Nudity and Language.

(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 sequelsDUD (0/10)

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.

~Spoiler~ While Silent Night, Deadly Night is not a classic, it is a whole lot of fun, as is Part 2. But Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out is one big, boring mess. I was initially excited to see Bill Moseley (Texas Chainsaw 2 and The Devil's Rejects) take over the reins as the film's villain. But as the movie progresses, I just felt bad for him (I doubt he puts this film on his resume). Ricky Caldwell was blown away at the end of the last film. But it seems doctors were able to reconstruct his brain and as a result he wears this ridiculous plastic covering over his melon. I wish words could express how dumb this looks. But all is not a success because poor Ricky is in a coma. So the doctors won't let sleeping maniacs lie and bring in a psychic to try and connect with him. This proves to be a fatal error, as you can imagine. And of course this happens on Christmas Eve. What, they couldn't wait until after the holiday? Talk about tempting fate. Nothing really happens for much of the runtime. For about 30 minutes of the movie, we're treated to archive footage of Silent Night, Deadly Night 1 and Roger Corman's The Terror. While this was funny in the first sequel, it's tedious and boring here. And the biggest problem with the movie is that Moseley never dons the Santa suit! That's kind of the point of the film. He even gets a great opportunity to wear the costume at the beginning of the film. Instead, he wears his inconspicuous hospital gown and his stupid brain hat. The only good thing I can say about the movie is that it features a pre-fame Laura Harring. The cast also includes Robert Culp. It seems Mr. Culp has an affinity for bad Yuletide horror flicks because he was in this and the Goldberg vehicle, Santa's Slay. Avoid both.