Ha ha and H-E-double hockey sticks, it’s
Burl, here to review another Halloween-themed slasher picture! Ha ha, this one
is called Hell Night, and it was even produced by Irwin Yablans, whose Compass
International Pictures helped bring us the original Halloween! But make no mistake, this isn’t Halloween!
No, it’s Hell Night, and that means we start at a frat party with everyone
in costume! It’s time to rush the pledges, and this means frat bros Peter and
Scotty, and their comely accomplice, are going to send four unwitting students
into Garth Manor for the night, but not without telling them that, after old
man Garth held a murder party for his family, one of the deformed brothers, or "gorks," per the dialogue, was
supposed to have survived, and gorks around the manor to this day! And of course
this turns out to be true!
Our frosh quartet includes Linda Blair,
perhaps best known from Nightforce
and Roller Boogie, in the role of
Marti, whose defining characteristic is that she can fix cars! There’s fresh-faced
Peter Barton, who also faced a maniac in Friday the 13th part 4, playing Jeff, and who tells a tale of the time he
saw a three foot man with a long beard, a green jerkin, curly boots and a tall,
pointed cap, and concluded that it must have been an elf! We also get Vincent
Van Patten, whom we know from Rock n’
Roll High School, as Seth, who spends most of the movie wearing comical
boxer shorts and repeating “My name is Seth!”
Then there’s a lady with a British accent: Suki Goodwin as Denise!
Kevin Brophy, who plays Peter the frat bro (he
also played Peter in Time Walker; and
maybe it’s the same Peter! Ha ha!), does so with enough good humour that he
doesn’t come off as repellent as most frat bros do in movies like this! He’s
got an assistant jokester, a glasses guy who sports a parrot on his shoulder
but otherwise seems to be dressed as a waiter in an Italian restaurant! The
glasses guy catches a pretty stiff neck twist, and, as with a similar scene in The Prey, a fake buttocks was used!
Hell
Night is long for a slasher picture, somewhere
north of 100 minutes; and in all that time you get an awful lot of lurking in tunnels,
hallways and gardens! It’s a little disappointing, because they had a back
story with lots of potential, and a good, scary house to work with, lots of
turrets and wrought iron; but director Tom De Simone, who came to the horror genre after a long
career in pornoo, was not up to the challenge of making any of it scary!
Although there are a few good moments: a great shock cut from a POV shot to a
wide of the gork; a mildly scary walk from the front gate up to the door of
the house after the characters have finally become aware that a gork is lurking;
and a moment with a gork rising up from under a carpet, where there’s a
hidden trap door!
But it’s a pretty cozy, good-natured affair
overall, though it’s more gorky than it is gory! It’s pretty reserved as these things go, and, I'm sad to say, offers very
little pep! On the other hand, it does have not one but two gorks, and both of them are mildly deformed, so we do indeed get some Special
Makeup Effects in the end! Most of the deaths are pokings or defenestrations,
or in some cases are not really seen at all! It is in other words a perfect
slasher movie for people who don’t like slasher movies, and I give Hell Night one and a half shoulder
parrots!
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