Director – Brian Yuzna, Screenplay – Woody Keith, Story – Arthur H. Gorson, S.J. Smith & Brian Yuzna, Producer – Richard N. Gladstein, Photography – Philip Holahan, Music – Richard Band, Surrealistic Visual Design & Effects – Screaming Mad George, Production Design – Gilbert Mercier. Production Company – Silent Films.
Cast
Neith Hunter (Kim Levitt), Maud Adams (Fima), Clint Howard (Ricky), Tommy Hinkley (Hank), Allyce Beasley (Janice), Reggie Bannister (Eli Wallace), Jeanne Bates (Katherine Harrison), Marjean Holden (Jane E. Na), Ben Slack (Gus), Glen Chin (Jo the Butcher), Conan Yuzna (Lonnie), David Wells (Detective Burt)
Plot
Kim Levitt is a junior reporter for L.A. Eye magazine. She becomes fascinated by an incident of spontaneous combustion where a woman fell from a building with lower half of her body on fire. However, her editor dismisses Kim and gives the assignment to her boyfriend Hank. Kim decides to investigate on her own. This leads her to meet Fima, who runs a bookshop in the building from which the girl jumped. Fima invites Kim to join her witchcraft circle dedicated to Lilith. As Kim’s apartment is overrun by bugs, she finds that Fima and her followers intend to draw her in to a sacrifice.
Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) is the most famous among a series of Christmas-themed slasher films. At the time it came out, its image of a psychopathic Santa prompted vehement protests from groups offended by its trashing of the sanctity of the holiday figure. The horror genre, never one to shy away from controversy, responded to this by creating a series of sequels – Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987), Silent Night, Deadly Night III: You Better Watch Out (1989), Initiation and Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker (1992), while the original later underwent a remake with Silent Night (2012).
The fourth entry in the series Initiation: Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 was directed by Brian Yuzna. Yuzna first emerged as a producer for Stuart Gordon with Re-Animator (1985), From Beyond (1986) and Dolls (1987), before making his directorial debut with the perversely entertaining Society (1989). He followed this with a string of horror films that included Bride of Re-Animator (1990), Return of the Living Dead III (1993), The Dentist (1996) and Progeny (1998), among others. These all came with striking fetishistic imagery and an instinctive flair for the use of makeup effects. (See below for Brian Yuzna’s other films).
The first three Silent Night, Deadly Night films don’t exactly smoothly connect but at least follow the same character and his brother. With Initiation, Brian Yuzna abandons any connection to what went before. The sole connection is that some of You Better Watch Out plays on tv during the scene where Clint Howard walks in on Neith Hunter and Tommy Hinkley having sex but that is it. In fact, it is a strain to even see Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 as a Christmas Film at all. There are assorted Christmas decorations in the background and a scene where Tommy Hinkley’s father Ben Slack makes a big stink about Neith Hunter being Jewish and not celebrating Christmas, while we later see him get strangled by the lights on the Christmas tree.
Homeless man Ricky (Clint Howard) with one of the bugs
Silent Night Deadly Night 4 earns some distinction as quite possibly not only the weirdest Christmas film ever made but the weirdest Christmas horror film ever made. In assorted scenes, we see Neith Hunter’s apartment overrun by bugs – she starts vomiting them up and as she runs to the bathroom we see one about three feet long up on the wall. As with any Brian Yuzna film, there are weird sex scenes – at one point, Neith Hunter turns aggressive and starts going on about try to sleep ravage Tommy Hinkley. There are weird performances from Clint Howard as a homeless man who is also a cultist and gets to impregnate Neith Hunter in a climactic ceremony, and Glen Chin as an overweight butcher in a bloodstained smock.
The film features the work of Screaming Mad George, a makeup effects artist who conducted work on several films of this era including various A Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, The Guyver (1991) and various other films for Brian Yuzna. George has a field day coming up with bizarre effects. These includes everything from plates of spaghetti comes to life, Tommy Hinkley strung up with hooks through his nipples to Neith Hunter developing rubber fingers. In the climactic scenes, we see Clint Howard’s body being devoured by large maggot-like creatures. The most bizarre sequence is when Neith Hunter undergoes the titular initiation where she is stripped by the cultists who come and place one of the bugs on her stomach and then moments later she vomits up a giant centipede-like bug about three feet long.
