Hack-O-Lantern

As Tommy grows up in rural SoCal, he's negatively influenced by his dubious grandfather (Hy Pyke). When he's 21, the old man has a ritual scheduled for him on Halloween night. Naturally, his mother (Katina Garner), sister (Carla B.) and cop brother (Jeff Brown) oppose this. Everything culminates at the town's Halloween party.

Shot in the second half of November, 1986, "Hack-O-Lantern" wasn't released until late March, 1988, and then only in the UK, although it was eventually released to video. Alternative titles include "Halloween Night," "Death Mask" and "The Damning." Despite its low-budget vibe, it actually cost a whopping $5.5 million. I say 'whopping' because the hailed "Halloween" was shot just 8.5 years earlier and only cost $325,000.

Yet don't expect the sense of artistry of that popular film. This is cartoonish and low-rent by comparison, characterized by the hammy acting of Hy Pyke as grandpa. Meanwhile Gregory Scott Cummins is a little too long in the tooth to portray 21 years-old Tommy (he was 30 during shooting), but that's a minor cavil.

If you can roll with the cheesiness, there are several highlights. For instance, the soundtrack features the catchy song "Devil's Son" by DC Lacroix from Seattle/Los Angeles, who released two albums in the mid-80s before disappearing. Their style is akin to WASP meets The Runaways, basically catchy hanging chord anthemic hair metal. Meanwhile the cut "Against the Law" is performed by no-name band The Mercenaries at the Halloween party. Both tracks resurface for the closing credits. The other songs and score were done competently enough by Greg Haggard.

Comedian Bill Tucker is thrown in for a surprise routine outside the party, which is amusing ("Gobble, gobble").

Sharp blonde Carla B., aka Carla Baron, stands out on the feminine front as the protagonist. Jeanna Fine is also alluring as Nora, the one with the short wild hair; she's unnecessarily shown fully nude, no doubt in an attempt to make up for subpar filmmaking. She unsurprisingly dabbled in porn before marrying a Hebrew and converting to Judaism. The rest of the exploitive nudity could be classified under what Seinfeld called "bad naked."

It runs 1 hour, 27 minutes, and was shot in the rural outskirts of Los Angeles.

GRADE: C.

There are a few positives to this film when the budget is taken into account. However budget doesn't have to effect writing and that is generally terrible, both in the dialogue and the twists that make things unnecessarily complicated.

Don't get me wrong, a good twist can make a movie, but these were clearly all done just for the sake of it and make little to no sense. When they come they go against a lot of pre-established character traits and defy human logical actions.

Overall there is more depth to this low budget horror than most, but the twists throw a lot of that good will out the window. On the plus side you could say at a reach that this movie may have inspired Hereditary, although that's pretty unlikely.

Young Tommy is given a pumpkin, a toy skeleton, and a pentagram necklace by his weirdly accented grandfather. When his mother learns where he got the pumpkin from, she smashes it. She complains to her husband about the man, and the way he singles out just their one son among all of them. He goes to complain, and gets killed upon observing a satanic ritual the grandfather presides over.

Years later, the son is a satanist too, and one of his brothers is a cop. The grandfather doesn't want him to waste his energies on girlfriend, so one of the cultists dresses up in a devil mask and cloak, and she thinks it to be Tommy (this scene is stolen from Carpenter's Halloween). The satanists are fairly careless about whether the pentagram is one point up, or two points up

There are a few musical scenes of bands performing. To some extent this is an element of 80's horror movies, but it also serves to pad out a pretty bare movie. One of these scenes, of lead singer in afro and faux-tribal bikini shooting lasers from her eyes at the band members, who disappear, and pitchforking one of them in the neck is a music video in a dream (!). Several of the real deaths involve pitchforks too, though. We even get a swashbuckling swordfight at a Halloween party.

Given the overall cheeziness, viewers might be surprised at the full-frontal nudity scenes that turn up. They will also be unpleasantly surprised at a scene in which the movie comes to a dead halt, while a guy performs his impersonation of a turkey in the wild surrounded by hunters before Thanksgiving. It's not funny in the remotest!

The only other Mundhra movie I believe I've seen is the softcore thriller Tropical Heat. In that, he largely wasted nice places shot on location in India, Maryam D'Abo, and Asha Siewkumar. A shame. He's also did the horror movie Open House (1987), and he did the thriller Night Eyes (1990) which spawned three sequels.

The particular copy of this movie that I saw was under the moniker "Hack-O-Lantern". In terms of pure gore, the movie didn't exactly live up to the name. It was, however, charming in a typically 80's horror fashion, i.e., just about every chick in the movie gets naked. The plot is nothing new, but it is rendered fairly well. In one particular scene, the movieturns into a music video by the heavy metal band D.C. La Croix. If you like old-school metal like Wasp and Venom you will like the song they have in the movie.

Bottom line, the movie needs more gore and a higher body count.

Jag Mundhra's second stab at the slasher film (after 1987's snooze OPEN HOUSE) isn't an '80s Halloween-season classic like TRICK OR TREAT or NIGHT OF THE DEMONS, but schlocky horror fans will probably have a good time with it.

Hy Pyke (what a name!) is delightfully over-the-top as the grandfather (who is described as 'kindly' in the IMDb summary, but you're never given the impression he's anything but a scumbag) hell-bent on getting his eldest grandson to devote himself to his Satanic cult, a lame-o group that flash gang signs to each other and wear flannels under their devil robes. Meanwhile, someone in the cult is randomly killing people, and it's up to the other grandson, a boyishly handsome cop, to figure out what the hell is going on.

It's gorier than a lot of the slashers from this time period (though the body count is low), and just about every female cast member gets naked at some point (except, bafflingly, the most attractive one). Most of the leads have fun with their silly roles. It feels super padded, even at 90 minutes, what with random five-minute glam metal dream sequences and a head-scratching, unfunny stand-up comedy routine that grinds all the Satanic action to a halt.

Watchable for sure, whether or not it's worth watching could go either way. Don't spend too long tracking it down, but you could watch way worse.