The Scare Salon

As for more obscure but still fun trivia, how about the fact that this film was only one of a handful of screenwriting credits by Alex Rebar, who played the gooey title character in the hilariously awful 1977 film The Incredible Melting Man. This movie also features a main character played by Jennifer Runyon, who had a small part in 1984’s Ghostbusters as one of the “psychic” students Bill Murray is experimenting on, as well as a leading role on the first season of the 80s sitcom Charles in Charge. And if all that wasn’t enough, eagle-eyed viewers may spot porn star Harry Reems (of Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones fame, but credited here as Dan Stryker) in a tiny role as a hapless airplane pilot who gets chopped up by a propeller.

So after this litany of fascinating facts, is this movie a lost Christmas horror gem? Well, that depends on your point of view, I guess, and on your tolerance for barely competent schlock. It’s entertaining in places, for sure, though mostly in a “so-bad-it’s-good” or “wtf did I just watch” kind of way. The acting is generally pretty poor; the dialogue is repetitive, cringe-inducing, and sometimes barely coherent; the kills aren’t all that gory; the plot makes little sense; and there are some boring, protracted scenes, despite the movie only being eighty-seven minutes long. The setting and story pretty blatantly rip off Bob Clark’s 1974 Black Christmas in a number of ways, and would be accused of ripping off Friday the 13th pretty hard too if this movie hadn’t actually preceded it by four months, a fact which I have to admit blows my mind just a little bit; you’ll understand why as I break down the film.

Much like the aforementioned Black Christmas, To All a Goodnight is set over the holiday season, though not at a sorority house, but at a finishing school for girls, which amounts to the same thing in this context. At the beginning of the movie, we get the obligatory, slasher-movie-killer revenge set-up, whereby a group of young women are hazing a new recruit (we’re led to assume) by chasing her through the house. One of the chasers is dressed as Santa and carrying a rubber axe (ah, that storied college tradition of hazing newbs by pretending to be a hatchet-wielding St. Nick), but as it happens, there’s a bit of an accident and the new girl stumbles over a railing, which causes a very obvious dummy to flop bonelessly to the floor below. Since we all know the rules of slasher movies by now, we can surmise that the killer is either going to be this girl, who didn’t really die; or a friend or relative of this girl, taking revenge against the careless bitches who caused her demise.

The movie then jumps ahead two years, and most of the students are heading home for the holidays, except for a handful of young women who have chosen to stay behind. These ladies consist of the virginal, goody-two-shoes Nancy (Jennifer Runyon), who might as well have “final girl” tattooed across her forehead, and four kinda snotty, interchangeable sluts named Melody, Leia, Trisha, and Sam (played by Linda Gentile, Judith Bridges, Angela Bath, and Denise Steams, respectively). Please note that although Jennifer Runyon went on to have quite a successful career after this movie, is the best actor here by far, and is cute as a button to boot, many of the other actors appearing in To All a Goodnight list this as their only film credit, and to be honest I’m not all that surprised.

It turns out that the head of the school is going to be away for the weekend, leaving only the house mother/cook Mrs. Jensen (Kiva Lawrence) in charge of these dick-hungry young women. Predictably, the girls immediately plan to drop some sedatives in the house mother’s drink so they can ship in a literal planeload of boyfriends (which is not an exaggeration; one of the guys has a private plane) to the house for a weekend of drinkin’ and screwin’. The Promiscuity Pack eventually persuades Nancy to be the one to give Mrs. Jensen the spiked milk, just because she’s the only one the house mother wouldn’t suspect of shenanigans.

Before the plan is put into motion, there’s a dinner scene with stew and cherry pie, and the standard issue creepy groundskeeper is introduced. The character’s name should be Red Herring McGee, but is actually Ralph (Buck West), and he essentially spouts the same portents of doom as Crazy Ralph from Friday the 13th, an eerie similarity that made me wonder if there was some kind of indie film espionage going on. The dude is so over-the-top skeevy and acts so inappropriately toward Nancy in particular that you can be one-thousand percent sure that he is NOT the killer.

In the kitchen after dinner, an Italian woman whose relationship to the other characters is never established shows up, picks at the girls’ leftovers, kvetches to Mrs. Jensen and Ralph that she’s going to need a bypass, and gives them cannoli wrapped in tin foil. This woman is never seen or mentioned again, and it’s unclear who the fuck she is and what she has to do with the plot.

While all of this is going on, a sixth young woman named Cynthia who isn’t even in the movie long enough to get a credit on Wikipedia gets naked in front of her bedroom window as she’s preparing to dress so she can go outside and meet her boyfriend Paul. Out on the school grounds, Paul gets stabbed by the killer Santa before she can come out, however, and as soon as Cynthia walks out into the driveway, Santa unceremoniously shanks her as well. Neither Cynthia nor Paul will be mentioned again either, and I don’t even remember if their bodies turn up later.

