Welcome to Awful Advent: a countdown of 13 Holiday Horror movies for the 13 days before Christmas
For this year’s ninth entry, a killer dressed as Santa stalks the youths staying at a girls’ finishing school over winter break in To All a Goodnight!
That one line intro is the summary of the entire movie. That’s it. That’s all there is. It’s a slasher movie where the slasher is dressed as Santa Claus.
The movie opens with a girl being chased through the school by a gaggle of other girls. She runs out onto a balcony where someone pushes her and she magically turns into a life-sized stuffed doll that lands, Michael-Myers-style, on the ground below. Cut to two years later and all the girls at the school are heading home for winter break. A few are staying behind with the housemother, the creepy religious groundskeeper, and a plot to sneak in some boys who are literally flying over in a private plane.
There’s no real mystery over who the killer is or why they’re doing it (although if you don’t already know, the thumbnail on Shudder shows the killer). Shades of Friday the 13th with the killer seeking revenge against anyone in the same demographic as the people they feel are responsible for their daughter’s death, all with a Silent Night, Deadly Night gloss. To call the film “derivative” would be both unfair and inaccurate. It came out 4 months before Friday and 4 years before Silent Night. However, “generic” would be a fair description.
The movie does have its moments of flair, but mostly rolls off the brain. Characters start dying before you have any sense of who they are and then the movie pauses so its second act can do the work of establishing the surviving characters. The characters’ actions fall on both sides of the reasonable/happening-because-we-need-a-movie divide and they’re not interesting characters, but the movie is efficient at making it clear who will live and who will die.
Also, the movie’s budgetary constraints are generally handled well. It doesn’t look as cheap as it surely must be, except in the day-for-night shots. “Day-for-night” means filming during the day and trying to make it look like night, usually by putting a blue filter over the lens. You do it because you can’t afford the light kits you’d need to properly shoot at night. It’s one of the things we accept in filmmaking because you do what you gotta do. It doesn’t look 100% real, but it’s usually not so glaringly obvious as to kick you out of the movie.
To All a Goodnight has day-for-night shots without the blue filter. So they’re just day shots. The characters are just walking around during the day. Even though it’s supposed to be night. We know it’s night because they’re carrying flashlights and mentioning how dark it is. As they squint at the sun.
Those shots were a real high point for me: it’s rare you get to see something done badly in a new way. Another thing I really enjoyed was the spate of elderly teens. This is a prep school for girls and no one is a teenager here. Which is good in practical terms because there is nudity and I don’t want to see naked kids, but also hilarious when you see people who clearly have mortgages pretend to be young.
What is there to say? It’s a cheaply but competently executed early-80s slasher. It’s neither excellent nor execrable. It’s fine. Add it to your library of Santa slashers or run it in the background of your holiday party. It has nice aesthetics, is a bit of a time-capsule, and doesn’t get on the nerves. It’s a bit of fun.
2.5/5 Santa-slashed sorority sisters
To All a Goodnight is currently available to stream on Shudder.
No comments:
Post a Comment