In short: Hauntedween (1991)

Twenty Halloweens or so ago, season fan Eddie Burber spiked another kid in the family’s haunted house business, cleverly named “The Burber Haunted House”. His mother fled with Eddie, apparently to raise him in a cabin in the woods.

Today, the nitwits of the Phi Beta Whatever fraternity need to come up with a lot of money to avoid getting struck from the Big Book of Fraternities (or something of the kind). First attempts at saving the fraternity via a big party fail thanks to everyone’s inability to do basic maths while drunk or sober. All the while, the chief frat boy and his girlfriend have relationship problems you really don’t want to hear about, but will, again and again and again.

Eventually, a mysterious stranger offers the gang of alcoholic youths the key to the old Burber House where they quickly – at least in context of the narrative pace of this film – open up their own, ahem, “Hauntedween” house. Once the the Hauntedween business is started, some heroic figure in a somewhat creepy mask begins murdering the frats sadistically, and sometimes in front of an adoring public who think it’s all just an act. Or who just had to spend an hour watching the victims and are now on the lowest ebb of their empathy.

This Kentucky-made local production by director (writer, producer, and so on, you know the drill by now, imaginary reader) Doug Robertson, starts out and continues as a bit of a chore to get through. After a perfectly okay slasher prologue, deeply unlikeable, unpleasant and frankly boring characters do little more than to get drunk and go through endless – and horribly written – relationship troubles. Then, they do the same somewhere else. Rinse and repeat for what feels like an eternity. The viewer’s eyelids droop, hands repeatedly reach for the remote control, and a certain degree of bitterness sets in.

Suddenly, once the whole gang moves on to the Hauntedween house, things quickly and markedly improve. Idiots and walking annoyances are dispatched in sometimes surprisingly clever gore gags; blandness turns into a delightfully grimy and nasty mood; pacing exists; even Robertson’s camerawork and editing improve. It’s as if we were suddenly transported into the movie this thing was trying to be for the last hour, a really great, pleasantly unpleasant backyard slasher made with macabre delight and a grin on its pumpkin face.

If the delights of the finish make up for the long, long, painful time of the first hour is probably something everyone needs to decide for themselves, pondering the value of time and patience compared to cheap yet awesome murders. Thus, HauntedWeen even does something for the philosopher in us.