R rated movie from 70s or 80s that had a thief mall Santa, and everything goes wrong and the movie get darker and then there’s a decapitated woman head on fish tank.
I’m pretty sure that the location wasn’t suburban, it was a city (mall and apartment)
I think is R rated because of the whole decapitated head situation and I think there was some nudity as well.
Is it The Silent Partner?
Reminds me of Bad Santa (2003) but it’s much more recent.
The film is The Silent Partner, a Canadian production from 1978. It is one of my all-time favorite neo-noir thrillers. Christopher Plummer played a thief who carefully plans to rob the bank at the mall where he is working as a bell-ringing Santa. Elliot Gould plays a meek bank teller who gets wind of the robbery plot, and unwisely decides to not report it to the authorities, but to instead use this knowledge to his own advantage. Knowing when Plummer plans to rob the bank, Gould first slips most of the money from his till into his lunch bucket, later hiding it in one of the bank’s safe deposit boxes. When Plummer robs the bank, head teller Gould gives Plummer only a few hundred dollars. Gould figures, what is the thief going to do when the actual amount stolen is reported on the news… Go to the cops? But what he didn’t count on was Plummer’s Santa being one of the most deranged, psychotic killers every to appear in a film. The two play a cat and mouse game with Plummer threatening Gould to try to get the money, and Gould trying to find some way to get Plummer off his back without his own crime coming to light. As the violence escalates, Plummer eventually assaults and beheads a woman, placing her head in Gould’s fish tank for him to find when he gets home.
This fantastic little thriller was written by Curtis Hanson, who later went on to write and direct the acclaimed L.A. Confidential. John Candy has a small role in the film, playing a junior teller at the bank.