*********!!!
Honestly, wow.
I haven't watched one of these no-budget horror movies in a long time and I'd forgotten just how rough they can be.
Where to begin?
I'll go with a synopsis. This is the story of some high school kids, including one that is obsessed with Halloween and "the rules" thereof, going off to a barn in the country on Halloween night where there was rumored to have been a death/murder 30 years earlier and an urban legend about 3 demons that live there. Needless to say, they run afoul of said demons. They actually end up releasing them on the citizenry of the nearby town, where literally everyone in the town is killed in a demon-massacre, and then there's a sort of climax of fighting the demons and then there's a sort of twist that causes a second climax, which turns out to be a sort of fake-out to set up the final scene. Or something like that. I dunno, I just watched it and that's still the best I can do.
It's funny because this movie actually seems like it should have a pretty linear and well-flowing narrative on paper... so why did it
feel like they were making it up as they went along?
Let me talk about the things this film had going for it. The story, ostensibly, works ok for an extremely rote genre picture. I guess the director/writer claims he was going for something and had been thinking about this film his whole life, but every idea in the film, more or less, has been done before, to death, except perhaps the triumvirate of demons concept. Which still was pretty slap-dash.
****, I'm doing a terrible job at being positive about this.
Anyway, the three demon-guys (which are just actors in old clothes, makeup, and/or some kind of mask armed with an axe, a pickaxe, and a sickle... and I think one of them or maybe all of them, I dunno, has like claws or something), are somewhat compelling.
They also, wisely, went for the vibe of making a late-80s horror movie, using the special effects that were popular at that time, animated lightning and magic bolts or whatever, which they were probably able to do on their iPad now, saving most of the budget. Which was like $8,000.
Alright, now the negative.
The script is bad. They are, ostensibly (twice in one write-up!), homaging and parodying tropes from that era of mainstream horror, and also from several more recent ones, but they do a damn poor job of it. Some of that is the dialogue, which is atrocious, and I'm sure they'd like us to believe it's atrocious on purpose but I'm not buying it. The story didn't work much better either. One character seems to get killed like 3 times but keeps showing up to be a demon ass-kicker. Which is actually not that big of a problem because the script makes it so that the demons are easily killed by high school students with whatever is lying around. I think one of the demons is actually killed by being beaten up by a high school boy. Like, beaten up with his
fists not like with a sledgehammer or something. One of the demons is killed with a baseball bat. Furthermore, the script makes the point, repeatedly, that
all they have to do to survive is keep their ****ing Halloween masks on. Over and over and over again this point is made. I'm sure I don't have to tell you what they do then. Yeah, they take the Halloween masks off like every three minutes. I mean, even when they know the demons are about. Just take 'em right off. Over and over again.
Ok, moving on, the camerawork/direction is really amateurish. I mean, I realize that for $8,000 and maybe some donuts you don't get an actual cinematographer but, oy, this movie looks bad.
Because they have no budget, they have to kinda fake having cool kills. Like 50 people or something get killed in this movie. And there are some things they do that at least work ok. But they kinda have to cut to kills from different angles and use editing to make it all work, so a lot of people, and I mean a lot, are killed in like one second and then the camera cuts away to something else so you can't linger over the shot and fret over the effects budget. Fine, whatever.
The real thing here though is the acting. When I say no one in this movie can act at all, like even at an amateur level, I do not exaggerate. No one. Not one "actor" in this film is less than bad. Except maybe the random dude who played young Jason Voorhees jumping out of the lake in Friday the 13th, he's cast here as like a weird TV personality. And he's not terrible at it, he's kind of credible. The rest is just abysmal. Like, I've always wondered when I watch these zero-budget movies, where do they
find these actors? Like, to be in a movie, I think you have to join the Actors Guild. And you would think that there would be enough people out there trying to become actors and movie-stars and whatnot, that you could find like 8 people who were at least pretty good in their high school play. But these filmmakers found none. Not one ****ing person who would even be
cast in their high school play.
And I never knew that Linnea Quigley was actually a terrible actress, I mean like, galactically, cosmically bad. In a film of terrible, below-amateur actors, she was actually the worst. Who knew?
Anyway, despite this being the worst movie I've seen in a long time, I think I'm giving this thing a weird sort of pass? It may not sound like it but despite everything, this just didn't feel like a total waste of my time. I mean, there were lots of moments when I felt like maybe I should just skip ahead or even just turn it off... but I didn't. And that's gotta be something. Maybe it's whatever it was that made
Thief recommend it (you must have known I couldn't go this whole thing without calling you out).
Make no mistake, this is an atrocious film. But that doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't watch it.