Silent Night, Bloody Night

(1964) **3/4

Not to be confused with Silent Night, Deadly Night, the 1984 movie about an axe-wielding Santa.

The Butler house has lain empty for years after the burning death of Wilfred Butler, the head of the household. A city lawyer shows up representing Jeffrey Butler, the sole remaining heir to the Butler estate to sell the property back to the town. The elders are eager to pay -- to a person, the four person council is pretty creeped out by the house. We learn that there is more spooking them than that a guy died there once.

The lawyer and his slinky European chippy spend the night at the Butler mansion, but are slaughtered with an axe before morning. One by one, the elders are lured to the Butler house by phone calls from a liquid, whispering voice claiming to be that of Wilfred's daughter, Marianne.

Little is known or spoken about the Butler family. Could it in fact be Marianne? Well, no, voice sounds a little too mannish. Perhaps it's Marianne's son Jeffrey, recently returned to town from California. Or maybe it's that unidentified inmate who just escaped from the local asylum. Gosh. What intrigue.

The gore is delightful in this. The axe murdering death has some nice butchery going down. There's a pretty great posse murder scene featured somewhere in there, which itself features a nasty eye gouge with a wine glass.

The problem is that everything between the gore is pretty dull. It's got elements of a mystery and a pretty good central history, but there's no sense of revelation or panic anywhere. The explanation of what's going on comes wholesale in narrations of newspaper quotes. That's not really a mystery. That's more like a riddle.

Nice performances and decent campfire story feel but, eh, you could skip it.