Right off the bat, it is evident that this film is meant to be the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise's version of The Exorcist II. Only, instead of tapping into a shaman from a bygone era, our blind, psychic protaganess is being used to tap into Ricky- the killer from SNDN 2; younger brother of the killer from the first film- whom is now comatose, with his brain exposed, but contained in a jar.It seems that Laura (our aforementioned protaganess) has unwittingly awakened Ricky, from his vegetative state, by probing into his mind with her psychic abilities. Now, he's out to hunt her down...and he will kill anyone and everyone who gets in his way.It's a pretty average film over all, but at least there's a decent story to it. Certainly better than the second one, but still nothing compared to the original.5 out of 10

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)

A belated addition to my earlier tribute to the cult American director for his 79th birthday; back then, I did not manage to acquire this but, now that Christmas-time is here, I have so as to augment a series of Yuletide thrillers. This is the third entry in a horror franchise (started in 1984) I was not familiar with; given the similar title, I often got it confused with the earlier 1973 film SILENT NIGHT, BLOODY NIGHT with Patrick O'Neal, John Carradine and Mary Woronov; as if that was not enough, this film's subtitle equates it with the much superior Christmas EVIL (1980) whose original title was YOU BETTER WATCH OUT! I believe Hellman only became involved in this as a personal favor to the producer who was just starting out; though he ditched the original script and had it rewritten, this was still a straight-to-video blot on his filmography and which stopped his already plodding career for 21 straight years! – luckily, he finally bounced back with one of his best films i.e. ROAD TO NOWHERE (2010; though, typically, it only received a limited exposure). Given the latter's Lynchian echoes, it is interesting that Laura Harring (who became a relative star with the latter's MULHOLLAND DR. {2001} – incidentally, just this week, her GHOST SON {2005} i.e. Lamberto Bava's remake of his father Mario's SHOCK{1977}, was on Italian TV!) has a major supporting role in this one; the film also features another future notable character actor – Bill Moseley (of THE DEVIL'S REJECTS {2005}) – and two Hollywood veterans in Richard Beymer (who also received a brief lease of life around this time thanks to Lynch's TWIN PEAKS TV-series) and Robert Culp (who, by now, had apparently let his hair go white).The film initially riffs on a theme from John Boorman's EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (1977) with psychiatrist Beymer making blind psychic Samantha Scully connect to comatose murderer Moseley (from the second entry in the series – ironically, the manifestations she has of Moseley's visions were lifted from the first film, in which the murderer was a totally different character!); needless to say, this works only too well and Moseley is soon off his bed and up to his old tricks at the hospital itself (his first victim being a visiting drunken Santa who sarcastically asks him if Perry Coma{!} was his favorite singer), a gas station and at a cottage in the country (it is amusing to see him hitching a ride in his hospital clothes, with his exposed brain inside a steam oven-type device, resulting in a driver who jokily queries about whether he has had his head transplanted being dumped on the side of the road soon after)! Scully and her incredibly hirsute (sporting not just long hair but a plentiful chest as well!) brother Eric Da Re, accompanied by his girlfriend Harring, are on their way to their granny's country house for a Christmas reunion and, given that the girl is telepathically connected to the killer, he follows them there (doing off with the old woman after she unwisely tries some BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN {1935}-like hospitality!); in the meantime, Beymer and Culp – on their way there themselves in the latter's car – indulge in pseudo-intellectual conversation that leads nowhere!Predictably, Moseley literally slits Beymer's guts open when the doc attempts to approach him (having deserted Culp when the latter has gone out to take a leak!) and the policeman only arrives on the scene after Moseley had been at long last dispatched by Scully (he unaccountably survives a shotgun blast to the chest) – the former having already done away with both Da Re and Harring; the unbelievably corny ending (with Moseley's ghost wishing us a "Happy New Year" in reply to Scully's "Merry Christmas"!) was apparently merely devised as a means of paving the way for a potential sequel (there were, in fact, 2 more of these in quick succession)! I had watched a "You Tube" clip of Hellman attending a screening of the film in which he jokingly names it his best work (while also taking care to badmouth THE EXORCIST {1973}!); it is a long way from being the best Christmas slasher, much less Hellman's zenith; even so, he does imprint it with his persona by quoting the famous "Even the phone is dead" line from Edgar G. Ulmer's classic THE BLACK CAT (1934) – apart from having various clips turn up on TV from THE TERROR (1963), the infamous Roger Corman quickie on which Hellman did uncredited doctoring work!