The remake you never knew you wanted is here, and it’s got a lot more Nazis in it. Forty years ago, Billy (Robert Brian Wilson) went on a rampage, murdering anyone with ungodly sexual proclivities in a trashy slasher that was clinically designed to offend Christian conservatives. In this version of Silent Night, Deadly Night, Billy (Rohan Campbell) is a… woke ally? More or less containing the same premise of its predecessor, the two films are interesting microcosms of their respective eras of horror.

If the original was a reflection of mid-1980s Reaganism and governmental austerity, Mike P. Nelson’s remake is a more dour affair aimed at the evil hiding in plain sight: people who claim to be good neighbors but who are, in secret, puritanically evil. Perhaps we’re all hiding a bit behind the good cheer of the holidays, but not all of us are also hiding sociopathic behavior. Like Dexter, Billy targets only the worst of humanity. Like Venom, he is possessed by a voice whose motivations are patently unclear. Does he have schizophrenia? Is it Santa Claus himself? Whatever the case, some bad peoples’ heads are gonna roll.

This Reimagined Cult Classic is a Solid Update, Yet Plagued by Frustrating Inconsistencies.

Nelson’s film also begins with Billy witnessing the brutal murder of his parents by a Santa-suit-clad killer, but this time, there’s no sex involved, just a custodian at Billy’s grandfather’s hospice. Charlie (Mark Acheson) shoots both parents with a shotgun on a cold, abandoned road for reasons as yet unknown, and twenty years later, Billy is a dark soul perpetually on the run and incessantly bothered by a voice — also Acheson.

In current day, Billy kills people. A lot of people. Very specific people. During the Christmas season, he murders a new soul a day and keeps a bit of the victim’s blood for a cursed version of the advent calendar. How he chooses his victims is a bit unclear, but the voice of Charlie seems to be more in control of this part of the operation than Billy is. Finding himself in a small town by the name of Hackett, Billy quickly ingratiates himself into the lives of Pamela (Ruby Modine) and her father (David Lawrence Brown), who operates a Christmas store. Without all the spilled blood, you’d think this was a Hallmark romance.

Even though we’ve seen Billy axe some folks to death by this point, it’s actually Pamela who seems more dangerous. A woman prone to explosive bouts of anger and poor impulse control, she seems drawn to Billy for the simple reason that they are both tortured souls. One night, Pamela takes Billy to her niece’s hockey practice and takes it upon herself to beat the crap out of two bullies on the ice.

The two fall in love fast — very fast — all the while Billy continues his daily routine of singling out a victim for sacrifice to the Gods of Christmas or something or other. Actually, there’s a lot of lore here that goes unexplored and potentially supernatural elements that are given short shrift. For a film that should operate pretty simply, it never quite coalesces the way Nelson wants, hamstrung as he is by his own constricted time frame of five days before Christmas. Part of the reason 1980s slashers worked when they did was because they relied on a pretty simple formula of sociopathic revenge. Things get a little complicated for Nelson’s version of events in ways that both enrich the story and detract from the real reason you bought your ticket: the gore.

This is, after all, a story about a traumatized man-child who murders people with an axe while dressed in an oversized Santa costume.

Things go by pretty slowly and methodically until one absurdly gory, absurdly fun slaughter. It’s a fever pitch moment that seems out of place with the rest of Nelson’s otherwise dark and somber affair (speaking of dark, I’m assuming the production team couldn’t afford a lighting team. That’s the only explanation for how bad this looks at times). Hackett, like Twin Peaks, seems to be a town hiding a lot of secrets, none of which they wish to acknowledge, including the potential promise of a child-abducting psychopath.

Silent Night, Deadly Night, is at its best when Nelson remembers how schlocky this material is, and he falters when he tries too hard to take it seriously. This is, after all, a story about a traumatized man-child who murders people with an axe while dressed in an oversized Santa costume. There are a lot of great kills in this remake, but it is tripped up, ironically, by its more noble instincts to make it all mean something. And truth be told, the best meaning is the simplest: the holidays just suck sometimes and you gotta take out that frustration on some Nazis.