The 1984 movie Silent Night, Deadly Night presented a serial killer in a Santa Claus outfit, giving all the bad little boys and girls hammer blows to the head or impaling them on reindeer antlers. It caused an uproar — some people picketed the movie theatres — and it inspired four sequels. It was a cult of ho-ho-horror.

And here we go again: Silent Night is a remake, although it isn’t likely to inspire many pickets, or any sequels either. A sort of tongue-in-cheek homage to bad slasher films, Silent Night tries to have it both ways: a pointless horror movie with no chills that wants to delight us with the way it skewers the tropes and pushes the disgusting factor. This results, for instance, in a scene in which Santa pushes a live woman into a wood chipper.  It is probably needless to add that she is topless at the time.

The film stars Jaime King, who has become the generic scream queen of her era (Mother’s Day, My Bloody Valentine) as Aubrey, a policewoman in Cryer, Wisconsin. It’s a town that celebrates Christmas with a vengeance, if you’ll pardon the expression, and every year half the population dresses up as Santa for the big parade.

This crowd helps disguise the bad Santa, who wears a mask, carries an axe, and punishes the town’s sinners: the cop who’s having an affair, the lascivious priest, the mayor’s sexy daughter, the local porn star.

Aubrey is out to stop him, although Sheriff Cooper (Malcolm McDowell, looking a little grizzled for the role and sounding like no one who has ever enforced the law in Wisconsin) doubts whether she has the ability. The sheriff sees this as his own big chance: “This is payback time for those parking violations and stray cats up trees,” he says, part of the exaggerated stereotyping with which Silent Night courts its perceived audience of horror fans who know they’re watching a near-parody of the genre but are meant to appreciate its self-awareness.

There are several suspects, most intriguingly Jim Epstein (Donal Logue, who once starred in a terrific movie called The Tao of Steve, but never found the stardom it pointed towards.) Jim is the town’s cynical Santa: he tells kids that Christmas is terrible and their parents are not to be trusted, and he delivers a long anti-holiday rant that includes — to push the darkness of the holiday to the limit — a reference to a Tim Tebow NFL sweater.

It’s not quite the hilarious expose that the filmmakers seem to intend, but it’s good to have Logue ranting again. The rest of the movie belongs in the wood chipper.