User Reviews

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.

Chris Vale witnesses a rape-murder as a child. He is disfigured at the time, and he's a bit unbalanced mentally as well.

Fast forward to the present. There's a Halloween party being setup...at the house where the rape-murder occurred. There are intricate costumes, and authentic looking weapons. A young man and woman drive there. When they stop for petrol, the man goes to the rest room. Chris Vale (now a man, escaped from an insane asylum) overpowers him, kills him, puts on a leather mask, then goes to the car. The young woman does not figure it out, but his bad driving tells her there is something wrong. The killer hacks her up.

Chris Vale gets to the party alone with a backseat full of steel weapons.

What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot. The film is high on slasher deaths, splatter, screams, and psychotic behavior.

-----Scores-----

Cinematography: 8/10 Excellent for daylight exteriors. A bit jerky on some of the darker interiors.

Sound: 6/10 Did not expect the lag of lips versus voice, which makes it look like a bad Eastern European production made by/for the SyFy network.

Acting: 4/10 Lots of non-actors in this one.

Screenplay: 4/10 The dialog is terrible. I would have preferred a English subtitles and the spoken word in the first language of the screenwriter. As it is, the lines are stilted, and just not what one would expect from English speakers.

When a friend of mine recently asked me to look round for some fun looking horror films,i,spotted a pretty good looking DVD cover to this film.Though now i have seen the film,i feel that it does not live up to what i was hoping to see from the cover.This is partly due to some of the worst shot slasher/killing scenes that i have seen in a while.

The plot:

A guy who has been held in a maximum-security prison for ten years,kills two guards and,decides to go back to his old house.Where as a kid,he saw his mum get brutally raped and murdered.But,unknowingly to him,in the ten years that he has been in jail for,the house has been turned into a place for students to have Halloween parties!.

For this years party,one of the students is planning to scare everyone at the party,by having him and a few of his friends pretend that there is an insane killer on the loose in the area.When the real killer returns to his old house,the prank starts to go very,very wrong...

View on the film:

The first thing i have to highlight is the guy that played the troll,who blocks the entrance for the party goers,that injects some really good comedy moments into the film,with a fun performance.To my pleasant surprise,i actually enjoyed seeing the section of the film where the prank is played out.With the gun standoff being pretty entertaining.Sadly,the rest of the film seems to try every thing it can to crush any good horror moments out of the film,by having all the murder scenes,including the two creative ones (one involving a clothes hanger,and another with a seat belt.)being cut in a very badly done way,with the all the killings looking like they were filmed on a budget of 20p.The main thing that i was shocked about with the film,was how badly the story lines had been written,with parts of the plot making no sense at all (such as the "killer" being held in prison,even though everyone knows that he did not kill his mum,and there being no sense at all in the flashbacks of him killing anyone at all!!)

Final view on the film:

A film with some very badly made slasher scenes,and a poorly written plot.

It's too bad that the makers of "Halloween Night" didn't submit the cover art to their DVD to IMDb. It's awesome: an evil looking jack-o-lantern has a hand gripping a butcher knife coming out of the top of it. The hand is covered with pumpkin guts which, if you look closely, has the bodies of the killer's victims blended into it. It is far and away the best thing about the movie.

But now, if you will, consider the rest of the DVD box. It claims to be based on a true story. The plot has a young boy see his mom raped and murdered in 1982. He is horribly burned in the attack, but ten years later he escapes from an asylum and returns to his home, where a huge Halloween party is going on, steals a costume from a victim, and infiltrates the party. Because the party involves a huge prank, no one realizes he's actually a killer, even as he goes around murdering partygoers.

So...based on a true story, huh? Apparently one of the producers used to throw Halloween parties involving pranks, and once someone escaped from an asylum while one of his parties was going on. But the escapee never came it to the party and no one was actually killed, making the 'based on a true story' claim even more meaningless than usual. It's kind of like me making a movie where I marry Sarah Michelle Gellar and say it's based on a true story because we were both alive at the same time. Sub-moronic.