Anyway, after Mrs. Jensen retires to her room for the evening, the girls all grab flashlights and go out at “midnight,” which is obviously a pleasant late afternoon, to meet the plane that’s transporting their penis-providing lifeforms for the weekend. One kind of amusing gag (which may or may not have been intentional) is that Harry Reems, the porn star, plays the only guy in the movie who has to stay behind with the plane and doesn’t get laid.

All the arriving dudes are just as annoying and interchangeable as the girls, so much so that I can’t remember which one was which. There was one guy who was named either Tom or Blake, who was supposed to be “the funny one” because he wore a kinda goofy shirt and talked like…Dracula?…at some point for no reason, but he gets offed pretty quickly when Santa bashes his face in with a rock, so thankfully I didn’t have to endure his “jokes” for long.

There’s also a buff douchebag named TJ (William Lauer) who seems to be the “leader,” and brought an acoustic guitar on which he sings horribly off-key folk tunes that made me want to repeatedly run him over with a VW hippie bus. The only sort of likable man is nerdy virgin Alex (Forrest Swanson), who talks about nothing but math and other nerd things until he gets a pity fuck from Melody, after which he starts talking about sports and chasing Nancy while acting like…Quasimodo? King Kong?…like a man oughtta.

Anyway, Trisha (who is British and also slutty and that’s about it) is dispatched when she goes to the fridge to get beer for the others, and “funny” Tom gets bumped off too when he goes to look for her. None of the others seem at all alarmed by their friends’ mysterious disappearances, figuring they just went off somewhere to bang (which, to be fair, does happen quite a lot in this movie). Hilariously, Nancy and one of the other girls clearly see blood on the floor in front of the refrigerator from where Trisha bought it, but neither of them thinks anything is wrong, instead surmising that Groundskeeper Ralph just cut his hand or something. The killer Santa is subsequently shown burying some of the bodies in the school’s garden, again without anyone noticing.

Meanwhile, Sam and Blake start porking in the front room while Melody and Alex are boinking upstairs. Lonely Nancy, in her frumpy robe, drinks milk and wistfully watches them through the windows from outside (!!!), but after she turns away, the killer Santa—who has somehow put on a medieval suit of armor, because why not—shoots Blake through the mouth with a crossbow and then beheads Sam.

The next morning, everyone is still blasé about the missing people, eating breakfast and shooting the shit like it ain’t no thing. Nancy goes into the woods (???) to try to find the others, followed by Alex, who seems to have taken a shine to her. As she’s running away from Alex’s tomfoolery, she stumbles across the murdered corpse of Ralph, who had actually come into her room through the window (!!!) the night before to warn her that something evil was going on and that she needed to pray. I guess Ralph should have taken his own advice, because God sure didn’t save his creepy ass.

The cops come out to the house, and several of the surviving “teenagers” try to keep their names out of the investigation so they don’t get in trouble with their rich parents. The main detective, Polansky (Sam Shamshak), is seemingly appalled by their callousness. A MAN HAS BEEN MURDERED, he insists, but TJ in particular is all like MY REPUTATION THO. Polansky gives a very weird speech about how Ralph had a pretty extensive criminal record (!!!) which may have contributed to his death, and this monologue is delivered as he stares unsettlingly at Nancy and cups his hand under her chin for an uncomfortably long time. He then tells the gang that he’s going to have two police officers watching the house around the clock until the murderer is caught.

So even though Ralph has very obviously been homicided to death, and a bunch of these lunkheads’ friends have been missing for, what, twelve hours now, TJ argues that they don’t have a single thing to be concerned about, and lambastes Nancy and Alex for worrying about nothing. Mrs. Jensen is also bizarrely unaffected, wondering why on Earth anyone should be frightened; when Nancy and Alex remind her about the dead guy and the vanished students, she’s all, “Oh yeah, that. Well, I’m sure everything will be fine.”

There are then several repeated and pointless discussions where the various factions argue about whether they’re actually in danger or not, and in the midst of that, Leia seduces one of the lumpy, middle-aged cops sent to protect them and bangs him in her room, while her nominal boyfriend TJ seethes about it for a second before honing in on Melody and her admittedly larger breasts.

The second cop who was patrolling outside gets axed by the killer Santa after walking right up to him and asking why he’s wearing that ridiculous getup; and later on, Leia goes to take a post-coital shower after her roll in the hay with the first cop, but finds Sam’s severed head stuck upside down on the shower…head. Oh, I see what you did there, movie. Fraternizing With A Witness Cop also gets stabbed in the back as he comes through the bathroom door in response to Leia’s screams. Killer Santa then approaches a naked Leia, but we cut away before he murders her.

