The controversy that surrounded the release of Charles E. Sellier Jr’s Yuletide slasher Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) pretty much demanded a sequel. Most sequels can be accused of just retreading old ground, of reheating the basics of the first film to serve up what directors, writers and producers hope will be another hit appealing to the same audience. But Lee Harry’s Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 takes things to ludicrous extremes – it doesn’t just give us more of the same, it gives us 40 minutes that we’d literally seen already, the first half of the film being largely made up of material shot for the original film.

That recycled footage makes up the flashbacks related by psychiatric patient Ricky Caldwell (Eric Freeman) who, on Christmas Eve four years after the events of the first film, relates to his shrink (James L. Newman) the events of his brother Billy’s (Robert Brian Wilson in archive footage) murderous rampage. Newly minted footage of Freeman and Newman in a sparsely dressed interview room occasionally pepper the old material but essentially, the first 40 minutes are just a condensation of Silent Night, Deadly Night. The new material starts with Ricky relating what happened to him after his brother was killed, how he was fostered but never got over the trauma and would become enraged by the colour red. Eventually he started targeting people he believed to be “naughty,” killing several of them before being captured and incarcerated. The third act has Ricky escaping from imprisonment, donning a Santa Claus suit and heading off in search of the now aged Mother Superior (Jean Miller) who ran the orphanage that he and Billy were confined to and who abused and humiliated them.

Even by the not entirely stellar standard of slasher sequels, Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 is a dismal affair – but it could have been so much worse. Director Harry claimed in a DVD commentary that he was asked originally to simply re-edit the first film and foist the result onto an unsuspecting public as a brand-new film. He argued for a new film and this abysmal compromise was the result. A young Ricky is inserted into scenes from the first film to make him more present in Billy’s story than actually was, but Harry never gets around the fact that there are several moments in the flashbacks where Ricky describes things he couldn’t possibly have known about.

The script has a slapped together, “that’ll do” feel that leaves many a plot thread dangling. The idea that Ricky’s murderous rages are triggered by the colour red is laughable in the extreme – red is hardly an uncommon colour so how on earth did he get through the day without slaughtering everyone around him? A simple ride in a car would have ended in disaster at the first red stop light… The film is full of ridiculous, ill-thought-out bits of business like this.

Which leaves one wondering if this was intended to be funny. Today the film is frequently described as a “black comedy” though it’s not at all clear if anyone involved in it intended it to be that way. How seriously are we supposed to take this nonsense? It’s pretty clear that Freeman wasn’t taking it seriously at all, turning in a riotously awful performance that only makes sense as a satire. Cackling half-heartedly, brooding so hard his frown will probably be permanent and spitting out nonsensical dialogue (“You tend to get paranoid when everyone around you gets dead”) with over-the-top enthusiasm. His mad performance is the most enjoyable thing about an otherwise lacklustre film – his gleeful cry of “garbage day!” before he guns down a man putting out his bins was later pressed into service as a social media meme.

Bizarrely, although Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 recycles so much material from the first film, the original film (“Oh, it’s great. It’s about this guy who dresses up like Santa Claus and kills people”) actually turns up at the cinema where Ricky takes his new love Jennifer (genre regular Elizabeth Kaitan using the name Elizabeth Cayton), necessitating the use of more recycled scenes. An obnoxious loudmouth in the audience (Randy Post) shouts abuse at the screen, calling it “bogus.” In a charitable mood one might put this down to a self-awareness on the part of Harry and his co-writer Joseph H. Earle though more likely it was just another excuse to crowbar in some of the original film.

Although Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 was such an egregiously exploitative con job, enticing patrons to part with their hard-earned cash to see 40 minutes of a film they’d already paid to see, it was enough of a hit for the series to continue. The Ricky/Billy trilogy was wrapped up in Monte Hellman’s Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! In 1989 before the psycho Santa routine was dropped for two further sequels, Brian Yuzna’s Initiation: Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 (1990) and Martin Kitrosser’s Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker (1991). The original film was given a very loose remake in 2012 by Steven C. Miller under the shortened title Silent Night.