Brilliant and touching

As Good As It Gets

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

I saw this in Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide even though apparently this and all the other "Silent Night, Deadly Night" sequels were direct to video. How nice of Maltin to go through the rest of these awful movies! Anyway, this movie's terrible because it's entirely pointless and looks stupid. The previous movie ended with the villain Ricky being shot numerous times. This movie features him coming back to life because scientists have reconnected his brain together. Why? Why would you reconstruct a serial killer's brain? That is very dumb.Never once does he even dress up like Santa so this really has nothing to do with the other movies. There's one Santa that appears at the beginning who's killed. There's fairly little connection to Christmas at all. I would think that a movie literally titled "Better Watch Out!" would feature Santa. Instead, we get a pointless violent film with Ricky's brain being exposed making him look like the DC supervillain, Psimon. What ever happened to the original Santa who killed his parents? Was this film really necessary? Couldn't they have addressed that to give this movie a reason for existing? *1/2

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.

Yes, we'd better all watch out. Watch out for the terrible acting in this terrible series of slasher flicks. After the abysmal part 2 I can't believe anyone thought the Silent Night, Deadly Night series needed to continue. But it was the '80s and crappy movies like these were very popular on home video. This time the Santa killer, Ricky Caldwell (Bill Moseley), is awakened from a coma and naturally returns to killing people. There's also a blind psychic girl (Samantha Scully) with a telepathic connection to the killer. Her brother has an awesome perm and loves denim. They take a trip to see their grandmother and find Ricky instead.Samantha Scully is one of the worst actresses that ever lived. It's not surprising that her career was so brief. What is surprising is that her career didn't end with her first audition. She is exceptionally bad in this. Consider yourself warned. The movie is somewhat notable for being directed by cult director Monte Hellman, who does manage to imbue the film with more quirky weirdness than most '80s slasher sequels. Also notable for a nice Laura Harring nude scene. Robert Culp had bills to pay, I guess, so he's in this as a detective with one memorably awful scene discussing the merits of the car phone with his partner. It's really a dull chore of a movie to sit through, even for the most avid slasher fan. The acting is incompetent, the pace sluggish, and the 'kills' unimaginative. We can thank the good people at Ragu for the blood used in this. Avoid unless you really like garbage. And don't forget -- it's Piru, not Peru.

I doubt loads of people watched out for yet another santa sequel after Part 2, known as one of the worst slasher movies ever - not bad in a subgenre where there's tight competition. So why bother doing another unwanted entry in the Ricky story? Or bother watching it? Well, personally I thought that with Richard Beymer from Twin Peaks as a mad scientist and Bill Moseley (who's had sort of a comeback lately but was probably working for free food when this movie was made) as reanimated Ricky it could only be so bad. Well, right now it's almost Christmas, so can I be blamed for wishing for a cinematic miracle? Back to reality: Beymer doesn't do anything with his clichéd character, and Moseley tries to keep a straight face wearing that fun glass head top (supposed to keep his reconstructed brain from falling out!), just looking evil and hardly uttering a word. He's rather slow and fragile than dangerous-looking, yet the bad supporting cast (including Laura Herring in an undemanding 'girlfriend-for-the-breasts-shot" role) are in panic. The blind girl doesn't act as tough she's blind, but as though she's über-stoned. Her bad 80s-haircut victim of a brother behaves absurdly, not even caring when someone he's supposed to love gets killed. There's boring flashbacks galore (and that after SNDN2 was trashed for its use of flashbacks, though they don't take up half of the movie here) and the murders are mostly tame or off-screen; so this isn't even of interest to undemanding gorehounds. Silent Night Deadly Night 3 - better watch out and rent a better movie!