Harefooted Halloween: Hell Night

What I Liked: Decent atmosphere throughout.  They filmed at real mansions so that’s instant production value right there.  They were dressed appropriately and even though the exterior and interior are two different locations they match up well enough.  The entire thing takes place at night so the filmmakers threw in appropriate mood lighting and shadows.  There are entirely too many candles used throughout though.  Like who would have the time and patience to set up and light them all?  As long as you don’t think about how dumb it is having a glut of candles in almost every room it admittedly looks kinda cool.

The lead characters aren’t total douches.  They’re not terribly engaging or memorable either but at least they’re not cloying assholes or anything.  Hey, I’ll take what I can get.

What I Didn’t Like: The premise is totally fine, a group of fraternity/sorority pledges must spend a night in an old abandoned spooky mansion as part of their hazing only to discover *gasp* there’s a killer picking them off, but the execution is not great.  Everything plays out how you think it will.  The last act in particular slows to a goddamned sloth’s pace with the characters taking forever to explore any area before eventually getting attacked.  And I mean c’mon, forcing folks to stay a night in a “haunted house” is incredibly lame for a frat ritual.  Sure it’s not devastatingly mean spirited which is nice, but if I were rushing and this is what they came up with I would dump these lame-o’s pronto.

While the leads are ok all the other side players are pretty damn annoying.  Surfer dude stud muffin, wild party girl, slimy frat bros, they’re all obvious cannon fodder but you wish they would die sooner.

Overall Impressions: This is a fairly typical slasher from the early eighties.  You can see the Halloween influence in the villain being an unspeaking brute, the entire thing taking place on Halloween night (or Hell Night, whatever) and the car attack scene.  Unfortunately there’s not much of interest here.  Linda Blair of The Exorcist fame stars but they give her nothing to do for almost the whole runtime.  The most curious aspect is director Tom DeSimione was really a porno guy who wanted to branch out into more mainstream stuff.  Weirdly there’s zero nudity in the movie.  Even when characters are supposed to be fooling around they all keep their clothes on.  Not common for that era of horror either.

Anyway, unless you’re a slasher purist who needs to track them all down don’t bother with this one.