YMMV / Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out!

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Right before the movie ends, a vision of Ricky in a suit wishes us a happy new year.
• Les Yay: It's not hard to read the constant bickering between Laura and Jerri as Belligerent Sexual Tension, especially after Chris is seemingly killed, and the two suddenly become very affectionate while trying to comfort each other.
• Padding: Much of the running time is padded out with Leave the Camera Running moments, long dialog sequences that don't really do anything to advance the plot, and more flashbacks to the first film (though not to anything like the same degree as in the second film, at least).
• Sequelitis: The film is considered by many to be the worst entry in the series, or at least the one that's least enjoyable to watch. While it's a more technically competent production than the second film, without that one's technical blunders and general So Bad, It's Good qualities, the end result is a dull film that's light on kills — Ricky killed as many people in the previous film's "Garbage Day" sequence alone as he does the entirety of this film — and incredibly padded in-between those kills.
• Squick: At least one review of the film noted that Chris's girlfriend looked a lot like his sister...
• Special Effect Failure: Ricky's killing a nurse off-screen is represented by what is very obviously someone squirting ketchup over the nurse's desk.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Ricky being brought back to life in a crazy medical experiment, and then murdering his way through everyone who stands in way of the one person who's able to communicate with him sounds like it could make the basis of an entertainingly trashy slasher film. However, between Eric Freeman being replaced by the far less physically intimidating Bill Moseley (whose talent for playing unhinged characters is wasted by giving Ricky almost no lines), and the film going in more of a psychological horror direction with only a small handful of kills which mostly take place off-screen, the end result is an extremely talky and padded film that makes Ricky's exposed brain seem bizarrely out of place — heck, they don't even take the obvious step of having Ricky hide the brain dome with a Santa hat!

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