TJ and Melody have gone outside to make out for absolutely no reason, and TJ gets garroted by Killer Santa, who is perched on a tree branch above them. Melody gets away and makes it back to the house, where she, Alex, and Nancy tear through the rooms freaking out, finding the dead cop and Sam’s head. They also find Leia, who is still alive but appears to have suffered some kind of psychotic break, as she looks as though her makeup and wardrobe were inspired by Linda’s demon form from The Evil Dead and she dances around humming like a weirdo.

At this point, the final battle between Killer Santa and the survivors commences, with Alex and Nancy fighting the murderer in the house while Melody flees to the nearby airstrip to wake up Porn Pilot to get them out of there. Somehow the Killer Santa is also in the cockpit of the plane, though, and turns on the propeller in time to chop up Melody and the pilot, though at first I wasn’t sure if both of them were dead because all we see is a few red chunks hitting the plane’s fuselage.

Back at the house, the killer is revealed to be Mrs. Jensen, who tells them she’s the mother of the girl who was accidentally killed two years ago by falling over the railing. Yes, this film did the “mother taking revenge for the death of her child” thing before Friday the 13th! Mrs. Jensen seems particularly keen to kill Nancy, even though Nancy says she only started at the school last year and didn’t even know this psycho’s daughter. Mrs. Jensen says that Nancy drugged the girl, though, which I guess is meant to be a reference to Nancy drugging Mrs. Jensen’s milk at the beginning of the movie, and it should be noted also that Nancy asked the other girls when they were convincing her to do it why she always had to do their dirty work. This would seem to imply that Nancy had done the drugging thing before, so is Nancy lying about only being at the school for one year, or is Mrs. Jensen just delusional? I mean, Mrs. Jensen is the house mother, so you’d think she would know if this chick had been at the school when her daughter died, but Nancy isn’t portrayed as the type of character who would lie, so I’m really just confused. I couldn’t see if Nancy was among the girls at the beginning who had been there when the daughter fell over the railing, and to be honest, the scene was so quick that I didn’t recognize any of the girls there as the ones who were killed by Mrs. Jensen. Besides that, if Mrs. Jensen was specifically taking revenge on the girls who were responsible for the death of her daughter, why did she also kill the guys? And why did she wait two years to do it? And why did she leave Leia alive? The whole thing just makes no sense.

Speaking of making no sense, there’s yet another reveal that takes place shortly after the first one, which at least explains how the killer Santa could be at the house menacing Nancy and Alex and also be in the plane chopping up Melody and the pilot. Yep, turns out there are TWO killer Santas; any guesses as to who the second one is? It’s the cop, Polansky, who is unmasked as Mrs. Jensen’s husband and the dead girl’s father. He also seems to be under the impression that Nancy is the one most responsible for his daughter’s death (WHY?) and laments that he didn’t kill her first. Anyway, Mrs. Jensen gets some poetic justice when Nancy kinda accidentally on purpose throws her over the same railing where her daughter died (which is pretty ice cold, all things considered), and then it looks like Polansky is gonna kill Nancy until Alex takes him out with the crossbow from earlier. The pair then flees the house, leaving Leia all alone, dancing around and humming, almost as though they were trying to set up a sequel where she’d be the killer.

So yeah, it’s not a great film by any means; most of the actors (and their characters) are insufferable; the dialogue is stuffed with cheesy and borderline nonsensical double entendres as well as a few instances of bizarrely incorrect word usage; and the twist is somewhat predictable and makes no sense in context. Though the version I watched on Shudder has clearly been cleaned up, earlier versions were apparently so muddy that some scenes couldn’t even be made out. The special effects, particularly the obvious dummy falling from the railing and some laughably glaring day-for-night shots, were not fantastic, and it’s pretty evident watching the film that this thing was shot in ten days on a seventy-thousand-dollar budget. On top of that, the film takes some conspicuous cues from Black Christmas, but without the wit, intelligence, suspense, or stellar characterization of that far superior film.

Oh, and I know this isn’t the filmmakers’ fault but the original poster art is sort of lame and has nothing to do with the movie. It’s not Christmassy at all and looks as though the characters are going to be menaced by something paranormal, like a big-headed demon or extraterrestrial, rather than a couple of killer Santas.

All that said, though, this is still a somewhat fun, if only serviceable, holiday slasher. Though it’s not all that bloody, it does have a high body count and some nudity if you’re into that, and some of the stuff that happens in it is so baffling that it becomes entertaining in spite of itself. It’s no hidden gem, but if you’re in the mood for some good old-fashioned 80s Christmas slashing, you could do worse, though I would recommend getting good and drunk first and MST’ing the shit out of it for maximum enjoyment.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.