I don't know why I find myself stuck in 1987. At the time, I didn't see it as a particularly big year for genre films. What I didn't know then, I sure know now. The Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise was a notorious one from my youth. I remember the outrage when the first movie came out. Parent groups hated it for depicting a killer Santa Claus. The movie's not great, but all the fuss made it an eventual box-office hit. So along came a sequel... Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 was also notorious in its day, but not for the killer-Santa angle. The film was largely trashed because it uses about 25 minutes of footage from the first movie for a prolonged flashback sequence which, well, tells the story of the first movie. If you hadn't seen the first one, that's fine I guess. I have, and found the excessive flashback insulting to my limited intelligence. Really, writer/director/editor Lee Harry? You think Silent Night, Deadly Night is so complex to warran...

Last year at about this time Shawn and I were introduced to the work of director Steven C. Miller . And what an introduction it was! Silent Night, Steven's loose remake of Silent Night, Deadly Night , is a lean, mean slasher machine that did what all good remakes should -- it took the idea of a killer Santa Claus and ran with it. And boy did it run far. Silent Night will get regular seasonal play alongside the classic Black Christmas . We didn't catch Silent Night in theatres during its original run. However, lucky Basementites south of the border -- that means you, U.S.A. -- get another chance as the flick begins screening in theatres on Dec. 18. Exact theatres and dates are still being sorted out, but Sacramento, Buffalo and New Orleans are on the list. For the uninitiated, the police force of a remote Midwestern town search for a killer Santa Claus who is picking off citizens on Christmas Eve. It's up to Jaime King and Malcolm McDowell to stop him. If yo...