The cover art also says, "In 1982, Christopher Vail was sent away after his family was brutally murdered...10 years later, on Halloween night, he returned". The back cover elaborates: "Based on the terrifying true story that started it all! Based on the actual events on Halloween night, 1982, an inmate of a maximum security medical facility escapes after brutally murdering two guards. Upon returning to the house when he was born, he goes on a killing spree that will make him Southern California's greatest mass murderer".

And let's break it down. The true story that started what all, exactly? If the events occurred in 1982 or 1992, that's still years after such films as "Halloween" or "Friday The 13th" used similar story lines, so I doubt it inspired them. And again, nothing like this ever actually happened, so how is he Southern California's greatest mass murderer? And why limit it just to Southern Cali; why not just say California since the whole thing is a lie anyway?

Most confusing is the fact that the film, according to everything the cover art claims, takes place in 1992. Yet everyone drives modern cars and uses cell phones and laptops of models which were not around in 1992. There's a lame reference to Melissa Etheridge when two lesbians take the screen; the singer didn't actually come out until after the release of 1993's 'Yes I Am' album.

Some other things:

• The killer (supposedly burned, clearly wearing a bad mask) stuffs a rag into a girl's mouth but doesn't tape over it, yet the girl is unable to easily push it out with her tongue.

• A body is hidden in a closet; someone then boards over the door frame and covers it with what appears to be contact paper. Despite the fact it doesn't match the pattern of the rest of the wall, sticks out a good three inches from the rest of the wall, and has a smelly, decomposing corpse in it, no one notices it for ten years. I would assume, since two people were murdered there, a cop might have noticed it at some point.

• When a girl taking a bath has her throat slit, blood dribbles out of a make-up appliance on her neck which doesn't even match her natural skin tone. Yet two seconds later, the tub is filled with blood.

• A blonde bimbo is somehow able to disarm a cop and shoot at someone over his shoulder before he can react. In addition, most of the gunshots leave exit wounds that splatter the walls but have no entry wounds.

• The cops set up roadblocks and have photos of the escaped killer, but never think to check his old house to see if he might be there.

As for the rest of the film? It was filmed pretty well and had a couple of decent effects shots. But there is zero suspense, the acting is simply atrocious (I'm talking sub-porn level here, which makes sense because I'm guessing most of the actresses came straight from that industry), and the film's tone veers between boring and improbable (my favorite scene has one the lesbians, while naked, kicking the killer's ass). Asylum Home Entertainment is quickly becoming to go-to company for really bad, cheap rip-offs of better movies, and "Halloween Night" shows why.

Watched this on years ago after looking up another Slasher film with a similar premise!

The film follows Chris Vale (Scot Nery), a young man who was wrongly convicted of murdering his family in 1982, and admitted into an insane asylum based largely on the fact that Chris had been found at home with the bodies by the police! 10 years on & having endured a horrific life in the asylum being bullied by inmates & staff alike for the incident, Chris has now quite literally turned insane & to prove his innocence, escapes from the asylum on October 31 to his home, which is now occupied by a new family who are holding a Halloween party! As the night draws on, Chris attempts to search the house for any clues that will testify his innocence, but in an effort to conceal himself from the party-goers & the authorities who are searching for him, begins his own killing spree that leads to a massacre far worse than the original!

I found the film to be pretty good! It's a 80 minute (1 hour & 20 minutes) to the point slasher with a pretty dark, but scary & sinister story-line! The gore & kills are ace & the Halloween Scenery do the film justice! The film reminds me of Trick or Treats, a 1982 Slasher Halloween film that was pretty similar to this one! I have yet to see it, but like this one, it sounds good!

Overall, you'll enjoy this slasher if you don't take it so seriously! It's definitely a classic film that gets forgotten about & should be seen as a classic alongside Trick 'r Treat! It's a dark & sinister slasher film that is heavily underrated!

8/10.

