Cash-in attempt by that pesky ASYLUM studio, this time trying to ride the coattails of Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN back in the day. Yeah, it took me seven years to finally catch up with this one, seemed there was no hurry! This copy of HALLOWEEN opens with a kid seeing his mom raped and murdered by some thugs and then he gets badly burned by them. Kid is institutionalized, of course, and TEN YEARS LATER, at the same house where all this took place, some very OLD and pretty GNARLY looking teens are conducting...what else? A Halloween party with drinking, pranks, and even lesbian activity. Earlier in the day, the burned, traumatized kid breaks out of the nuthouse and steals the costume of someone enroute to the event after killing him and begins to systematically slaughter all the people at the party (and anyone else he sees). The killer's garb looks cool, the mask reminded me of a leather version of the Coppermasked Madman from Tim Ritter's TRUTH OR DARE franchise. Okay, so the pranks get out of hand, the lame brain cops are dispatched (in more than one way), the maniac is killing off the partygoers in his own digs without anyone seeing what's happening (which gave me a chuckle, the house is pretty small!). What kept me watching was the naked factor- Amanda Ward, Erica Roby, Stephanie Medina, and Jan Anderson wisely flashy their curvy assets again and again and there's a even a couple of nice lesbian sequences with kissing and heavy petting. The gore, well, it's okay, but nothing we haven't seen before. Nothing is very stylized but we do get some thoat slashings, a gutting, some shootings, a corpse that homages PSYCHO (but is nowhere nearly as good as the Hitchcock prop over half-a-century old!) and spattering blood. The blood was very unrealistic, though, and looked thin and orange, I did notice that---a common problem with shooting HD gore these days. Gotta have someone that can mix the grue properly. The ending features two patently absurd double twists that are really so far out of left field that they come across as silly more than anything else, and it's amazing that the script is by Michael Gingold, managing editor of FANGORIA magazine, who has penned more than his share of negative film reviews on product just like this! We'll cut him some slack, though, for writing in plenty of gore, lesbians, and nudity for the director to work with, and we also know it probably came down this from Asylum: "can you write us a script set on Halloween at one house location so we can shoot this movie for $12,000.00 over the weekend? We need the script...TOMORROW!" So I'm going to assume Gingold had to at least pull an all-nighter to get the words out onto paper in a flash, or at least write it in between all his feature articles over at FANGO. Overall, the finished movie is nothing special, and there's so many DIY slasher movies made by indies across the country that are so much better than this effort, but for The Asylum, this is actually one of their better pieces of output, believe it or not. So if you're looking for some gore, sex, lesbian nudity and a little carbon copy of HALLOWEEN, check this out. It ain't much, but if you have a few cool ones beforehand, it can go down easy and you won't upchuck anything until you start thinking about it the next day!
Cash-in attempt by that pesky ASYLUM studio, this time trying to ride the coattails of Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN back in the day. Yeah, it took me seven years to finally catch up with this one, seemed there was no hurry! This copy of HALLOWEEN opens with a kid seeing his mom raped and murdered by some thugs and then he gets badly burned by them. Kid is institutionalized, of course, and TEN YEARS LATER, at the same house where all this took place, some very OLD and pretty GNARLY looking teens are conducting...what else? A Halloween party with drinking, pranks, and even lesbian activity. Earlier in the day, the burned, traumatized kid breaks out of the nuthouse and steals the costume of someone enroute to the event after killing him and begins to systematically slaughter all the people at the party (and anyone else he sees). The killer's garb looks cool, the mask reminded me of a leather version of the Coppermasked Madman from Tim Ritter's TRUTH OR DARE franchise. Okay, so the pranks get out of hand, the lame brain cops are dispatched (in more than one way), the maniac is killing off the partygoers in his own digs without anyone seeing what's happening (which gave me a chuckle, the house is pretty small!). What kept me watching was the naked factor- Amanda Ward, Erica Roby, Stephanie Medina, and Jan Anderson wisely flashy their curvy assets again and again and there's a even a couple of nice lesbian sequences with kissing and heavy petting. The gore, well, it's okay, but nothing we haven't seen before. Nothing is very stylized but we do get some thoat slashings, a gutting, some shootings, a corpse that homages PSYCHO (but is nowhere nearly as good as the Hitchcock prop over half-a-century old!) and spattering blood. The blood was very unrealistic, though, and looked thin and orange, I did notice that---a common problem with shooting HD gore these days. Gotta have someone that can mix the grue properly. The ending features two patently absurd double twists that are really so far out of left field that they come across as silly more than anything else, and it's amazing that the script is by Michael Gingold, managing editor of FANGORIA magazine, who has penned more than his share of negative film reviews on product just like this! We'll cut him some slack, though, for writing in plenty of gore, lesbians, and nudity for the director to work with, and we also know it probably came down this from Asylum: "can you write us a script set on Halloween at one house location so we can shoot this movie for $12,000.00 over the weekend? We need the script...TOMORROW!" So I'm going to assume Gingold had to at least pull an all-nighter to get the words out onto paper in a flash, or at least write it in between all his feature articles over at FANGO. Overall, the finished movie is nothing special, and there's so many DIY slasher movies made by indies across the country that are so much better than this effort, but for The Asylum, this is actually one of their better pieces of output, believe it or not. So if you're looking for some gore, sex, lesbian nudity and a little carbon copy of HALLOWEEN, check this out. It ain't much, but if you have a few cool ones beforehand, it can go down easy and you won't upchuck anything until you start thinking about it the next day!
