Now the inept brilliance of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 wasn't the only helping of Yuletide horror served by 1987. For, our next sighting of Christmas terrors would come later in the summer. And it too was in the form of a terrible sequel. For seasonal scares would surface again at Amity Island, for our next stop in the history of Christmas horror is a mercifully brief layover in Jaws: The Revenge.
Released on 17th July 1987, Jaws: The Revenge is the belated third and unnecessary sequel to the Spielberg classic. Now what most people forget, and who can blame them, as some folks try to forget as much of this movie as possible, is that the film opens just before Christmas. We learn that Martin Brody has passed away, mainly because Roy Scheider refused to have anything to do with this movie. Wise man! Anyhow his wife Ellen, still played by Lorraine Gary, is living with their now adult son Sean, who has followed in his father’s footsteps, and become a police officer. And as the movie starts it’s just before Christmas and there’s a big outdoor carol concert in Amity. But Deputy Sean is called out to a disturbance in the bay, and while investigating a shipping buoy is attacked by a great white shark and killed. After the funeral, Ellen goes to stay with her eldest son Michael, who is now working in the Bahamas. However the very same shark follows them there… No, I swear I’m not making this up.
After meeting new characters Jake McCay (played by Mario van Peebles) and Hoagie Newcombe (played by Michael Caine), the Brody family, or what’s left of it, celebrates Christmas and New Year in the sun. And so, with the festive season done with in this movie, we can thankfully now ignore the rest of its nonsense with a clean conscience!
1988 was perhaps a mercifully quiet year for Christmas horror, although people of a certain age may remember being traumatised by a ludicrously violent TV movie shown on IBC on Christmas Eve that year. Vastly inappropriately scheduled at 7 PM, The Night The Reindeer Died, which saw criminal psychopaths invade the North Pole only to be thwarted by Lee Majors and a machine gun toting Santa. Thousands of bullets and buckets of blood ensued. TV executive Frank Cross famously ended up on the naughty list for this one…
However the following year, we had a far more entertaining helping of Christmas horror in the shape of a French movie called 3615 Code Père Noël. More commonly known in the English speaking world as Deadly Games, although this movie has also appeared under the titles of Dial Code Santa Claus, Game Over, and Hide and Freak.
Written and directed by René Manzor, this movie introduces us to Thomas, an unusually intelligent child, who lives in a big mansion house with his mother, who runs a swanky Paris department store, and his near blind diabetic grandad. Thomas is obsessed with action movies, and enjoys re-enacting favourite scenes and having adventures in his capacious home while dressed like a pint-sized Rambo.
However on Christmas Eve, while trying to contact Pere Noel, as Santa is known in France, on the Mintel service - France’s advanced teletext system that was a precursor to the internet - he accidentally contacts a random stranger who turns out to be, you guessed it, a dangerous psycho.
But before Thomas realises that this Santa he is chatting to is bogus, the crazy guy has learned where his mother works. And after Thomas cuts off the conversation, he goes to the store, gets a temporary job there, and dressed in a Santa outfit, manages to stowaway in a van-load of Christmas goodies bound for Thomas's house. So then, on this snowy Christmas Eve, with his mother very busy at the store and working late, Thomas and his grandad will be stalked by a killer Santa. However young Thomas, being a gifted child with gadgets and technical knowledge galore, will have a few surprises to spring on this bad Santa…
Now if you are thinking that this sounds like a horror version of Home Alone, you‘re not the only one. And rather suspiciously, Deadly Games was first screened in March 1989, while Home Alone didn’t come out until 10th November 1990. Naturally writer/director René Manzor was convinced John Hughes had plagiarised his movie, although Hughes has claimed he never saw this very similar French precursor to Kevin McCallister’s seasonal antics. Which might be true, or it may not. One wonders if Hughes got coal in his stocking that year…
Anyhow, what of the movie itself? Well, in many respects, the plot of Deadly Games is not unlike many juvenile adventure tales i.e. kids encounter a criminal, and using their own know-how, best the baddie. However, here this young adventure plot is blended with a grown-up slasher movie. So on one hand, you have lots of funny moments and heart-warming family scenes, and the big old house at Christmas in the snow looks magical. But you also have some very dark thrills and frights, and when the deranged Santa is stalking the vast benighted house, and make no mistake, the movie’s gloves are most definitely off. And not everyone is going to get to the end in one piece.
Now this mix of two different styles of movie could have been a terrible mess but director Manzor boldly blends them together, with the result that you are constantly being wrongfooted by the movie and you can’t predict exactly where it is going to go next. Deadly Games is a marvellous fun Christmas horror, mixing childhood magic with a very sinister stalking Santa, and it really deserves to be far better known than it is.
However, while 1989 had given us this wonderful inventive and original French Christmas horror movie, over in the US, something equally offbeat, but in a not so entertaining way, was stirring… For the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise would return again. But we will learn about this third movie and its frightful siblings behind the next door…
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