Halloween Night (2006 Video)
4/10
Halloween rip-off from The Asylum, surprisingly not as bad as much of their output...
17 August 2008
Warning: Spoilers
Halloween Night starts as a young boy named Chris Vale (Sam Stone) witnesses his mum (Jan Anderson) get raped & then murdered before being horribly burnt by a jet of steam from a pipe. Jump forward 'Ten Years Later' on 'Halloween Night' where Chris (Scot Nery) is now locked up inside a mental asylum with a face that looks like a McDonald's hamburger, he escapes & kills teenager Todd (Nicholas Day Clark) & his girlfriend who were on their way to a Halloween party organised by their friend David (Derek Osedach). It just so happens that David is organising this Halloween party in the house where Chris used to live & he heads there dressed in Todd's Halloween costume & everyone mistakes Chris for Todd which lets him move about freely killing everyone he meets for no apparent reason...

Directed by Mark Atkins I settled down to watch Halloween Night yesterday & I feared the worst, being made by those folk at The Asylum who specialise in ripping-off big budget well known Hollywood blockbusters (affectionately known as Mockbusters) with the vast majority of their product being amongst the worst films you could ever have the misfortune to see but rather surprisingly I though Halloween Night was a fairly reasonably watch & not a too bad little Halloween (1978, 2007) rip-off that does what it sets out to do. The script by Michael Gringold will feel very familiar who has watched any sort of 70's or 80's teen slasher, although the title is obviously taken from Halloween there are elements of Friday the 13th (1980) with the killers mask resembling Jason's more than Michael's & the basic idea of a horribly burnt maniac killer is taken from The Buring (1981). To give it some credit at least there's a steady stream of dead bodies & killings, there's a nice amount of sex & nudity including a bit of lesbianism & a deliriously awful double barrelled twist ending that doesn't make any sense. The ending claims that Chris' father placed some wood effect sticky strips over a door, shut him self in the small room & committed suicide & no-one found him in the ten years since! Wouldn't the door handle or the door frame give away that there was a room there? Do you know the smell that a dead decomposing body would have given off? All the fly's & maggots would have been hard to ignore! Then in the final twist David is accidentally killed by his girlfriend after he is mistaken for the killer & placed in a body bag! What? Wouldn't the police & medical examiners actually have checked his face? I mean Chris is so burnt I really doubt anyone could have got the two mixed up. Then the final scene show's Chris being picked up at the side of the road with a paper plate placed over his face with two eye-holes cut out, would you stop to give someone wearing a paper plate over their face a lift? It's just a totally insane ending that makes zero sense & that sums up films from The Asylum quite well in that when they go for simple blood, guts & nudity their films are OK in a crappy sort of way but when they try to write twist endings or good scripts & plots then they fall completely on their face & look stupid.

As usual for an The Asylum film Halloween Night looks like it was shot on a camcorder although the special effects are better than their usual output. Out goes the horrible CGI & wisely the makers went with proper on set prosthetic make-up effects, there's various stabbings & impalement's, some effective burn make-up, a slit throat & a ripped out throat, some guts, a rotten corpse, a fair amount of blood splatter & Halloween Night is maybe the only slasher to feature death by clothes hanger! There's nothing scary here but if all your looking for is some cheap gore effects & naked chicks then I suppose it delivers.

This isn't as badly made as many films from The Asylum but that's not saying much as there really isn't anything to it & when a bit of film-making is required when the twist endings come along it all falls apart & becomes hilariously bad & inept. There's not even any reason given why Chris would want to kill anyone anyway, is there? The acting isn't anything special & I am sure the actors used were cast for their looks rather than their acting ability.

Halloween Night is a Halloween rip-off with a bit of Friday the 13th in their as well & a modern Scream (1996) style twist ending which is just plain stupid. For what it is I thought it was OK, at least it actually delivers what it promises with a fair amount of blood & boobs & it's short.
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