Sam Panico
Oh Canada. We've celebrated your movies for an entire week and you continue to deliver pure blasts of polite insanity to our streaming devices and DVD players!
Halloween night 1966. A priest named Zachary Malius kills seven frat boys from Winfield College for breaking into his family's crypt and recreating an occult ritual. He's placed into an insane asylum, where the laws in Canada are, well, insane. He's never fed and has been in a catatonic state for years, surviving by eating bugs.Kids have learned nothing in the intervening quarter century as they go right back and do the ritual again. Malius comes back to life and starts doing what slasher villains do best - wipe out people right after they get done having sex. At least he has the excuse of being a priest. One wonders why they decided to make him like Freddy Kruger, yelling things like, "No sex! No TV! No parking!" That said, the fact that the Catholic Church covered up these crimes should come as a shock to no one.Sam Rockwell shows up briefly as the younger version of the character that Darren McGavin plays for the rest of the film. Jorja Fox from TV's CSI also shows up.Director Brian Owens is also behind 80's video fave Brainscan. There is one genuinely unnerving scene where a crucified Christ comes to life and starts screaming, then falls to the floor and breaks into small pieces. Shades of Enter the Devil!There are moments of slow motion flashbacks and hints of art here that are undermined by horrible looking titles. It's like his movie got only so close to being well art directed. It's not the best or worst slasher ever, but it won me over. Maybe I was watching it at 2:30 AM, which always helps matters.
lost-in-limbo
A promising concept, is let down by its stringy narrative and so-so execution. I've never even heard of "Happy Hell Night" before and this early nineties, offbeat campus low-budget slasher is something that wouldn't have felt out of placed in the 80s. Tacky, gory and sleazy, but something just seemed to be missing or should I say something felt out of place. I couldn't shake the feeling that it could have been much better.In 1963 seven members of the Phi Delta Kappa Fraternity were found brutally mutilated inside Winfield Mausoleum. The accuser priest Zachary Malius was put away in the local State Asylum. Twenty five years later, a hazing prank goes wrong when some guys accidentally release Zachary from his cell and heads back to Winfield College to continue the butchery.The killer is suitably creepy and genuinely unnerving in appearance, but when he opened his mouth to spout out an amusing quip (ala Freddy Krugger style). It simply killed the mood. "No
" this, "no
" that. Done in a scratchy tone. No, please stop talking. Sadly this is too distracting (including its loopy tone), as it does bestow a nasty, atmospheric ambiance with some striking imagery
especially with the sequences of the killer lurking in the shadows and of course when he's stuck in his cell. Even then odd surreal images crop up too, involving a Jesus statue in a church and the setting has a Gothic touch. The darkly twisted, but untapped story takes awhile before hitting its strides, with the usual campus lounging and dramas. But when it kicks off the slaughter, buckets of blood flows (very cheap jolts), sex and nudity escalates (sometimes kinky) and stupidity is ensured. Some passages during the stalk and slash stages, just seem to jump around in a rather jaded manner. Not making much sense with little in the way of cohesion. The music does create some chills with its foreboding cues.The cast attached features some names; Darren McGavin, Sam Rockwell, Jorja Fox (from the TV show "C.S.I") and Ted Clark. But these folks have nothing more than minor roles. The rest of the performances are extra-ordinary
some rather bad in their amateurishly buoyant deliveries. Crude dialogues come out of their mouths with a real joke-like emphasis.Nothing special, but kind of fun over-the-top, b-grade shocker.
BA_Harrison
When a couple of frat boys break into an insane asylum as part of a Hell Night prank, they release an evil being who has been trapped there for the past 25 years. The demon then proceeds to kill everyone who crosses his path, using a wickedly pointed mountaineering pick as his weapon of choice.Happy Hell Night is a low budget piece of trash that is, for the most part, pretty awful; the acting is uniformly lousy and the direction uninspired, but, fortunately, the film does deliver a fair amount of (mostly unconvincing) gore and a touch of nudity from a couple of babes, making it just about bearable.Charles Cragin, as the killer, is fairly creepy to look atpale and bald with completely black eyesbut his aura of menace is diluted whenever he is given lines to speak. After each kill, the character makes a lame quip with a voice which sounds like he's been gulping back heliumFreddy Krueger he ain't!Finally, after almost everyone at a frat house party are slaughtered, two brothers (and the slapper they have both been humping) attempt to send the demon back to hell.Happy Hell Night is silly, instantly forgettable, and only really worth a watch if bad horror movies are your passion.
Lonesomewolf
This movie is an unbelievably incredible gore drenched slasher! Most horror flicks that I see nowadays are entirely lame because they don't even contain gory graphic violence like this one does. As far as I'm concerned, bloody gore to the extreme is the way to go! This movie has an unleashed killer named Malius who brutally kills off college students at a fraternity with a scythe. Every time he kills somebody, he says "No" in addition to a different word each individual time. Like for instance, he killed a nurse at an asylum he escaped from by cutting her throat and then he said "No TV." He also killed a girl that was getting ready to drive her car away from the college dorm by chopping his scythe through the top while she was in the driver's seat. The sharp point of the scythe cut through the top of her skull and went out her mouth, and then Malius pulled the scythe out and said "No parking." Those are just a couple examples of this Malius character. So if you love gory horror flicks, this one is the bomb! Go rent Happy Hell Night and remember that it has a good surprising twist at the end! Happy Hell Night to all and to all a good night!!!