(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 sequels

DUD (0/10)

"Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out!" begins as a sexy young blind woman, Laura (Samantha Scully),is having nightmares featuring the previous movies' psycho-Santa killer Ricky Caldwell (now played by genre icon Bill Moseley). As it turns out, her demented doctor, Newbury (Richard Beymer),has been planning to probe the mind of Ricky, who is still alive yet in a coma, and is using Laura to this end. Laura and Ricky now share a psychic link; what one sees, the other sees. As Laura, her brother Chris (Eric DaRe),and Chris' new girlfriend Jerri (Laura Harring) travel to the family homestead to visit with Laura and Chris' grandma (Elizabeth Hoffman),Ricky naturally escapes and leaves a few bodies in his wake as he attempts to meet up with Laura. Trailing Ricky are Dr. Newbury and a detective named Connelly (Robert Culp).

Done by cult favourite director Monte Hellman ("The Shooting", "Two-Lane Blacktop", etc.) basically as a favour, Part 3 largely eschews any sense of humour that the previous sequel displayed, playing its material with a very straight face. The one exception to this approach is the ever so slightly off kilter character of Connelly, amusingly and effectively played by Culp, a man who's quick with the sardonic quips, and who has one strange yet memorable exchange with Beymer during a car ride. This character and performance are really the best things about Part 3, which unfortunately, despite some solid atmosphere, is ultimately too tedious to maintain much interest. It should be pointed out that one supposed shock moment just falls way too flat. The science fiction element is a fresh enough new hook, but it fails to inject much life into the story.

Moseley, better known for much more uninhibited performances in movies like "The Devil's Rejects" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2", is awfully low key here; his antagonist never registers very strongly, or inspires much fear or unease. Co-star Harring does show off some of her nice body in a bathtub scene, but horror fans who crave nudity and lots of gore aren't going to find enough here to suit their tastes.

Not even the finale (which borrows a little from "Wait Until Dark") is particularly exciting. Scully's character isn't particularly likable, although some viewers could see that as an appreciable break from convention. The use of archive footage is still present, but not prevalent.

As an interesting footnote, it's been noted by buffs that both DaRe and Beymer became regulars on 'Twin Peaks' after and that Harring would get a showcase role in David Lynchs' feature film "Mulholland Drive". (It's also worth noting that Hellman and executive producers Richard Gladstein and Ronna Wallace would also executive produce Quentin Tarantinos' break through film "Reservoir Dogs" a few years later.)

In any event, SNDN No. 3 is dull, draggy, and something of a chore to sit through.

Hellmans' daughter Melissa plays Newbury's assistant.

Four out of 10.

So to me right from the start this movie has a really flat and off putting tone that doesn't remotely have the feel of Silent Night Deadly Night, and it's just pretty much dead boring and not very fun at all. For one thing it takes itself too seriously, unlike the second 'movie' it doesn't even have a slight unintentionally hilarious charm going for it, it's way too po-faced to pull that off. They probably should have gone for laughs but it seems they actually thought that they could play a story with a man shuffling along like a snail in a hospital gown and slippers with his exposed brain in a salad bowl in place of his cranium, completely straight! Who the hell was the genius that decided to give him that look anyway? They never even get him in a Santa suit once, and there was a clear point in the story when he could have easily got one too, after Ricky kills the obnoxious drunk Santa who taunts him into waking up from his coma, but no he just inchworms his way out without anyone noticing and proceeds to hitchhike with his dumb fishbowl brain head, and somebody actually gives him a ride!!! It was a decent effort but with that thing stuck on his head the whole time with its antenna and little blinking light Bill Mosley just looked like a silly Frankenstein-esc zombie from a hokey 50s sci-fi B-movie that was more fun! Mosley had virtually nothing to work with here and that was too bad because everyone who knows about him knows that the guy can play manic crazy better than most in the horror movie business. He was stuck in a role that didn't even let him emote here though and he looks like he's ready to nod off in some shots, and for that reason he was nowhere near as much fun as Eric Freeman's version of the character was. I really found myself hating Samantha Scully's weird artsy performance as Laura, her look and how she spoke was so floaty and pretentious, timid or not she was horrible and I didn't give a hoot what happened to her character. She was such a ham when she was trying to act scared, and the Shining type thing between her and Ricky was stupid and completely unnecessary. It's such a listless little mess of a picture, like how they got to the sweet old granny's house who got bumped off earlier and they wonder where she is for about a minute but they never bother to go and look for her, they go and take romantic baths and watch old horror movies, and nothing interesting happens for a good forty minutes, it's a complete joke, and that little condescending "Happy new year" that tops off all the lousiness at the end from Mosley in a tuxedo was so bizarre, I just thought it was like they were going ha-ha you watched the whole movie you idiot! And how about those scenes with Ricky's doctor and the police detective or whatever he was meant to be, their scenes and ridiculous drawn out conversations about crap really drag an already slow as hell movie to a dead halt. They just talk and talk even though they're meant to be racing to stop a demented mass murderer! It's like they were ad-libbing it all and I couldn't stop focusing on the guy's freakishly protruding chin when he was talking.. If you watch them in order, the films in this series each seem to try and top the one that came before in terms of craziness, but at least all the others had they're good points, this is a boring dud with characters that are annoying and unlikeable, it thoroughly wasted Bill Mosley, the kills are pathetic, there's no goddamn Santa suit!! it's slow as f&@k and the absolute worst in the series, do not bother with it, total jingle balls x