It's a blatant rip-off of "Halloween," that's obvious, but what's inside is a stock slasher flick that's terrible on its own merits. Immediately the desperation from the director and writer to keep the audiences attention is shown, as they feature a lesbian sex scene not ten minutes in for no reason whatsoever. But with Asylum this is basically par for the course. Even in a "serious" film like "9/11 Commission Report," they featured an obligatory sex scene. But that's only one problem with "Halloween Night." Invariably, you'll be left with a plethora of questions that will never really be answered. Why is Christopher on a killing spree? Why did he escape and where was he going? Why would he kill if he saw his mom brutally murdered? "Duh… he's insane." Nah, I don't buy it.

Not to mention Gingold rips elements from previous slashers. Christopher doesn't kill a girl because she reminds him of his mom, his mask looks similar to Jason's, and the whole mental patient angle is very derivative of a certain film that drops on the same holiday. Gingold pads the film with plodding characterization, terrible dialogue, especially from the lead actor who performs the worst ad-libbing I've ever seen anywhere, and characters that I could give two shits about. It's as hard to list the endless flaws as it was to sit through this, but in the end "Halloween Night" is the result of monkeys on a typewriter who finished off "Halloween" hours before. Boo.

In spite of my best attempted enthusiasm, I just couldn't muster the excitement in watching what I can safely consider one of the worst slasher movies ever made. Only from Asylum could that be accomplished.

If you haven't figured it out by the title, this is an Asylum mockbuster of the movie "Halloween". It is based on a true story, i.e. there was once a successful movie by the title of "Halloween". It seems they even borrowed the sound track. As a child Chris Vale (Scot Nery) witnessed the rape and murder of his mother (Jan Anderson). He becomes badly disfigured and enters a mental institution where he escapes and returns to his old neighborhood...and I think you know the rest. The opening scene after credits starts to introduce the young adults and future victims. The scene hits on the classic Asylum trifecta of Bad acting, Bad writing, and Bad directing. The beginning includes the token horror film lesbian scene, although not nearly as good as the one in "Wrong Turn 4". Thank you Amanda and Alicia for allowing those wonderful close-ups that omitted your face.

I enjoyed the old time looking Gilmore gas pumps. Our killer is both psychotic and capable of reasonable thought as he goes to a Halloween party where he meets a bunch of nice party people and guys in Michael Myers' masks. The movie becomes a typical 80's style Roger Corman slasher with plenty of blood, gore, twists, and young topless girls. If your a Corman style fan, check it out.

F-bomb, sex, rape, nudity (Jan Anderson, Amanda Ward, Stephanie Christine Medina, Alicia Klein, Erica Roby)

What do you get when you combine one of the most trashy film cycles of the 20th century with one of the most trashy production studios of the 21st century? Well you get lesbianism, which was apparently a mainstay of earlier Asylum pictures, we've got a white guy calling another guy the N-word, um, cropped framing which is tighter than a nun's arse, videography done on the cheap as well some fantastic kills and a great villain.

Yep, soon as I knew this was a slasher a-la-asylum, i knew i was gonna get a mixed bag. I'm pretty sure I can say without fear of conjecture that early period Asylum films are among some of the ugliest looking films that has ever been released onto the home video market with their washed out colour palette, low quality digital video and the aforementioned camerawork which attempts to cover up the most likely five figure budget to no avail. This drags the film's appeal down considerably. These early Asylum films just look terrible and their aesthetic gives me acid.

Overlooking all of that, because I am incredibly generous don't you know, Halloween Night still delivers as a slasher with a colourful cast of college douche-bags and one effective Michael Myers clone who kills silently and brutally and of course we all love that. What we don't all love though i'm sure is telegraphed Tv movie calibre dramatic tension and a generic soundtrack. For every good moment Halloween Night has, it has four or so problems with it's execution to diminish its impact.

In conclusion, as a shameless cash in on Rob Zombie's Halloween, Halloween Night has appeal as being your archetypal direct to DVD slasher film from the mid 2000's, giving you a good idea of where the sub-genre was at the time. Apart from that, it's a poorly shot, padded out slog that is only saved by it's impressive kills considering the quality of the rest of the filmmaking. I recommend to this hardcore slasher fans, fans of the Asylum, if there are any and for anyone who on the off chance has a thing going on with trash media from this time period. Everyone else, you might be bored out of your skull.