Publication Date: 12-04-2025

Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker (1991) review

Dir. Martin Kitrosser

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★

What the hell could’ve motivated me to skip ahead in the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise and watch The Toy Maker, the fifth and final installment? I can’t justify that anymore than the screenwriters who decided to curve the franchise’s path after the second film, comprised almost entirely of reused footage from its predecessor, and make sequels that disregarded the “killer Santa Claus” thread that was formed with the chilling and controversial original film.

What I’ll try and justify is how Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker is a fairly good little thriller, effectively scary, cheaply shot, which adds to its aesthetic, and bearing enough interesting twists to keep even a picky horror fan somewhat in-tune with it. It’s actually a grimmer film than I had anticipated, very sad at times and even troubling during one key sequence where a young couple are mutilated by a gaggle of toy soldiers, modified toy-cars, and a crawling hand while having sex. It’s all strange, it’s all bizarre, and it’s mostly effective.

The film opens with a young boy named Derek (William Thorne), awakened suddenly from the doorbell ringing, finding a Christmas present addressed to him just outside of his door. His father wakes up and reprimands him for opening the door this late at night, and opens the gift to find a musical orb that’s colored and shaped to look like Santa Claus. After playing a nursery rhyme, the toy launches several cords from itself that strangle Derek’s father, before he falls and is impaled by a fireplace poker.

Two weeks later, Derek hasn’t uttered a word and he nervously operates while living with his mother Sarah (Jane Higginson). She tries to cheer him up by taking him to a toy-store, run by the cleverly named old man Joe Petto (Mickey Rooney) and his strange son Pino (Brian Bremer), who tries to give Derek a toy larvae to which Joe objects. When Sarah and Derek leave, we see that Joe is actually extremely violent abusive to Pino, blaming the toy-store’s failures on him, in addition to a young man named Noah (Tracy Fraim), who has been following Sarah and Derek. Eventually, the larvae toy is given to Joe’s landlord, who is killed by it on the way home after it slithers into his mouth and devours his eyeballs.

Such begins the advent of modified toys, everything from soldiers to robots, carrying out violent and malicious tendencies, presumably made by Petto at his toy-store. With this, Derek is put in grave danger, especially after Noah finds Sarah and reveals his secret to the audience and the real motivations of another character come to life.

With this installment of the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise, again, deviating from its roots, the film looks and feels like an episode of a horror anthology, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Its look and tone is that indescribable hybrid between “eighties old” and “nineties new” that comes off in the rather dim color palette, and its emphasis on toys and several scenes at Petto’s toy-store keenly remind me of that terrific closing sequence in Child’s Play 2.

And then, beyond the horror of toys coming to life and acting on vicious, life-threatening impulse, you have a young boy who is desperately inching towards being catatonic, a creepy old toy-store owner, played wonderfully by Mickey Rooney, and a fringe narrative concerning a love-story that throws another wrench into predictability. Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker is far from a slickly made horror film, but it nonetheless shows its effectiveness by exercising the strengths of its concept rather than draw from the well of clichés.

My review of Silent Night (2012)
My review of Silent Night, Deadly Night (2025)

Starring: William Thorne, Jane Higginson, Mickey Rooney, Brian Bremer, and Tracy Fraim. Directed by: Martin Kitrosser.