Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2

What makes a movie a movie? Can it be boiled down to "events captured on film"? If so, then we have to consider something like the 2023 film Paint Drying -- 607 unbroken minutes of a static image of white paint drying on a wall -- to be a movie. Is a plot required? Well, then we're forced to consider Pirates II: Stagnatti's Revenge, a porn movie with an $8,000,000 budget, full sets, costumes, special effects, and enough plot that it was edited down into a non-pornographic R-rated cut. Perhaps it boils down to what the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said when discussing obscene material: "I know it when I see it". Which brings us to the conundrum that is Silent Night, Deadly Night 2. How does one judge a movie where 30 minutes of an 88 minute movie is recycled footage from Silent Night, Deadly Night used in a series of flashbacks? What am I supposed to say about a movie where a full third of it is another movie entirely, but an immensely truncated version of said movie? Do I commend them for boiling down a 90 minute slasher movie into its most base elements (nudity and murder)? Or do I point out how, somehow, editing down a 90 minute movie into a 30 minute flashback had no discernable negative impact whatsoever on SNDN1's narrative structure, and how much it depresses me that a subgenre of horror I love so much can be so easily distilled? I have a deep resentment that this movie has given me an existential crisis, and yet, I almost have to respect it for pulling it off. How does one judge the narrative of a movie like SNDN2 when all but the last 10 minutes of the movie are flashbacks and the framing device of a psychological interview with the movie's antagonist Ricky? Do I mention how Ricky has flashbacks to, and speaks with great detail to, events he wasn't present for? Or events he was present for, but only as an infant? What about how the constant flashing back means this movie is in a constant state of narratively looking over its own shoulder? By the time the inevitable and obvious conclusion happens, 85% of this movie is gone, and the "Ricky is a crazed killer" drum has been beaten so much, it's an honorary member of the LAPD. How does one judge the ... portrayal of Ricky by Eric Freeman, since there is no doubt a restraining order in effect that prevents calling it acting? He seems to have been told in acting class that, at all times, one's eyebrows must move more than a seismograph during an earthquake. Jim Carrey's performance in Ace Venture is a subtle character study compared to this. If one approaches SNDN2 as a black comedy or a satire of slasher movies or just a campy C-level romp -- and one absolutely must, or one might go more insane trying to take this seriously -- it can be amusing, even entertaining, but in no way, shape, or form can this be confused as acting, except in the way that several well-placed explosives in a dilapidated building can be considered acting upon the building's structural integrity. How does one judge the movie's overall composition when the budget was intentionally kept so low that using 30 minutes of the preceding movie was to get this up to a feature-length runtime? Can I be mad that the movie theater set that only has three rows and is as well-lit as a Florida beach at high noon? Was the interview room framing device and multitude of exterior shots a way to save money? Or that the kills are both original -- strangulation with a car antenna, impalement with an umbrella and then opening it -- and also too comedic to be taken seriously? Is this a movie? I don't know. I don't even know how to grade it, to be honest. It is fascinating in a macabre, can't-look-away kind of way. There isn't an ounce of professionalism here -- this was a cash grab, through and through -- but there doesn't seem to have been an intent. It's not good, but it embraces its not-goodness, and I can't be mad at that. This is the kind of movie one has to be in the right kind of mood to watch. On a purely objective basis, this is unequivocally a train wreck, but as a cringey, so-bad-it's-good, Troll 2/The Room kind of movie, there's a certain weird charm to it. So I'm scoring it on that basis and that basis alone.