To All A Goodnight (1980)

I was asked the other day from one of my fellow critics why low-budget horror directors seem so keen on staging slasher pictures on holidays – in particular, he noted, Christmas.  I think its antithetical nature is perhaps the reason why.  Christmas is sold to us as a time of Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men, and heaping helpings of family, good cheer, selflessness and a time to put our differences aside.  So, why then, post a horror movie there?  Why not Halloween?  That holiday was practically made for the slasher genre.

At any rate, Christmas doesn’t really factor very much in to David Hess’ To All a Goodnight, a hazy, lazy buck-and-a-quarter slasher picture centered on the students left behind during Christmas break at the Calvin Finishing School for the Girls who plan to party their butts off with their boyfriends until a killer begins stalking the couples one by one.  The cops show up and try to help but they end up being victims themselves.  And, it turns out, the killer’s machinations have a strange tie-in with a girl who was killed a few years back during an initiation gone wrong.

I have to write all of this quickly because I saw the movie half an hour ago and most of it has already seeped out of my memory and into the ether.  The movie is not particularly memorable even by the standards of this genre.  Hess is not much of a director.  He’s a musician and actor whose most memorable credit was playing one of the killers in Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left.

His film is a strange kind of vapor that evaporates from your mind the minute that the movie ends.  You won’t remember it when it is over.  This time next week you will be straining to remember anything about it.  Honestly, I just saw it yesterday and I’m struggling.  The only real question lingering in my mind is why a Christmas horror flick is being released in January.  In showbusiness, timing is everything guys,