Trivia / Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2

• Blooper:
  • At the start of the "Garbage Day" rampage, you can just about make out a boom mike and the heads of a couple of crew members — unless you're watching the fullscreen VHS version, in which case you can make out the entire crew.
  • The Lieutenant's sidearm changes from a snubnose to a much larger revolver during the final scene.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Eric Freeman originally read for the role of one of the cops who tries to talk Ricky down at the end of the "Garbage Day" sequence, back when David Heavener was originally set to play Ricky.
• Creator Backlash: Per this interview, Eric Freeman seems to vacillate between disowning the movie and embracing it. He admits that his performance is too over-the-top which he blames in part on director Lee Harry, who gave Freeman no feedback on his acting aside from repeatedly saying that he was "not nutty enough,"^note for instance: Freeman initially delivered the infamous "Garbage Day" line as an understated Pre-Mortem One-Liner, but Harry directed him to redo the line "crazier" on subsequent takes and partly because he assumed from the script that the movie was a horror comedy and played Ricky accordingly. But Freeman still enjoyed making the film and appreciates the cult status it's gained over the years.
• Creator Killer: Unsurprisingly this was Eric Freeman's first and only lead role, though he did a fair amount of television work (including several appearances on In Living Color!) afterwards.
• Hostility on the Set: There were apparently many disagreements between producer Lawrence Appelbaum and the rest of the cast and crew, to the point where James Newman, who played Dr. Bloom, admitted on the DVD commentary track to flipping off the camera when he was being loaded into a body bag — knowing it would be hidden behind the actors playing Sister Mary and the detective — imagining that he was doing it to Appelbaum. Randy Post, who played the loudmouth in the theater, also had a hard time getting paid, resulting in Eric Freeman having to step in and demand that Appelbaum pay him.
• Life Imitates Art: A plot point in the first film was the toy store's Santa showing up too drunk to work, leading to the owner making Billy act as Santa for the night. During this film's shoot, the actor they originally hired to play the Santa who Ricky kills for his costume never showed up for filming, resulting in the cinematographer jumping in to play the part.
• No Budget: The filmmakers were given $100,000 and told to edit the first film to pass it off as a sequel. According to director Lee Henry even that much was a concession from the studio, as he insisted that the film wouldn't sell without some new material added.
• The Other Darrin:
  • If you count the flashbacks to Silent Night, Deadly Night, Ricky is played by at least five different actors throughout the film. Hilariously, the twelve-year-old Ricky from the sequence where he is adopted by the Rosenbergs looks younger than the Ricky who appears in the final scene of Silent Night, Deadly Night, while the teenage Ricky from the scene where he commits his first murder actually looks older than Eric Freeman (probably because the actor actually was older).
  • Jean Miller plays Mother Superior, replacing Lilyan Chauvin from the first film. However Chauvin still appears in the footage taken from the first film, so Miller wore makeup that made her face look disfigured to hide the actor change, with Mother Superior being said to have suffered a stroke.
• The Other Marty: Part 2 reshot some of the sequences that Ricky had appeared in during the first film, since the actor that originally played him was too old to reprise the part. Unfortunately they didn't do a very good job of it, with the result that the actor playing the young Ricky often changes in the middle of a scene.
• Recycled Soundtrack: Music from the 1983 film The Alchemist is reused.
• What Could Have Been:
  • According to Eric Freeman, the role of Ricky almost went to D-Grade country singer, actor, and director David Heavener.
  • In the script, Ricky was definitively killed at the climax. The shot of him opening his eyes and smiling at the camera was added during filming as a potential Sequel Hook.

---