SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 5:
THE TOY MAKER
Nobody ever said the FIFTH time's the charm
But all things considered, it's not bad. And at the very least, it features the only remotely convincing "life-sized action figure" character I've seen, beating out the guys in Xtro and Dollman vs. The Demonic Toys (sorry, Craig).
For most of its running length, this is a merely enjoyably tacky time waster. Kids are having toys anonymously delivered to their doorsteps, and when one of 'em sees his father open one before Christmas, he sees the toy kill his father (and not from the silly bastard licking the paint off of it until his blood turns to lip balm). After this, the kid is unable to talk, and while his mother (who looks uncannily like Mimi Rogers) tries coping with the loss of her husband and this traumatized kid, there's a toy maker named Joe Peto, who locks his kid Pino in the basement (think about this for a second, and you can extrapolate the rest of the movie from that), and there's also this department store Santa who keeps snooping into EVERYBODY's business.
Like I said, tacky, but an enjoyable time waster. It's the last act that makes it worth a look - delightfully fucked up and well executed, even though you should see it coming once you actually think about it for a moment.
Mickey Rooney looks exactly like he did on his guest appearance on The Simpsons, except here he's live-action, of course. You'd never know it.
The only apparent relationship this has to any previous SN,DN movie is one actress named Neith Hunter who plays a chick named Kim, who appears in both movies. I barely remember part 4, except that it blessedly took a different tack from the killer-Santa monotony of 1-3. Still, the foxiest SN,DN lady is Samantha Scully from part 3. Rgggggggggggellllle!
Not a good movie overall, but there's something about this one anyway. Considering the really awful results that "part fives" have come up with so far (Star Trek, Friday the 13th, etc), I was expecting a lot worse.