Following the unintentional “Garbage day!” greatness of the first sequel, the killer-Claus franchise continues its slay ride with Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (exclamation point theirs). The most notable thing about it is its trio of future David Lynch players: Mulholland Dr.’s Laura Harring and Twin Peaks’ Richard Beymer and Eric Da Re. It’s more fun to imagine Lynch watching this than to do so yourself. Furthermore, you’re better off watching The Terror, the 1963 Roger Corman mishmash that appears on the tube a couple of times.

Ricky Caldwell, the head case-cum-homicidal Kris Kringle, is played this time by genre fave Bill Moseley (The Devil’s Rejects). Instead of rocking the Santa suit throughout, he’s most often clad in a hospital gown and something like a spaghetti colander over his otherwise exposed brain. That’s because Ricky, shot to shreds by the police at the end of Part 2, has been revived six years later as part of sketchy research that brain scientist Dr. Newbury (Beymer) is conducting among the comatose. Despite his vegetative state, Ricky has acquired psychic abilities, which he uses to link up with Laura (Samantha Scully, Best of the Best), a young woman with no eyesight and a rather sour ’tude.

Vis-à-vis the ESP, Ricky repeatedly gives Laura a graphic heads-up of the murders to befall the supporting characters, yet you’d hardly know it since she and her upturned nose just go about their snooty business and, hey, it’s Christmas Eve, dammit. She and her brother, Chris (Da Re) are going to Grandmother’s house for the holiday, and he’s brought along his new girlfriend, Jerri (Harring), whom Laura immediately dislikes. To be fair, Jerri doesn’t help matters with the icebreaker, “So, tell me, how long have you been handicapped?” (Chris is only slightly less crude when he addresses his sister: “Who said you have to be the world’s champion blind orphan?”) Inevitably, Ricky follows them with intent to harm … but only after Harring’s equally inevitable disrobing.

The Better Watch Out! subtitle could double as a harbinger of the damage done to Monte Hellman’s career. How does one go from a counterculture cult classic (Two-Lane Blacktop) to a cheaper-than-Corman VHS premiere like this? (Don’t answer — we know Warren Oates had a hand.) For having a “name” (in certain circles) behind the camera, Silent Night, Deadly Night III has nothing to show for it; the work he presents is as clod-ridden and humdrum as his not-famous predecessors. At least one would think Hellman would have the good sense to end the film any other way than to plop Moseley into a tux and superimpose an image of him turning to the viewer to offer a smile and five words: “And a Happy New Year.” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

WWE Studios’ first theatrical picture not to star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, See No Evil casts wrestler Kane as Jacob Goodnight. He’s the strong, silent type — as in simple-minded and mute and fond of torturing sinners, most of whom are teenagers. Four years after surviving a bullet in the brain put there by a cop — whose arm he then severed — Goodnight resides in the hidden hallways of an abandoned hotel.

There, the man society would never understand (partly due to the hole in his head buzzing with live flies) can retreat and be left alone … except for the weekend when eight juvenile delinquents (Transformers’ Rachael Taylor among them) are brought in to spruce it up for a homeless shelter. It’s all part of a community-service program overseen by that cop (Steven Vidler, The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course), now retired from the street beat, yet still without two working limbs up top. Regardless of shared history, Goodnight doesn’t see eye-to-eye with visitors … mostly because his hobby is squeezing out said peepers and showcasing them in jars.

Usually in horror movies, the bad guy’s pool of victims includes one each of all types — y’know, the nerd, the jock, the slut, the black one, etc. — but in See No Evil, they all pretty much fill the “troubled kid” slot. Goodnight is eager to use his knowledge of the hotel’s secret passageways to his advantage: spying on these well-scrubbed JD teens from behind two-way mirrors; popping out of elevators and dumbwaiters like a trapdoor spider; capturing them via hooked chains, which he wields with Olympics-worthy precision.

As slashers go, this one is nastier than most, despite opening titles that scream “made-for-TV.” (It wasn’t.) Kane exudes appropriate menace, no doubt helped by not having to speak. Nihilism spurts and gushes throughout — an uneasy feeling accentuated by the dingy, sweat-stained veneer favored by director Gregory Dark, here graduating to studio fare after a long career in porn (New Wave Hookers), would-be porn (the Animal Instincts trilogy) and may-as-well-be porn (Britney Spears videos).

Stick through the end credits for the stinger of the “deceased” Goodnight (who managed to return in 2014’s slicker, not-quite-sicker See No Evil 2) getting his face pissed on by a lifted-leg dog. Let’s see you try that, Marvel! —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.